The artist Niggle constantly reworks (niggles at) the picture, scraping away old paint and applying new layers, but he fails to capture the tree’s life and beauty except for a single, perfect leaf. “Leaf by Niggle” is an allegory featuring an artist who spends his entire life on one vast painting of a tree. Tolkien was famous for his rewrites he revised The Hobbit, which was originally published in the 1930s, after the release of The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, to reverse engineer continuity between the two stories. In the recently published book Beren and Lúthien, Christopher Tolkien has collected various drafts of the story, including parts of the poem, and shared them as a fascinating window into his father’s creative process. The story first appeared in The Silmarillion as a prose recap of the Lay of Leithian, one of Tolkien’s long epic poems that he never completed. In it, Lúthien-a demigod elf princess whom Tolkien refers to both as a “mere maid” and “the greatest of the children of Iluvatar”-singlehandedly defeats Morgoth, the Big Bad of the First Age of Middle Earth. Tolkien’s Beren and Lúthien contains echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Rapunzel, and the Orpheus and Persephone myths.
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