Ooh la la, Lúthien...

[IxnaY AintsaY]

I don't believe Inziladun was comparing Beren and Aragorn's respective verbal contracts with the respective fathers of their respective loves, but rather just making a joke about Arwen's apparent lack of initiative compared to Luthien.

[shadowfax]

Forgive me if I'm going in circles here as I admit to not having read every post in thius thread

But there is another relationship that interests me as well.

what about Morgoth and Luthien. When she danced for him, did she really just dance for him?

To come back to JRRT being Catholic, there is a Bible passage, and interestingly its one of the passages that Martin Luther and other people in the reformation decided to drop out, as such if you want to read it today you need a Catholic Bible.

In that story there is a young woman, not entirely dissimilar to Luthien, who dances for the king, flirts with him, gets him drunk on wine, and when he sleeps she draws her knife and cuts off his head and takes it (with the crown on) to her mother (I think). In the Jewish original, the sensual nature of her dance is apparently even less ambiguous but i haven't actually read that myself.