First US edition. Octavo. Publisher’s black cloth, lettered in gilt to the spine, in the original pictorial dustwrapper. A near fine copy in a near fine dustwrapper.
 
First US edition of one of Tolkien’s three Great Tales of Middle-earth, described by Tolkien as “the chief of the stories of The Silmarillion”.
 
The story of Beren and Luthien was conceived by Tolkien while recuperating after The Somme in 1917, in an afternoon in a woodland glade with his wife Edith. It went through many forms, in prose and verse over the next decades, and is the first story from Middle-earth that Christopher Tolkien recalls his father telling him.
 
Its deep personal meaning to Tolkien is inscribed in stone, where the names “Beren” and “Luthien” are engraved on the gravestone he shares with his wife in Oxford.