A Note on Beren and Luthien's Disguise as Werewolf And Vampire-Bat

S hunting can be a pleasant and rewarding way to pass the time for those Tolkien scholars who plough their strips in the field of medieval literature for professional and/or recreational reasons. The discussion of Tolkien’s possible sources and their influence on his conception of Middle-earth has yielded important insights into the meaning of his work. For the time being, however, it looks as if the most important parallels and analogues have been investigated, although a “sources and analogues” volume uniting the most important texts still remains a desideratum. Future scholarly endeavor in this field is therefore likely to yield results that are quantitative (“yet another parallel / source of . . .”) rather than qualitative. I do not intend to belittle the scholarly effort and diligence that go into such research, yet the results are, in my mind, often of minor relevance since they add little that is new to our critical understanding of the professor’s writings. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to dismiss “source hunting” altogether since there remain some areas that may profit from the identification of Tolkien’s likely models and influences. The following discussion of a possible source for Beren and Lúthien’s disguise as werewolf and vampire-bat is intended to provide an example of work in this direction. Most of Tolkien’s fiction is accessible without specific background information, which is especially true of those works that were published during his lifetime. The stupendous popular success of The Lord of the Rings would not have been possible if it had not at least halfway met the aesthetic expectations of modern readers or touched upon some half-remembered yet strongly felt desire for non-modernistic modes of narrative. Critics may wrinkle their noses at some of Tolkien’s “out-ofdate” literary techniques or ideas, but such criticism is the consequence of a conscious choice to use a modernistic yardstick. The Silmarillion, to consider only the first of the by now numerous posthumous publications, differs insofar as it was not designed to meet the modern reader’s expectations to the same degree as the works of fiction completed during Tolkien’s lifetime. Christopher Tolkien did his best to present the