The tale of Beren and Luthien was part of The Silmarillion, the myths and legends of the First Age of Middle Earth. Essential to the story is the fate that shadowed the love of Beren and Luthien: for Beren was a mortal man, but Luthien was an immortal elf. Her father, a great elvish lord in deep opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform before he might wed Luthien. This leads to the heroic attempt of Beren and Luthien together to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril. In this book, J.R.R.'s son Christopher Tolkien has attempted to extract the story of Beren and Luthien from the comprehensive work in which it was embedded; but that story was itself changing as it developed new associations within the larger history. To show something of the process whereby this legend of Middle Earth evolved over the years, he has told the story in his father's own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages in prose and verse from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it changed. Presented together for the first time, they reveal aspects of the story, both in event and in narrative immediacy, that were afterwards lost.