Who Were the Real Heroes of Middle-Earth?

The relationship between Beren and Luthien brought immense personal changes to their lives as well as to the people around them. Though some parallels might be found in the relationship of Ronald and Edith, it would be a fantastic if poetic stretch to identify them strongly. Beren was a warrior but also an outlaw and outcast. In a way he was orphaned, but unlike Ronald and Hilary Tolkien Beren grew to manhood with his father, and lost his mother first when Emeldir led the last women and children out of Dorthonion. War overshadowed the early lives of both couples. Beren's people were slain or driven off in the Dagor Bragollach and its aftermath, and Luthien's people were finally drawn back into the periphery of the long war between the Noldor and Morgoth when Orcs began attacking Doriath's borders. Tolkien went off to serve in the British army during World War I, and while recovering from an unusually persistent case of Trench Fever which had led to his early return to England, Tolkien began writing the Lost Tales. By this time all but one of his old friends from Oxford had been killed in the war, so much like Beren (whose companions and kinsmen had mostly died in Dorthonion) Tolkien was isolated from his past. Perhaps the most touching death in the small circle of friends Tolkien experienced was that of Geoffrey Bache Smith, who had joined Ronald's group of friends in school known informally as the T.C., B.S. (Tea Club, Barrovian Society). With Smith's influence joining Ronald's love of the great epics the group began to develop a full appreciation for poetry, and near the end of his brief life Smith wrote to Tolkien: "My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight -- I am off on duty in a few minutes -- there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the T.C.B.S. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four!..." (Ibid., p. 97) In many ways I think Tolkien kept alive the dream voiced by Smith, and he proved Smith's words prophetic, for now many years after Tolkien's own death his "Lay of Leithian" though incomplete is treasured by the many fans who have

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