The name Beren appears beside Edith Tolkien’s name on J.R.R. Tolkien’s gravestone.
Tolkien and his wife Edith are buried at Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford. Their gravestone identifies Tolkien as “Beren” and Edith as “Lúthien,” referring to the central lovers in one of Tolkien’s most important legends.
Beren is a mortal man, while Lúthien is an immortal Elf whose love story is told in The Silmarillion and related writings. Tolkien connected the fictional pair with his own relationship with Edith, particularly after seeing her dance in a woodland setting during their courtship.
The inscription does not use the names of Tolkien’s best-known later characters such as Frodo or Aragorn. Beren and Lúthien instead represent a much older strand of Tolkien’s mythology, one he developed across decades and regarded as especially personal.