The Poetic Origins of Middle-earth

Christian Kriticos reviews “The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien.”

By Christian KriticosOctober 16, 2024

• SF

• Poetry

MANY READERS OF J. R. R. Tolkien’s three-volume epic, The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), go through an awkward phase. Scattered across the 1,000 pages of high fantasy adventure are over 70 poems—hobbit walking songs, elvish lays, and dwarvish incantations. Impatient fans are liable to skip these verses, seeing them as an unwelcome diversion from the book’s main quest.

Other Tolkien readers come to realize that the poems are the heart of the novel. The wide-ranging verse forms help distinguish the character and culture of Tolkien’s imagined races. The allusions to mysterious names and places give depth to a rich fictional history. And on closer inspection, many of the songs, seemingly silly at first glance, reveal latent aspects of the story’s principal players.

A new three-volume set, however, tests the endurance of even the most ardent fans of Tolkienian verse. The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien dispenses with plot and prose, bringing together some 200 distinct poems across a 1,600-page count that makes The Lord of the Rings look comparatively brief. The contents span Tolkien’s entire lifetime—the earliest piece is a preteen limerick, while the last is a poetic tribute to Tolkien’s friend W. H. Auden, composed just a few years before both authors’ deaths.

The range of the output is quite astonishing. The tone of the poems runs a full spectrum—from the ponderously serious to the excessively childish. And Tolkien’s verse forms are no less diverse. He mimics the octosyllabic couplets of medieval literature, as well as the trochaic tetrameter most associated with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Tolkien even seems to borrow from Gilbert and Sullivan, with the complex meter of his poem “Errantry” fitting the tune of the “Modern Major-General’s Song.”

This content has been assembled by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull—a husband-and-wife team who have written and edited several previous Tolkien-related publications. In the world of Tolkien scholarship, the expertise of this pair is unmatched. Their editorial notes reflect this, being both exhaustive and exhausting. Indeed, it is almost 100 pages before the first of Tolkien’s poems appears, prefaced by Hammond and Scull’s introduction and a chronology that traces where and when Tolkien composed each poem. In this way, The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien may suggest a curious reversal of The Lord of the Rings for more restless fans—many readers will likely bypass the prose to get to the poetry.

Tolkien veterans, however, will be used to this academic approach. Hammond and Scull borrow from the style of Tolkien’s youngest son and literary executor, Christopher, to whom this new set is dedicated. Christopher edited 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth (1983–96)—a painstaking examination of the evolution of Tolkien’s legendarium, from its earliest draft versions in the 1910s through to his final notes in the 1970s.

Hammond and Scull present Tolkien’s poetry in a similar way. They offer not just the final version of each poem but every existing draft as well, illustrating Tolkien’s compositional process. Thus, for many entries, we are presented with five or six versions of the same poem, often running to more than 100 lines each, due to Tolkien’s penchant for prolongation. This is accompanied by notes that go so far as to detail the type of paper and writing implement Tolkien used. (In the world of Tolkien scholarship, soft pencil is an evil on par with Morgoth himself.)

Presenting these endless drafts and redrafts adds further evidence to one of Tolkien’s most notorious characteristics—that he was a niggler and a perfectionist, rarely able to finish a work and remain satisfied in its completion. He was a recycler too. Some of the more fascinating entries in this set document how Tolkien might start a poem, leave it untouched for decades, and then repurpose it as part of his ever-expanding legendarium.

But while Tolkien’s recycling was largely a private affair, taking place among his piles and piles of unpublished papers, the Tolkien Estate recycles in a way that is perhaps more irksome to fans. Although there is much in The Collected Poems that has never been seen before, most of the contents have been previously released. Fans may rightly feel aggrieved at having to purchase a pricey deluxe set when only around one-third of the material will be new to them. But it is an old trick of the posthumous Tolkien publishing industry, which continues as strong as ever half a century after the author’s death—drip-feeding small snippets of new material, bulked up with a lot of old content that has been published before.

Nevertheless, there is some merit in having these new materials as part of a comprehensive set. Poetry was a constant in Tolkien’s creative life, and by bringing together a thorough compendium, this set serves as a kind of biography in verse. Many of these poems even trace the key events and relationships of Tolkien’s life.

The earlier poems are often inspired by and dedicated to Tolkien’s wife, Edith, whom he later immortalized as the elf-maiden Lúthien in his legendarium. There is also a poem commemorating the birth of their first child, John, as well as a comic verse documenting the domestic challenges of the Monday morning routine in a house with four children. One of the final poems was written by Tolkien “in grief at an estrangement from [his] daughter” (later resolved). In this short piece, Tolkien seems to place his daughter, Priscilla, within his fantasy world, referencing fictional rivers and mountains. This offers a tantalizing example of how he may have incorporated real relationships and emotions into Middle-earth.

The chronological approach that Hammond and Scull take also allows us to see how Tolkien’s disposition changed over time. The most moving example comes through a series of poems concerning the First World War. The earliest takes a limerick form and pokes gentle fun at the quality of British military recruits:

There once was a careless Two-Lieut
—Did he know how to drill or to shoot?
No he got up at nine,
Spent the day with his wine
In a tavern of evil repute.

But as Tolkien experiences the battlefields and trenches firsthand, the poems become more somber. In “The Thatch of Poppies,” he contrasts his physical presence in France with his heart’s yearning for England, “far away beyond the distant sea.” Tolkien uses the popular wartime image of poppies (a flower also associated with sleep) to suggest a somnolent state in which he can return home in his dreams: “[T]here’s a magic in the poppies.” But the flowers also represent death, and he observes that the fields draw their nourishment from the buried bodies of his fallen companions. Tolkien’s wife noticed this change in temperament, writing to him with reference to his middle name, “Your little poem of the poppies was inside [your letter] and O Ron, I do like it, but it seems rather different to most of the others, somehow.”

Tolkien composed further poems in memory of the friends he lost as the war drew on. “G.B.S.” commemorates Geoffrey Bache Smith, a friend since Tolkien’s school days, whom he had often sought out for advice on poetic composition. “Companions of the Rose” remembers Smith again, as well as their mutual friend Robert Gilson. As Tolkien reflected in his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” Seeing these poems in sequence brings the devastation of that fact to life, reinforcing how his dreadful wartime experiences must have colored almost all of his creative life that came after.

Of course, it is what came after that will be of principal interest to most readers. And while the majority of the poems in this collection were written long before The Lord of the Rings, they nonetheless contain countless seeds of its mythology. Even the earliest poems are concerned with fantasy and faerie. But as the chronology of this collection moves forward, one can observe an evolution from a generic realm of interchangeable elves, gnomes, and goblins to a secondary world that is more distinctly Tolkienian. For instance, in a metaphor describing a surface of water as “smoother than glass by olden dwarves composed,” one might see a germ of Tolkien’s conception of the dwarves as a race of craftsmen. Similarly, a series of poems on Tinfang Warble (a minor figure in Tolkien’s legendarium) trace the character’s development from a stereotypical sprite-like figure to something more original and enigmatic.

These are relatively minor tidbits for fans that hunger for more Tolkien lore. But there are occasionally more substantial insights. One of the most notable might be “Scatha the Worm,” a poem that describes (for the first time in detail) a legendary dragon from the northern reaches of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The beast had previously been mentioned only very briefly in one of the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings, as well as its appendices. The character is not necessarily the most significant or substantial, but with almost every note and draft on Tolkien’s mythology now published, even a small scrap on a minor figure such as this one must be acknowledged as a rare and valuable treasure.

Whether this poem (or others in the collection) stands on its own merits or is elevated only by authorial association may be a debate of some contention. Hammond and Scull acknowledge that “it is not hard to find negative criticism of Tolkien’s poetry.” They even add: “We ourselves make no claim to greatness for Tolkien as a poet.”

But the question of whether we would be interested in these poems had they not come from the same pen that wrote The Lord of the Rings is purely academic. Because Tolkien did write The Lord of the Rings, and no artistic work exists in isolation; it always brings with it a context that colors its meaning in some way.

So, just as the poems within The Lord of the Rings gain meaning as part of a larger narrative, so too does The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien. It is just that the larger narrative, in this case, is Tolkien’s own biography and the broader body of his creative works. With this new three-volume set, another piece is added to the mythology of the man’s life. In reading it, we gain new insights. But he still remains as enigmatic as any of the godlike figures of his legendarium—a creator of worlds that we cannot quite fathom.