In 1909, Father Francis ordered Tolkien not to see or write to Edith again until he was 21. For Edith was a protestant and Tolkien Catholic. Father Morgan opposed the relationship based on the age gap between the young couple- and on religious grounds. For Edith and Tolkien, it came in the shape of Father Francis Morgan, Tolkien’s guardian since the death of his mother. For Beren and Luthien that opposition came in the form of Luthien’s father, Thingol who was unhappy with his daughter falling in love with a human.
However, as in the case of Beren and Luthien, there was opposition to their match. Tolkien and his brother who were both studying in Birmingham also became boarders, and Tolkien and Edith, in particular, became close friends. She had just finished her musical studies at boarding school and was living in a boarding house in Edgbaston in Birmingham while she decided what to do next. Edith Bratt was three years older than Tolkien. However, the roots of his own love story go back as far as 1908 when Tolkien was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy.
Tolkien’s tale of Beren and Luthien may have begun in 1917. However, Luthien and Beren’s love story finds other, perhaps unwitting echoes, in Tolkien’s and Edith’s relationship – which saw the couple undergo their trials and tests before they too could have their own happily ever after. “I never called Edith Luthien,” Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher in 1972, a year after Edith’s death, “ but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion.” Tolkien began the tale in 1917, inspired to create Luthien after seeing Edith dancing and singing in a hemlock grove. However, the inspiration for the very first of his tales, Luthien and Beren, lies buried within the grave with him: his wife, Edith Bratt. Inspired by the First World War, the changes of industrialization and its effects on the English countryside and the myths and legends of Faerie and the Anglo Saxons, Tolkien’s most famous Middle Earth sagas are The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In the Catholic section of Oxfordshire’s Wolvercote graveyard is the last resting place of Oxford Professor of Anglo Saxon and creator of the Tales of Middle Earth, J.R.R.
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