  Well-posedness for the initial value problem for a self-gravitating elastic
body with free boundary in Newtonian gravity is proved. In the material frame,
the Euler-Lagrange equation becomes, assuming suitable constitutive properties
for the elastic material, a fully non-linear elliptic-hyperbolic system with
boundary conditions of Neumann type. For systems of this type, the initial data
must satisfy compatibility conditions in order to achieve regular solutions.
Given a relaxed reference configuration and a sufficiently small Newton's
constant, a neigborhood of initial data satisfying the compatibility conditions
is constructed.
