J.R.R. Tolkien’s wife was Edith Bratt. Tolkien met Edith when he was a teenager, and they married on 22 March 1916 after a long courtship complicated by Tolkien’s guardian’s instructions that he postpone the relationship.
Edith strongly influenced Tolkien’s mythology. He associated her with the elven character Lúthien, whose story of love and courage is one of the central tales of Tolkien’s legendarium. Tolkien later had the names “Beren” and “Lúthien” engraved on their shared gravestone in Oxford.
Edith and Ronald Tolkien had four children: John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla. She was not the model for every female character in Tolkien’s work, but the connection between her and Lúthien is explicitly reflected in Tolkien’s biography and in the inscription on their grave.