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The fading of Lúthien follows immediately on the statement that the Necklace was kept, but no connection is made. In the Tale such a connection is explicit: the doom of mortality that Mandos had spoken ‘fell swiftly’–

and in this perhaps did the curse of Mîm have [?potency] in that it came more soon upon them (II. 240).

Moreover in a synopsis for a projected revision of the Lost Tales it is said that the Nauglafring ‘brought sickness to Tinúviel’ (II. 246).

The reference to the fading of Lúthien in S retains the words of the Tale: Tinúviel slowly faded ‘even as the Elves of later days have done’; and, again as in the Tale, Lúthien ‘vanished’. In the Tale Beren was an Elf, and it is said of him that after searching all Hithlum and Artanor for Tinúviel in terrible loneliness ‘he too faded from life’. In my discussion of this I said (II. 250):

Since this fading is here quite explicitly the mode in which ‘that doom of mortality that Mandos had spoken’ came upon them, it is very notable that it is likened to, and even it seems identified with, the fading of ‘the Elves of later days throughout the world’ – as though in the original idea Elvish fading was a form of mortality.

The passage in S, retaining this idea in respect of Lúthien, but now with the later conception that Beren was a mortal Man, not an Elf, is changed in that Beren is no longer said to have faded: he ‘was lost’, looking in vain for Lúthien. It is also said here that the price of Beren’s return from Mandos was ‘that Lúthien should become as shortlived as Beren the mortal’; and in §10, where the story of Beren and Lúthien is briefly told, it is not in fact said that Lúthien died when Beren died in Doriath (see the commentary on that section, ssss1). There is also a sentence added to the MS in §10: ‘But Mandos in payment exacted that Lúthien should become mortal as Beren.’

It is possible to conclude from this that, in the conception as it was when S was written, Beren died, as a mortal dies; Lúthien went to Valinor as a living being; and Mandos allowed Beren to return to a second mortal span, but Lúthien now became subject to the same shortness of span as he. In this sense she became ‘mortal’; but being an Elf she ‘faded’ – this was the manner of her death: as it was also the manner of the death of the fading Elves of later ages. Part of the difficulty in all this undoubtedly lies in the ambiguous nature of the words ‘mortal’ and ‘immortal’ applied to the Elves: they are ‘immortal’, both in the sense that they need not die, it is not in their essential nature to die, ‘in the world’, and also in the sense that, if they did, they did not ‘leave the world’, did not go to ‘a fate beyond the world’; and they are ‘mortal’ in that they might nonetheless die ‘in the world’ (by wounds or by grief, but not from sickness or age). Lúthien became ‘mortal’ in that, although an Elf, she must die – she must fade.