The Gest of Beren and Lúthien

[Pitchwife]

Great topic, Lommy! It was high time the Lays of Beleriand got their own thread(s); thanks for starting this one!
I totally agree with your admiration of the Gest. One of my own favourite passages comes shortly after the one you quoted:

Thus Lúthien, whom no pursuit,
no snare, no dart that hunters shoot,
might hope to win or hold, she came
at the sweet calling of her name;*
and thus in his her slender hand
was linked in far Beleriand;
in hour enchanted long ago
her arms about his neck did go,
and gently down she drew to rest
his weary head upon her breast.

Heart-melting, isn't it? And I suppose we can all guess what happened next, although he is, of course, discreet enough never to tell us...

Originally Posted by Lommy quoting Greenie

"Why did a person who could write like that bother to write prose?"

Several reasons, I think. Above stated admiration notwithstanding, I have to somewhat agree with Mith about endless rhyming couplets getting tiresome after a while. To be sure, the Gest has its poetic jewels - quite a lot of them - , but it's quite tough to keep up that level of intensity for hundreds and hundreds of verses.
Another aspect: narrative poetry of this kind, whether rhymed or alliterating, already was an anachronism at the time the Lays were written - so much so that, when the Gest was submitted to a publisher, the reader mistook it for a translation of an ancient Celtic original! Even LotR, being the hybrid between novel and romance it is in my eyes, was anachronistic enough in its day, but I don't think a Lay of the War of the Ring (even supposing Tolkien had ever finished it) in, presumably, thousands and thousands of verses would have had any chance of ever being published - and without the tremendous success of LotR in prose, we wouldn't be reading and appreciating the Lays today.
(By the way, it's interesting that the prose Silmarillion as we now know it developped, after BoLT had been aborted, from a compressed sketch meant to provide readers of the Lays with the mythological background - so in a way, Tolkien's recasting of the Legendarium in prose grew from the attempt to explain his poetry.)

Originally Posted by Lommy

Why did he (or did he?) prefer the metre seen in for example The Lay of the Children of Húrin, when at least to someone with my degree of education he seems far more fluent and talented in the kind of metre found in The Gest?

I think it depends on the subject matter, and Tolkien chose the metre for each of the great Lays very wisely. The alliterative form of Children of Húrin, reminiscent of Beowulf and other Norse/Saxon poetry, fits the bleak, tragic heroism of Túrin's tale, just as the rhymed couplets of the Gest are better suited to the more romantic and hopeful tale of Beren and Lúthien. (Which makes me wonder if he had any model for the Gest, comparable to the way CoH can be viewed as being modelled on Beowulf, and what it could have been. Any ideas?)


*It just strikes me how these four lines seem to echo Pwylls first meeting with Rhiannon in the Mabinogion (also a tale of a mortal wooing a Faery bride) - he pursues her on horseback for three days or so without ever being able to overtake her, until he finally comes to his senses and politely asks her to wait for him, which she then does gladly...