J.R.R. Tolkien associated his wife Edith with the fictional character Lúthien. Lúthien is an immortal elf who falls in love with the mortal man Beren in Tolkien’s legendarium.
Tolkien drew the association from a real moment: he described seeing Edith dance in a wooded clearing near Roos in Yorkshire. That memory helped inspire the image of Lúthien dancing. The Beren-and-Lúthien story became one of Tolkien’s most important tales and appears in several forms across his writings.
The connection is commemorated on the couple’s gravestones in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. “Lúthien” is carved beneath Edith’s name, while “Beren” appears beneath Tolkien’s. Readers sometimes choose Galadriel, Arwen, or Éowyn because each is a major female character, but the personal association Tolkien explicitly memorialized was with Lúthien.