Tolkien's poetry

J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar of English literature, a philologist interested in language and poetry from the Middle Ages, especially that of Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Europe. His professional knowledge of poetical works such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shaped his fictional world of Middle-earth. His intention to create what has been called "a mythology for England"^{[T 1]} led him to construct not only stories but a fully-formed world with its own languages, peoples, cultures, and history.^[1] He is best known for writing the fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.^[2]

The Lord of the Rings contains at least 61 poems,^[3] perhaps as many as 75 if variations and Tom Bombadil's sung speeches are included.^[4] The verses include songs of many genres: for wandering, marching to war, drinking, and having a bath; narrating ancient myths, riddles, prophecies, and magical incantations; of praise and lament (elegy); some of these are found in Old English poetry.^[5]

Michael Drout wrote that most of his students admitted to skipping the poems when reading The Lord of the Rings, something that Tolkien was aware of.^[6] The Tolkien scholar Andrew Higgins wrote that Drout had made a "compelling case" for studying it. The poetry was, Drout wrote, essential for the fiction to work aesthetically and thematically; it added information not given in the prose; and it brought out characters and their backgrounds.^[6] Thomas Kullmann and Dirk Siepmann note that all the poems follow in traditional genres, such as Old English charms, elegies, and riddles; Middle English nature songs; or English folklore songs for the nursery, the church, the tavern, the barrack room, festivals, or for activities such as walking. They comment that many of these poems are far from conventional lyrical poetry such as that of Wordsworth or Keats, since evoking "the poet's personal feelings" was not Tolkien's intention.^[7] Tolkien indeed wrote in a letter that

the verses in The L.R. are all dramatic: they do not express the poor old professor's soul-searchings, but are fitted in style and contents to the characters in the story that sing or recite them, and to the situations in it."^{[T 3]}

Brian Rosebury agrees that the distinctive thing about Tolkien's verse is its "individuation of poetic styles to suit the expressive needs of a given character or narrative moment".^[12] Diane Marchesani, in Mythlore, considers the songs in The Lord of the Rings as "the folklore of Middle-earth", calling them "an integral part of the narrative".^[13] She distinguishes four kinds of folklore: lore, including rhymes of lore, spells, and prophecies; ballads, from the Elvish "Tale of Tinuviel" to "The Ent and the Entwife" with its traditional question-answer format; ballad-style, simpler verse such as the hobbits' walking-songs; and nonsense, from "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" to Pippin's "Bath Song". In each case, she states, the verse is "indispensable" to the narrative, revealing both the characters involved and the traditions of their race.^[13]

The poetry of the Shire is "plain, simple, straightforward in theme and expression", verse suitable for hobbits, but which varies continuously to suit changing situations and growing characters.^[14] Bilbo's Old Walking Song, "The Road goes ever on and on / Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet..." is placed at the start of The Lord of the Rings. It reappears, sung by Frodo, varied with "weary feet" to suit his mood, shortly before he sees a Ringwraith; and a third time, at the end of the book, by a much aged, sleepy, forgetful, dying Bilbo in Rivendell, when the poem has shifted register to "But I at last with weary feet / Will turn towards the lighted inn, My evening-rest and sleep to meet". Shippey observes that the reader can see that the subject is now death. Frodo, too, leaves Middle-earth, but with a different walking-song, singing of "A day will come at last when I / Shall take the hidden paths that run / West of the Moon, East of the Sun", which Shippey glosses as the "Lost Straight Road" that goes out of the round world, straight to Elvenhome.^[14]

In contrast to the hobbits, Tom Bombadil only speaks in metre.^[15] The Tolkien scholar David Dettmann writes that Tom Bombadil's guests find that song and speech run together in his house; they realize they are all "singing merrily, as if it was easier and more natural than talking".^{[16] [T 15]} Such signals are, Forest-Hill asserts, cues to the reader to look for Tolkien's theories of "creativity, identity, and meaning".^[15]

Shippey states that in The Lord of the Rings, poetry in the metre of Old English verse is used to give a direct impression of the oral tradition of the Riders of Rohan; Tolkien's "Where now the horse and the rider?" echoes the Old English poem The Wanderer, while "Arise now, arise, Riders of Theoden" is based on the Finnesburg Fragment. In Shippey's opinion, these poems are about memory "of the barbarian past",^[17] and the fragility of oral tradition makes what is remembered specially valuable. As fiction, he writes, Tolkien's "imaginative re-creation of the past adds to it an unusual emotional depth."^[17] Some of the poems are in alliterative verse, recreating the feeling of Old English poetry, with its use of rhythm and alliteration. Among these are Aragorn's lament for Boromir, which recalls Scyld Scefing's ship-burial in Beowulf^[18] In Shippey's view, the three epitaph poems in The Lord of the Rings, including "The Mounds of Mundburg" and, based on the famous Ubi sunt? passage in "The Wanderer", Tolkien's "Lament of the Rohirrim",^[6][19][20] represent Tolkien's finest alliterative Modern English verse.^[6]

