We’ve got a Tolkien Kind of Love

I’ve been married for 22 years and I love my husband more than ever. He’s stayed with me through all life’s difficulties, and even during the lowest moments, he’s been patient, loving, and understanding. Like all relationships, things in the beginning were shallow and delicate, but time brought change and change brought growth. What was once superficial and immature transformed into an unbreakable bond, deep and rounded.  I guess you could say it’s a Tolkien kind of love…

The set-up

JRR Tolkien, author of those famous books about wee little Hobbits with fuzzy feet, was born in South Africa on January 3, 1892.  At the age of three, his mother took him and his younger brother on a visit home to merry old England. Things didn’t remain merry, however, because Dad Tolkien died while they were there.  With nothing to return to, the family stayed on in England. Nine years later tragedy struck again. This time it was Mama Tolkien, and on her passing custody of the boys went to a Catholic Priest named Fr. Morgan.

 Morgan arranged accommodations at a boarding house and there our Tolkien, 16-year-old Ronald, met his soulmate 19-year-old Edith Bratt. The two went together like tea and water, like fish and chips, and bangers and mash. Cupid’s arrow struck fertile ground, by 18 he was in love.

  Like all good love stories though, obstacles were blocking the path to happiness. You see there was one fatal flaw in their relationship, Edith wasn’t Catholic. Tolkien was deeply religious, and for him the problem was insurmountable. Oh, the strife of a heart that doesn’t conform to the logic of the mind. Tolkien found the  problem “absorbing and nervously exhausting.”  His mind was so preoccupied it was affecting his studies. Protective of his ward, Fr. Morgan intervened.  Study now, love later, came the verdict, and Ronald was forbidden any communication or contact with Edith until he turned 21.

The Exile

The imprisonment of his heart was intolerable. Ronald pined and prayed for a chance glimpse of his beloved, which he got several times before she moved from their old boarding house. For almost three years there was no communication between him and Edith while he studied at Exeter in Oxford. To help soothe his pain, he began writing a diary for her in which he told his daily struggles and failings.

Though not officially bound, the songbird of love  sang continually in his ear through  his university years. Finally 1913 came, and with it Ronald’s 21st birthday.  Instead of going out for beer bongs and dancing girls, he wrote to his beloved exactly on the stroke of midnight. “How long will it be before we can be joined together before God and the World?” he wrote.

We can imagine he waited with eager anticipation for her reply, perhaps his fingers trembled when it finally came and he ripped it open only to read of her engagement to another man. She had convinced herself that Ronald would forget her, however, now that she knew he hadn’t she couldn’t bear to let him go again.  Five days later Ronald was by her side asking her to give up her engagement and take his hand instead.  She accepted,  and on his insistence, she converted. From then on the two lived happily ever after.

Um, not yet.

And The Wait Goes On

Although communication lines were now open for the couple, they were still unable to be together. Edith was in Warwick, near Birmingham while Ronald finished school in Oxford. The whole while World War I was spreading like a cancer. Most of the men had already volunteered, but Ronald held out in order to finish his education. Finally, he succumbed to social pressure and signed up.  The couple married in March of 1916.  May found him ripped from his beloved and fighting through the carnage of the battle of the Somme.  Falling victim to trench fever several months later, he returned to England where he spent the remainder of the war.

As the army moved him from station to station Edith followed him as best she could.  One day the couple managed to set off into the woods in an attempt to escape the dreariness of war. There among the hemlocks Edith lost herself in joy and began to dance.  Maybe it was the glaze of sunlight on her dark hair, or the billowing of her skirt in the breeze; whatever the cause, the moment was magical. Tolkien watched and dreamt a story of a woman named Luthien, an immortal elf with beauty beyond compare.  Beren a mere human, wins her heart but must prove his worth to gain the hand of his lover. The story became one of Tolkien’s favorites.

Together At Last

It wasn’t until the war ended that the couple was finally able to be permanently together, but that time Ronald was 27 and Edith was thirty.  They lived a happy home life after that, and although they had their trials, they always sustained a deep love for each other.  And so, when like footprints in the sand beauty was washed away by time; and passions bloom had dried; love remained. He understood what many miss; passion and beauty are nothing but the dross. Fired in the struggles of everyday life, these frivolities melt away, and what is left if the purest form of love.

In their old age, Tolkien moved with his wife to the Miramar in Bournemouth.  According to their grandson Simon, “Bournemouth was certainly not My grandfather’s first choice of place to live, and I’m sure he missed Oxford. However my grandmother loved the Miramar, and my grandfather wanted to make her happy in the last years of their lives. ” When the inevitable day of separation came, it was Edith who was the first to go. Romantic until the end, Tolkien had the name Luthien inscribed on her tomb.  He tells his son Christopher in a letter dated July 11, 1972:

“I have at last gotten busy about mummy’s grave.. The inscription I should like is :

Edith Mary Tolkien

1889-1971

Luthien

Brief and jejune, except for Luthien, which says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was (and she knew she was) my Luthien.”