Edith Tolkien

There's the teenage love.

I mean, Tolkien, as we know, fell in love with Edith Bratt at a very early age and remained constant to her despite various kind of problems in their relationship.

Orwell had this great teenage love called Jacinta Buddicombe, and they both of them wrote sort of nature poems to their lady loves.

And in fact, if you actually compare the metrics and the and the language that Tolkien and Orwell use in writing these teenage love poems, there is a certain similarity.

You think that...

How much of, like, Edith's own perspective do you think is in this?

Yeah, I don't feel like I know enough about Edith.

Well, I feel like

she's...

So anyway, there has to be something of her.

I'm not saying she wrote it or even had any input into it.

I'm just saying like, you know, don't you think that there's probably something of like conversations he'd had with Edith before? probably this arguments maybe even probably yeah

so emotive.

Now, Edith had passed away about eight months before on November 29th, 1971.

Yeah.

Tolkien himself, of course, he would pass away on September the 2nd, 1973, uh, which is barely a year after writing this letter to Christopher.

And I'll, I'll open the first part of the letter.

"I have at last got busy about Mummy's grave.

The inscription I should like is Edith Mary Tolkien, 1889, 1971, Lúthien.

Brief and jejune," uh, a word that means simple or predictable, "except for Lúthien, which says for me more than a multitude of words, for she was, and knew she was, my Lúthien." There's a footnote here where he writes, "She knew the earliest form of the legend written in hospital, and also the poem eventually printed as Aragorn's song in The Lord of the Rings." The next day he continues the letter.

So this is just a couple years, three years before he dies, right? I am not in very good health, but I still have some energy.

Mummy is not well, much afflicted.

Though her arm, damaged in a fall a month or two ago, is slowly improving under treatment, she has much pain, and as she is now not only leg-crippled but one-handed, left arm in a sling, much limited in what she can do in work and leisure.

She cannot knit, for instance.