01/28/2026
Beautiful, beautiful love story...
In 1908, a sixteen-year-old orphan named Ronald Tolkien moved into a boarding house in Birmingham. There he met Edith Bratt, nineteen, a talented pianist who had lost her mother four years earlier.
They found each other in the way orphans sometimes do—quietly, unexpectedly, completely.
According to biographer Humphrey Carpenter, they would sit together in teashops, especially one with a balcony overlooking the pavement. There they would throw sugar lumps into the hats of passersby, moving to the next table when the bowl ran empty.
By the summer of 1909, they were in love.
But Tolkien's guardian, Father Francis Morgan, disapproved. Edith was three years older. She was Protestant. And Ronald's grades were suffering. Father Morgan issued an ultimatum: no contact with Edith until Tolkien turned twenty-one.
Tolkien obeyed. For three years.
On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, he wrote to Edith immediately, declaring that he had never stopped loving her. Her reply devastated him: she had accepted another man's proposal. She thought Ronald had forgotten her during the silence.
Tolkien refused to accept it. He traveled by train to Cheltenham, where Edith met him on the platform. By the end of that day, she had returned the other man's ring and agreed to marry Tolkien instead.
They were formally engaged in January 1913 and married on March 22, 1916—weeks before Tolkien shipped out to the battlefields of the Somme. He later wrote that parting from Edith felt "like a death."
He survived the war. Their love survived fifty-five years.
To Tolkien, Edith was more than a wife. She was the source of Lúthien Tinúviel, the immortal elven princess who gives up her eternal life for love of a mortal man—the most beautiful story in all of Middle-earth.
"I never called Edith Lúthien," Tolkien wrote to his son after her death, "but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion."
When Edith died in November 1971 at eighty-two, Tolkien had one word inscribed beneath her name on the gravestone: Lúthien.
Twenty-one months later, he was buried beside her. Beneath his name was added: Beren.
The grave still stands in Wolvercote Cemetery, north of Oxford—two names, two characters, one love story that became legend.
~Old Photo Club
