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IN A LETTER of my father’s written on the 16th of July 1964 he said:
The germ of my attempt to write legends of my own to fit my private languages was the
tragic tale of the hapless Kullervo in the Finnish Kalevala. It remains a major matter in the
legends of the First Age (which I hope to publish as The Silmarillion), though as ‘The
Children of Húrin’ it is entirely changed except in the tragic ending. The second point was
the writing, ‘out of my head’, of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, the story of Idril and Earendel,
during sick-leave from the army in 1917; and by the original version of the ‘Tale of Lúthien
Tinúviel and Beren’ later in the same year. That was founded on a small wood with a great
undergrowth of ‘hemlock’ (no doubt many other related plants were also there) near Roos in
Holderness, where I was for a while on the Humber Garrison.
My father and mother were married in March 1916, when he was twenty-four and she was twentyseven.
They lived at first in the village of Great Haywood in Staffordshire; but he embarked for
France and the Battle of the Somme early in June of that year. Taken ill, he was sent back to England
at the beginning of November 1916; and in the spring of 1917 he was posted to Yorkshire.
This primary version of The Tale of Tinúviel, as he called it, written in 1917, does not exist—or
more precisely, exists only in the ghostly form of a manuscript in pencil that he all but entirely erased
for most of its length; over this he wrote the text that is for us the earliest version. The Tale of
Tinúviel was one of the constituent stories of my father’s major early work of his ‘mythology’, The
Book of Lost Tales, an exceedingly complex work which I edited in the first two volumes of The
History of Middle-earth, 1983–4. But since the present book is expressly devoted to the evolution of
the legend of Beren and Lúthien I will here very largely pass by the strange setting and audience of
the Lost Tales, for The Tale of Tinúviel is in itself almost entirely independent of that setting.
Central to The Book of Lost Tales was the story of an English mariner of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period
named Eriol or Ælfwine who, sailing far westwards over the ocean, came at last to Tol Eressëa, the
Lonely Isle, where dwelt Elves who had departed from ‘the Great Lands’, afterwards ‘Middle-Earth’
(a term not used in the Lost Tales). During his sojourn in Tol Eressëa he learned from them the true
and ancient history of the Creation, of the Gods, of the Elves, and of England. This history is ‘The
Lost Tales of Elfinesse’.
The work is extant in a number of battered little ‘exercise books’ in ink and pencil, often
formidably difficult to read, though after many hours of peering at the manuscript with a lens I was
able, many years ago, to elucidate all the texts with only occasional unsolved words. The Tale of
Tinúviel is one of the stories that was told to Eriol by the Elves in the Lonely Isle, in this case by a
maiden named Vëannë: there were many children present at these story-tellings. Sharply observant of
detail (a striking feature), it is told in an extremely individual style, with some archaisms of word and
construction, altogether unlike my father’s later styles, intense, poetic, at times deeply ‘elvishmysterious’.
There is also an undercurrent of sardonic humour in the expression here and there (in the
terrible confrontation with the demonic wolf Karkaras as she fled with Beren from Melko’s hall
Tinúviel enquires ‘Wherefore this surliness, Karkaras?’).
Rather than awaiting the conclusion of the Tale I think it may be helpful to draw attention here to
certain aspects of this earliest version of the legend, and to give brief explanations of some names
important in the narrative (which are also to be found in the List of Names at the end of the book).