The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen

Mary Bowman compares the “feigned” historical echoing of Beren and Lúthien in the “Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” with Dante‘s echoing of Lancelot and Guinevere in his tale of Paolo and Francesca, here in an 1862 painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

“‘The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen’ is a story within the Appendices of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings. It narrates the love of the mortal Man Aragorn and the immortal Elf-maiden Arwen, telling the story of their first meeting, their eventual betrothal and marriage, and the circumstances of their deaths. Tolkien called the tale ‘really essential to the story’. In contrast to the non-narrative appendices it extends the main story of the book to cover events both before and after it, one reason it would not fit in the main text. Tolkien gave another reason for its exclusion, namely that the main text is told from the hobbits‘ point of view. The tale to some extent mirrors the ‘Tale of Beren and Lúthien’, set in an earlier age of Middle-earth. This creates a feeling of historical depth, in what scholars note is an approach similar to that of Dante in his Inferno. Aspects of the tale discussed by scholars include the nature of love and death; the question of why the tale, if so important, was relegated to an appendix; Tolkien’s blurring of the line between story and history; the balance Tolkien strikes between open Christianity and his treatment of his characters as pagan; and the resulting paradox that although Tolkien was a Roman Catholic and considered the book fundamentally Catholic, Middle-earth societies lack religions of their own. It has been noted also that the tale’s relegation deprives the main story of much of its love-interest, shifting the book’s emphasis towards action. … The first one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings that appeared in 1968 omitted all the Appendices ‘except for The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen’. The process of the composition of the tale was explored by Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien in the 12th and final volume of The History of Middle-earth. Working from his father’s unpublished manuscripts and drafts, he traces the evolution of the tale through several versions and framing devices, including an ‘abandoned experiment at inserting it into [a] history of the North Kingdom’, concluding that ‘the original design of the tale of Aragorn and Arwen had been lost’. The original manuscript pages of the deathbed exchange between Aragorn and Arwen show that this key scene was almost unchanged from the published version, and had been written at great speed. …”
Wikipedia
Going In Sorrow, But Not in Grief: Islam, Tolkien & Dying Well
YouTube: The Love Story of Aragorn and Arwen

In Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Ringsfilm trilogy, the tale is brought from the appendix into the main narrative, and (shown) Arwen brings the banner of the White Tree to Aragorn, and they are married. In the book these are separate events. Aragorn is shown wearing a circlet; Tolkien described the crown in the book as a taller version of the helmets of the city guard, and in a later letter as resembling the Hedjet of Upper Egypt