Hemlock: A Love Story
This is the true tale of one of my favorite love stories of all time, a tale more than a century old. It is a reminder of why we celebrate love stories, especially those fraught with trials, and the couples that braved them to be together.
Once upon a time, a man and woman fell in love. He was an utter gentleman, despite his youth; she was full of spirit, and quickly struck a friendship with him over bicycle rides and long talks. But when the man’s guardian discovered their growing affection, he forbade any communication between them, until the man would come of age. He promised to wait for her. Three long years passed, separated, but they only served to strengthen his resolve. Minutes after the stroke of midnight on his twenty-first birthday, he penned a love letter to her, and five days later she broke off the other engagement she’d acquiesced to, returning to him with open arms. He had never loved her more, and knew he would marry her.
Once upon a time, a man and woman fell in love. They couldn’t have been more different. He was caught up in his university work and the mythology he was beginning to create. She was occupied in the house and home, and often annoyed at his need for academic company. They got on each other’s nerves - but they were soulmates. It was indisputable. Little acts of love convinced even the most skeptical onlookers of this.
Once upon a time, a man and woman fell in love. Then, the war came. He wrote her letters from the front in between notes about his mythology, coded to bypass military censors while shells and soldiers screamed around him and death became industrialised as it never had before. On a foray back home, returned from the hell strip of the Somme, he met her again. For a while, he could forget officers like himself being cut down a dozen a minute; for a while, she could forget the fear of a knock on the door carrying news of his death. They went walking in a little woodland glade, and she danced for him in a field of hemlock. In that moment, it seemed like wars could be won, and troubles could end, and joy could rise from sorrow.
Once upon a time, a man and woman fell in love. He never forgot her dancing in the hemlock. The world he was spinning in his myths grew, and a love story sprang at its very heart, inspired by that day of love in a time of war. The myth told of an immortal princess and her mortal lover, sent on an impossible quest to gain her hand in marriage. When he was captured by the enemy, she stormed the fortress, and overthrew it to rescue him. When he died fighting a mighty beast that threatened her homeland, she followed him, and sang before the god of death, who was so moved that he returned them both land of the living. They passed many years in peace, before death took them again.
Once upon a time, a man and a woman fell in love. They sacrificed themselves for one another in different ways. She gave up both her career as a pianist and her religion to be with him, dividing her life into a before and after. Many years later he would return this, departing from the life he loved as an intellectual, to remove to a village where she would be more comfortable as age came for them.
Once upon a time, a man and woman fell in love. They were both utterly mortal. When she passed beyond our world, he wrote to their eldest son of the glade and the hemlock: “In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing –and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.” - Mandos being that god of death from the myth he had written, whose judgement was superseded by the princess’ enduring love.
Once upon a time, a man and woman fell in love. J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith remain together, buried in Oxford under a headstone marked not only by their names in this world, but also with the names of the mythic lovers their story inspired - Beren and Lúthien.
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