10. Tolkien was devoted to his wife, Ethel, and their shared gravestone has an in-joke engraved on it
Tolkien met Ethel Mary Bratt (1889-1971) in 1909. He was then 16 years old, and she 19, and they met when Tolkien and his brother, Hilary, moved into the Edgbaston boarding house where Edith already lived. She, too, was an orphan, and the pair soon fell in love, passing afternoons together in tearooms where they delighted in practical jokes such as dropping lumps of sugar onto the hats of passers-by. Unfortunately, Tolkien’s Catholic guardian, Friar Francis Xavier Morgan, saw Edith as a distraction for his talented young charge, and so forbade them to meet again until Tolkien turned 21.
On the night before his 21st birthday in 1912, Tolkien wrote Edith a letter requesting her hand in marriage. Edith was betrothed to another man, believing herself to have been forgotten by her former lover, but instantly broke it off to accept Tolkien’s proposal. They remained devoted to one another for the next 59 years until Edith’s death. The strange names on their shared headstone are a reference to Tolkien’s tale of Beren and Lúthien, a story he wrote about a mortal man’s adventures during his love affair with the immortal elf Lúthien, based on his own relationship with Edith.
