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Originally Posted by Lalwende
I can't help thinking that the inspiration for Luthien was in some way Edith - at least, Tolkien may have created Luthien as an idealised version of what he saw when he saw his wife dancing in the woods at Roos, East Yorkshire.
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I think this brings up another interesting dimension. It was pointed out in an essay in Tolkien the Medievalist that Ronald & Edith were at Roos during Ronald's convalescence - this was in mid November. Now, mid November on the North Sea coast is no place for dancing outdoors, & there certainly would not have been any Hemlocks in bloom.
In other words, that whole episode was far more a fantasy than reality. Again, we seem to have Ronald seeing the world 'through enchanted eyes'. If his own life experiences found their way into his mythology it was probably in a way that was very far removed from the fact. It seems like the reality served as a basis for what appeared in the mythology, but once it had found a mythological form this mythological version of the truth seems to have 'fed back' into his memories of the primary world, so that in his memory Edith
did dance among the Hemlocks in a woodland glade at twilight, rather than freezing in the blustery winds off the North Sea in November.