Among the Hemlock
For my second entry today, on the 32nd anniversary of the end of this story, a story from England in the early part of the 20th Century, a tale a few of you already know. A story of love that perhaps, in it's own way, has touched almost literally every single one of us amongst this LiveJournal fellowship. Enjoy.
Edith Bratt was born on January 21st, 1889, in Glouchester, England. The England of the early 20th century was a dramatically different world, socially, than it is now. Women, at the time, largely did not go --and were not welcome-- in higher education, and so after Edith had completed her public schooling, unable to find work as the gifted pianst she was, she took work instead as a secretary. She was described as a small, slender, beautiful woman with grey eyes, and it was soon she fell in love with a young man named John three years her junior living at the boarding house she was staying at. And then the problems began.
The young gentleman she fell in love with had been orphaned at the age of 12. John's father died of yellow fever in their birth home of South Africa years before, leaving his family bankrupt and forcing his family to return to England under conditions of economic difficulty. John's mother had labored long and hard to pay for the best education she could for her two sons, and the strain eventually broke her own health as well. Knowing her health was failing, John's mother had arranged before she died for her two sons to be taken care of by the local Roman Catholic church.
John was raised by one of the priests there, Father Morgan, a kind and humorous man who raised John and his brother like they were his own sons. Both John's late mother and Father Morgan recognized the potentital for scholastic brilliance in young John, and Father Morgan continued the work that John's mother had begun. Father Morgan took very seriously his duty to John and John's future, and it was in this that conflict arose.
The relationship between John and Edith began as a series of encounters in local teahouses and late-night talks as they leaned out their boarding-house windows. It soon became more serious, much to Father Morgan's concern. Father Morgan worried that what might turn out to be nothing more than the common infatuations of youth would interfere with young John's studies. For a poor young man with no other resources, financial or familial, other than his own mind; for a Roman Catholic in then highly-intolerant England, only success in academics would give John any hope of advancement or even escaping poverty.
It soon became clear that, in fact, John's academic performance was suffering from all the time he spent with Edith, to the extent that John's admission into college was potentially at risk. Father Morgan had first ordered John to move to a different boarding house, apart from Edith. When Father Morgan discovered that John and Edith were continuing to pass notes, meet clandestinely, and (scandalously, for the time) went bicycling and had a picnic without a chaperone, Father Morgan's patience was at an end. Father Morgan ordered John to cut himself off entirely from Edith -- no meetings, no communication, nothing at all under any circumstances -- until John reached the age of 21, three years hence.
As much pain as it caused John, John obeyed. Father Morgan was the faithful, kindly guardian who had raised John and made possible John's education through much of John's life, and so to Father Morgan's stern directive John submitted, to the letter. As Father Morgan had hoped, John subsequently prospered academically. But John had never forgotten his first love, and the midnight of his 21st birthday, John sent Edith the simple one line message: How long will it be before we can be joined together before God and the world?
Edith was now 24, and already engaged to another man. Neither fact deterred John in the least, swiftly travelling to see her. It was soon obvious her love for him had no more diminished over the years of isolation than his love for her.
On March 22nd, 1916, Edith Bratt gave her hand and her love to John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
JRR Tolkien served in WWI on the horrific front lines of the Somme, the battlefields which would be the graves of so many of his closest friends. Tolkien himself survived only because he contracted trench fever and was sent home to England. Edith gently nursed the broken Tolkien back to health, the two of them together taking long walks in the hemlock woods as he slowly recoevered. Of these happy times, Tolkien later wrote: Her hair was raven...her skin clear, her eyes bright, and she could sing --and dance. It was also during this time that Tolkien first put together the stories of Arwen and Aragorn; of Eärendil and Elwing; of Tuor and Idril; and of Beren and Lúthien.
Their love sustained them through many challenges. It was not easy for Edith to be married to the devoutly Catholic Tolkien in an extremely anti-Catholic early 20th century England. It was not easy for Edith to fit into the rarified social circles and culture of the professor at Oxford Tolkien became, and she was isolated in large part by the other, more "cultured", spouses. Despite these, Edith and JRR Tolkien raised four children in a very happy family life. The debt that JRR Tolkien felt torwards Edith for all she sacrificed and bore to be the spouse of a Oxford academic he felt he could never repay, and his deep love for her comes through throughout a lifetime of letters. Fifty-six years they shared together, before death took her in 1971.
In a letter to his son a few months after Edith's death, Tolkien wrote:
- I do not feel quite real or whole, and in a sense there is no one to talk to…we had shared all joys and griefs, and all opinions (in agreement or otherwise) so that I often feel myself thinking ‘I must tell Edith about this' - and then suddenly I feel like a castaway left on a barren island under a heedless sky after the loss of a great ship...
...For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.
JRR Tolkien died 32 years ago, today. John and Edith are buried together in the same grave in Wolvercote Cemetary at Oxford. And upon their headstone, reads the following simple inscription:
Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien 1889 - 1971
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren 1892 - 1973
Farewell sweet earth and northern sky,
For ever blest, since here did lie
And here with lissome limbs did run
Beneath the Moon, beneath the Sun,
Lúthien Tinúviel
More fair than mortal tongue can tell.
Though all to ruin fell the world
And were dissolved and backward hurled,
Unmade into the old abyss,
Yet were its making good, for this -
The dusk, the dawn, the earth, the sea -
That Luthien for a time should be.
The Silmarillion, Chpt. 19, "Of Beren and Luthien"