The Hobbit contains over a dozen poems, many of which are frivolous, but some—like the dwarves' ballad in the first chapter, which is continued or adapted in later chapters—show how poetry and narrative can be combined.^[21]

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, published in 1962, contains 16 poems including some such as "The Stone Troll" and "Oliphaunt" that also appear in The Lord of the Rings. The first two poems in the collection concern Tom Bombadil, a character described in The Fellowship of the Ring,^{[T 16]} while "The Sea-Bell" or "Frodos Dreme" was considered by the poet W. H. Auden to be Tolkien's "finest" poetic work.^[22]

The Silmarillion as edited and constructed by Christopher Tolkien does not contain explicitly identified poetry, but Gergely Nagy notes that the prose hints repeatedly at the style of Beleriand's "lost" poetry. The work's varied prose styles imply to Nagy that it is meant to represent a compendium, in Christopher Tolkien's words, "made long afterwards from sources of great diversity (poems, and annals, and oral tales)".^{[23][T 17]} Nagy infers from verse-like fragments in the text that the poetry of Beleriand used alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm including possibly iambics.^[23]

Tolkien's legendarium, the mass of Middle-earth manuscripts that he left unpublished, contain several long heroic lays, edited by his son Christopher in The Lays of Beleriand. These include the tale of the tragic figure of Túrin Turambar in 2276 lines of verse, The Lay of the Children of Húrin, and the Tale of Beren and Lúthien in some 4200 lines of rhyming couplets, The Lay of Leithian.^[24] The fantasy novelist Suzannah Rowntree wrote that The Lays of Beleriand was a favourite of hers. In her view, "the book's main attraction is Part III, 'The Lay of Leithian'". She describes this as "a red-blooded, grand poem, written in a richly ornamented style bordering (in places) on the baroque. At worst this seems a little clumsy; at best it fits the lavish, heroic story and setting." She comments that C. S. Lewis "obviously enjoyed the poem hugely," going so far as to invent scholars Peabody and Pumpernickel who comment on what Lewis pretends is an ancient text.^[25]

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son is a play, reworking the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, written in alliterative verse. It represents what critics agree is a biting critique of the heroic ethos, castigating Beorhtnoth's foolish pride.^[26][27][28]

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún contains two long poems, "The New Lay of the Völsungs" and "The New Lay of Gudrun", both inspired by the legend of Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs in Norse mythology. Both poems are in a form of alliterative verse inspired by the medieval verse of the Poetic Edda.^[29]

The Fall of Arthur is an unfinished poem on the legend of King Arthur.^[30] It is in some 1,000 stanzas of modern English, in Old English-style alliterative verse. The historical setting is early medieval, both in form and in content, showing Arthur as a Migration period British military leader fighting the Saxon invasion. Tolkien avoids the high medieval aspects of the Arthurian cycle, such as the Holy Grail and the courtly setting. The poem begins with a British "counter-invasion" to the Saxon lands (Arthur eastward in arms purposed).^[31]

Songs for the Philologists is a short, unauthorised collection of poems of philological interest, including 13 by Tolkien; six of those are in Old English,^[32] and one, "Bagme Bloma", is the only poem ever written in Gothic.^[33] Tolkien intended them to be sung to familiar tunes; thus Ofer wídne gársecg was an Old English translation of the folk ballad "The Mermaid", beginning "Oh 'twas in the broad Atlantic, mid the equinoctial gales / That a young fellow fell overboard among the sharks and whales"; it was to be sung to "The Mermaid"'s tune, while "Bagme Bloma" was to be sung to the tune of "O Lazy Sheep!" by Mantle Childe.^[34]

