New Book From Lord Of The Rings Author Published 100 Years After It Was Written

Although J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for The Lord of the Rings, he wrote many other stories during his life. Over the years, several of his earliest works have been released that give a glimpse of Tolkien's first attempts to construct fantasy tales and worlds. Today, 100 years after it was written, another of Tolkien's works has been published.

Beren and Luthien tells the story of a mortal man and an immortal elf who are tasked by Luthien's father to steal a Silmaril gem from Melkor, the greatest of the evil beings. The story was reworked and told in The Silmarillion, Tolkien's anthology of short stories and tales about Middle-earth. The theme of love between mortal man and immortal elf woman also shows up in The Lord of the Rings with the romance between Aragorn and Arwen.

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This version of Beren and Luthien was announced last year and has been put together by Tolkien's son, Christopher, who collected many iterations of the story to show its evolution. It is accompanied by illustrations by Alan Lee, an artist who previously worked on editions of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and other Tolkien books. You can see some of his illustrations above.

Tolkien originally wrote Beren and Luthien in 1917, after coming home from serving in the British Army in World War I. He was profoundly affected by the Battle of the Somme, specifically, and the loss of many of his close friends during the war. But Tolkien was also inspired by his interactions with Edith Mary Bratt, the woman he would eventually marry. "I never called Edith Luthien--but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of The Silmarillion," he wrote in a letter in 1972. "It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while)."

J.R.R. and Edith's shared gravestone in Oxford, England, is inscribed with the names Beren and Luthien.

You can pick up the book from most booksellers; it currently costs $15.49 on Amazon.

A couple of years ago, Christopher Tolkien released another early story from his father's collected works. Titled The Story of Kullervo, it shows a different attempt by Tolkien to take many influences from Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon folklore and turn it into a fantasy story. This, too, eventually would be reworked and end up in The Silmarillion.

In other Tolkien news, multiple biopics are currently being made, according to The Hollywood Reporter. One of these, Tolkien & Lewis, will look at the author's friendship with Chronicles of Narnia writer C.S. Lewis and how he helped convert Lewis to Christianity. The other, called Tolkien, focuses on how he came to write the beloved fantasy series.