Tolkien's poetry

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was a scholar of English literature at the University of Oxford. He was 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" led him to construct not only stories but a fully formed world with its own languages, peoples, cultures, and history. He is best known for writing the fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. == Middle-earth ==

The Lord of the Rings The Lord of the Rings contains at least 61 poems, perhaps as many as 75 if variations and Tom Bombadil's sung speeches are included. 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. Several Tolkien scholars have commented on Tolkien's poetry. 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. 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. The Tolkien scholar David Dettmann writes that Tom Bombadil's guests find that song and speech run together in his house; they realise they are all "singing merrily, as if it was easier and more natural than talking". Such signals are, Forest-Hill asserts, cues to the reader to look for Tolkien's theories of "creativity, identity, and meaning". 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", while "The Sea-Bell" or "Frodos Dreme" was considered by the poet W. H. Auden to be Tolkien's "finest" poetic work. The Silmarillion 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)". Nagy infers from verse-like fragments in the text that the poetry of Beleriand used alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm including possibly iambics. The Lays of Beleriand 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. 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. == Long poems on medieval subjects ==

''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. 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. The Fall of Arthur is an unfinished poem on the legend of King Arthur. 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). == Other poems ==

Songs for the Philologists Songs for the Philologists is a short, unauthorised collection of poems of philological interest. It was privately printed without Tolkien's permission, and was withdrawn before distribution. It includes 13 by Tolkien; six of those are in Old English, and one, "Bagme Bloma", is one of the few written in Gothic. Tolkien intended them to be sung to familiar tunes; thus 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. Collected poems In 2024, the Tolkien scholars Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond published The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien. 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, of which 70 have not been published before. == Technical skill ==

A mixed reception 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." The Scottish poet Alan Bold, similarly did "not think much of Tolkien's poetry as poetry." Rawls wrote that Tolkien's verse was "weighed down with cliches and self-consciously decorative words". The scholar of English Randel Helms described Tolkien's "Errantry" as "a stunningly skillful piece of versification ... with smooth and lovely rhythms". Rebecca Ankeny writes that Tolkien's poetry "reflects and supports Tolkien's notion of Secondary Creation", embedded as it is in the text and lending it substance. 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". Sound and language 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. == Legacy ==

In fantasy While The Lord of the Rings has given rise to a large number of adaptations and derivative works, the poems embedded in the text have long been overlooked, and almost never emulated by other fantasy writers. Settings 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. 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. The settings were well received by critics. == See also ==