In 2024, the Tolkien scholars Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond published The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien.^[36] The work, in three volumes, contains some 195 entries and five appendices, with a total of at least 240 of his poems, depending on how they are counted,^[37] of which 70 have not been published before.^[38] The collection excludes many of the poems embedded in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and presents the longer separately-published poems as excerpts.^[37] Each poem is supported by commentary and draft versions illustrating the history of its creation. Hammond stated that some of the unpublished poems are "remarkably good", while Scull said that they would extend people's "view of Tolkien as a creative writer."^[38] She found the incomplete war poem "The Empty Chapel" particularly "affecting".^[38] A poem in Old English, Bealuwérig ("Malicious Outlaw"), is Tolkien's translation of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky", complete with invented words.^[38]

In the early 1990s, the scholar of English Melanie Rawls wrote that while some critics found Tolkien's poetry "well-crafted and beautiful", others thought it "excruciatingly bad."^[39] The Scottish poet Alan Bold,^[40] similarly did "not think much of Tolkien's poetry as poetry."^[41] Rawls wrote that Tolkien's verse was "weighed down with cliches and self-consciously decorative words".^[39] On the other hand, Geoffrey Russom, a scholar of Old and Middle English verse, considered Tolkien's varied verse as constructing "good music", with a rich diversity of structure that avoids the standard iambic pentameter of much modern English poetry.^[42] The scholar of English Randel Helms described Tolkien's "Errantry" as "a stunningly skillful piece of versification ... with smooth and lovely rhythms";^[43] while Rebecca Ankeny writes that Tolkien's poetry "reflects and supports Tolkien's notion of Secondary Creation".^[41]

Besides rhyme and metre, Tolkien employs numerous poetic devices suited to the theme and context of individual poems. Several of these can be seen in the longest poem in The Lord of the Rings, the Song of Eärendil. It makes use of rhyme, internal half-rhyme, alliteration, alliterative assonance, and in Shippey's words "a frequent if irregular variation of syntax".^[44] These devices serve to convey "an elvish streak ... signalled ... by barely-precedented intricacies" of poem construction, giving a feeling of "rich and continuous uncertainty, a pattern forever being glimpsed but never quite grasped", its goals "romanticism, multitudinousness, imperfect comprehension .. achieved stylistically much more than semantically."^[44]

Kullmann and Siepmann note the wide variety of metres that Tolkien uses, and that he nearly always avoided the most common form of his time, iambic pentameter. Several poems are unrhymed; these are often but not always alliterative, imitating Old English verse, while others are irregular, like "Sing now, ye people of the Tower of Anor". Of the rhymed verse, Tolkien often uses iambic tetrameter, as in "Gil-galad was an Elven-king", and sometimes iambic octameter, like "Eärendil was a mariner that tarried in Arvernien". Less commonly he uses other metres, including the irregular strophic rhyme of "Troll sat alone on his seat of stone", the iambic dimeter of "We come"/"To Isengard", or the ballad stanza of "An Elven-maid there was of old". On a few occasions, Tolkien uses dactylic metres, such as the dactylic trimeter of "Seek for the Sword that was broken", or the dactylic tetrameter of "Legolas Greenleaf long under tree".^[7]

In a detailed reply to Rawls, the poet Paul Edwin Zimmer wrote that "much of the power of Tolkien's 'prose' comes from the fact that it's written by a poet of high technical skill, who carried his metrical training into his fiction."^[45] In Zimmer's view, Tolkien could control both simple and complex metres well, and displayed plenty of originality in the metres of poems such as "Tom Bombadil" and "Eärendil".^[45]

Tolkien's poems are variously in modern English, Old English, Gothic, and Tolkien's constructed languages, especially his Elvish languages, Quenya, such as Namárië, and Sindarin, such as A Elbereth Gilthoniel. Shippey notes that Tolkien believed that the sound of a language conveyed a specific pleasure, even if untranslated.^[46]

While The Lord of the Rings has given rise to a large number of adaptations and derivative works,^[47] the poems embedded in the text have long been overlooked, and almost never emulated by other fantasy writers.^[45] An exception is Poul and Karen Anderson's 1991 short story "Faith", in After the King, a 1991 hommage to Tolkien published on the centenary of his birth. The story ends with two stanzas of "The Wrath of the Fathers, Aeland's epic", written in Old English-style alliterative verse.^[48]

Seven of Tolkien's songs (all but one, "Errantry", from The Lord of the Rings) were made into a song-cycle, The Road Goes Ever On, set to music by Donald Swann in 1967.^[49] The Tolkien Ensemble, founded in 1995, set all the poetry in The Lord of the Rings to music, publishing it on four CDs between 1997 and 2005.^[50] The settings were well received by critics.^[51]

• Tolkien's prose style