To anyone who believes fairy tale romances never happen in real life, may I remind you that JRR and Edith Tolkien met and experienced a forbidden love in their youth, and then were separated for five whole years because of his guardian’s rules that he could not date till he was 21, and she got engaged to someone else only because she assumed he’d forgotten her and lost hope that she could ever be with him, but then on his 21st birthday, he wrote her a letter saying he still loved her and wanted to marry her, she responded basically saying ‘if I’d known you hadn’t left me on the shelf, I would never have said yes to anyone else,’ then a week later she greeted him at the train station and then immediately dumped her fiancé, and they got married and she converted to his religion and danced for him in a flowering field far away from the trenches into which he was drafted, which left such an impression that he crafted an entire story about the most beautiful maiden in the world who danced in the woods and made enormous sacrifices to be with the man she loved, and they had four kids and remained faithful to each other and blissfully grew old together and their gravestones are now marked with the names of that same fictional couple that he created, who broke every rule and overcame every possible obstacle to be together and get a happy ending, who only did all that because he based it all on their own real love story.
Knowing all this has always made this bit of Beren’s song instantly reduce me to tears:
Though all to ruin fell the world
and were dissolved and backward hurled
unmade into the old abyss,
yet were its making good, for this—
the dawn, the dusk, the earth, the sea—
that Lúthien on a time should be!
Tolkien straight up wrote a poem that said “the world could end, but it wouldn’t have all been pointless, because she was in this world, however briefly, and that justified all the rest.” Kills me.
Who can outdo Wife Guy Tolkien? Dude was writing elaborate AUs where his wife is an impossibly beautiful magic-wielding immortal elf princess who fights Satan and wins to rescue her human boyfriend from Satan’s doom fortress. Flawless.
Final note: while they were dating, a favorite activity was to go to a local cafe with a balcony and throw sugar cubes into people's hats.
