Front cover of the 2017 hardback edition
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Editor | Christopher Tolkien |
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Author | J.R.R. Tolkien |
Illustrator | Alan Lee |
Cover artist | Alan Lee |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Genre | High fantasy |
Published | 1 June 2017 (Worldwide) |
Publisher |
HarperCollins Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
Media type | Print (hardback) |
Pages | 304 |
ISBN | |
Preceded by | The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun |
The Tale of Beren and Lúthien is the story of the love and adventures of the mortal Man Beren and the immortal Elf-maiden Lúthien, as told in several works of J. R. R. Tolkien. It takes place during the First Age of Middle-earth, about 6500 years before the events of his most famous book, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote several versions of their story, the latest written in The Silmarillion. Beren and Lúthien are also mentioned in The Lord of the Rings.
The first version of the story is the Tale of Tinúviel, which was written in 1917 and published in The Book of Lost Tales. During the 1920s Tolkien started to reshape the tale and to transform it into an epic poem which he called The Lay of Leithian. He never finished it, leaving three of seventeen planned cantos unwritten. After his death The Lay of Leithian was published in The Lays of Beleriand, together with The Lay of the Children of Húrin and several other unfinished poems. The latest version of the tale is told in prose form in one chapter of The Silmarillion and is recounted by Aragorn in The Fellowship of the Ring. Furthermore, it was the model for "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", which is told in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings.
As told in The Silmarillion, the later version of the tale: