On March 25th was the long awaited Tolkien Reading Day so all month long in March, we, along with some of our readers, read Tolkien’s Beren and Luthien over in our Facebook Group.
Read my review of week one and two over here!
Disclaimer: This post can contain spoiler
When reading Beren and Luthien, my reading experience of the “Lay of Leithian” was far greater when reading out loud rather than reading it silently. By reading it out loud, it gave me the opportunity to explore the tale and its rhythm with the attention it deserves. Personally, I don’t know how it is for you, but when I read poems, of all lengths, silently I tend to read them too fast, neglecting the necessary pauses and intonations. In fact, I’d love to have a professional performer read excerpts of the Lay of Leithian out loud. I’m sure it’ll compare to Shakespeare’s best writings.
Here is a little task for you, go and read the following excerpt out loud and take your time doing it. Try to emphasize each pause and exclamation. In short, read the following excerpt, and the Lay of Leithian in general, as a performance.
‘Sleep, O unhappy, tortured thrall!
Thou woebegotten, fail and fall
down, down from anguish, hatred, pain,
from lust, from hunger, bond and chain,
to that oblivion, dark and deep,
the well, the lightless pit of sleep!
For one brief hour escape the net,
the dreadful doom of life forget!’
– Beren and Luthien page 201, line 1589 – 1596
Reading the entire “Lay of Leithian” out loud might be somewhat tiresome, but it increases the reading joy profoundly! Part of me now wonders what the entire Silmarillion would’ve been like if it were written as an epic poem.
Source: unboundworlds.com
As I’ll explain down below, most of my time reading Beren and Luthien was focused on understanding and untangling the different versions rather than analyzing them. There are so many new things revealed to me, giving me great insight into Tolkien’s writing process and thought process that I didn’t knew before. For example, I wasn’t aware that Tolkien felt overwhelmed to „write a futher book about hobbits“ (Beren and Luthien p. 219). As Christopher Tolkien explains, his father could not think of „anything more to say about hobbits“ after his novel The Hobbit (p. 219).
While I struggled to keep track of every change in every version of the tale of Beren and Luthien, the increased signifinance of Thû (Sauron) and Luthien, compared to the final version, stood out to me. Luthien seems so much more determined, even more than she already is in The Silmarillion, that I cannot help but love Luthien so much more now after having read Beren and Luthien.
As I’ve indicated, I struggled to remember all details of all those different versions of this tale while reading it. The more I read on, the more the different versions blended in with one another. The insertion of Fingolfin’s fate and the tale Mîm added further to my confusion, to be honest. Talking to our members in our Facebook group revealed that I’m not the only one. Several have commented how difficult it is ‘to read’ Beren and Luthien.
I’ll surely need to reread this book again and again, in the years to come, in order to fully appreciate everything. The great beauty of Tolkien’s works is that it is so filled with details that rereading any of his works never gets boring. To the contrary, the more I reread his works, the more I love it. So, for now, I’ll hold back with a rating and a review of Beren and Luthien as I genuinly don’t believe I’ve grasped it all and are capable of giving a well-informed rating and review.
Now it is your turn, what were your thoughts while reading Beren and Luthien? Did you struggle reading it as well? Also, would you read The Silmarillion written as an epic poem? Leave your thoughts in the comments down below!
