Тем временем вышла в свет книга «Берен и Лутиэн» – к сожалению, никакого нового материала, только системно представлена эволюция легенды.
Из предисловия Кристофера:
«In my ninety-third year this is (presumptively) my last book in the long series of editions of my father’s writings, very largely previously unpublished, and is of a somewhat curious nature. This tale is chosen in memoriam because of its deeply-rooted presence in his own life, and his intense thought on the union of Lúthien, whom he called ‘the greatest of the Eldar’, and of Beren the mortal man, of their fates, and of their second lives.
It goes back a long way in my life, for it is my earliest actual recollection of some element in a story that was being told to me — not simply a remembered image of the scene of the storytelling. My father told it to me, or parts of it, speaking it without any writing, in the early 1930s.
The element in the story that I recall, in my mind’s eye, is that of the eyes of the wolves as they appeared one by one in the darkness of the dungeon of Thû».
44 года работы над очень сложными текстами. Сам Толкин-старший работал около 58-ми.
