Christina Scull and Wayne G Hammond (eds) ‘The Collected Poems of J R R Tolkien’ (HarperCollins 2024)

A big book, in three volumes: fully 1500 pages of Tolkienian verse. It’s a very handsome piece of book production: good quality paper, well bound, nice font, full-colour frontispieces (of MS poems, in Tolkien’s beautiful calligraphy). Not cheap, but I bought it immediately, as many Tolkien fans and completists will have done. It will probably be this year’s bestselling poetry book.

The editors praise Christopher Tolkien in their introduction for all he did in terms of editing his father’s work. The project for this Collected Poems began when he was still alive, and with his blessing. In his honour, Scull and Hammond follow the editorial practice of Christopher T.’s History of Middle Earth, to whit: notating every tiny little change and alteration in the (often many) manuscript variants and revisions that Tolkien produced. This means there is a lot of repetition, a great many pages per poem, cluttered with variorum gubbins, multiple versions, textual annotation. There’s also a lot of explanatory annotation, much of is useful, and the editors link to other critics’ discussions of key poems. It’s a lot.

Selection is a puzzle. Given how many of the book’s 1500 pages are given over to reprinting slightly different versions of the same (often slight, or minor) poem, it is frustrating that the longer works are chopped down to little indicative gobbets. Tolkien’s translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Beowulf, and his own long-form creations, like the several thousand lines of The Children of Húrin, are all mutilated. ‘As with Tolkien’s other long poems,’ Scull and Hammond say, ‘The Children of Húrin cannot be printed here in its entirety … but we have made representative selections’ [2:487]. But, with a different editorial philosophy, and without filling up so much space with endless variant versions of minor poems, whole works could indeed have been included. The editors note that The Children of Húrin has been published elsewhere, but then most of the poems they include have also been published elsewhere. Long-form verse narrative is out of favour at the moment, but it is its own thing, and needs length to accumulate its effectiveness; and Tolkien’s long narrative poems are, despite a great deal of arthritic archaism, really quite effective in what they are doing. It could be argued they are his greatest achievement as a poet.

Still, those not prepared to buy those other volumes must make do with short sections, chosen by what rationale isn’t clear, included to gesture towards the longer works. I’d have preferred a more inclusive collection of actual Tolkien, and less pettifogging tracing of all the minutiae of his developing specific pieces. ‘Earendil was a mariner…’ (one of Tolkien’s best poems, but still) gets fully 60 pages of such grinding through multiple drafts, and the reader interested in ‘The History of Tom Bombadil’ (dated by the editors ‘c.1931–62’) must wade through pages and pages of this kind of thing, through half a dozen iterations of, basically, the same poem:

Old Tom Bombadil [added: he] was a merry fellow
His house was Underhill; his boots [added: they] were yellow
[at right: Green his jacket was and his boots were yellow]
[Green>] Bright blue his jacket [added: was] and a peacock’s feather
[at right: He lived under Hill and a peacock’s feather]
Nodded in that [added: old] hat tossing in the weather …

— before she can get a clean, reading copy of a (later version) of the text. Every entry is followed by a cliff-face of tiny font pedantry:

C15: ‘frightening the finny fish and the brown water rat’; in B1 this line reads ‘frightening the finny fish and the little water rat’, with ‘little’ changed to ‘brown’ on the margin.
C18: In B1 Tom says ‘I do not care for wading’, full stop; in B3 he says ‘I do not care for wadin’!’ with the final word changed to ‘wading’ in the margin.
C22: In B1 this line reads ‘swam fair Goldberry. But Tom he would not follow’, with ‘fair’ changed to ‘young’ in the margin
C27: In B1 this line begins ‘In old crack’

And so on, for many pages. This tiresome hyperattentiveness to trivia of revision threatens to swamp the book.

The dates covered by the three volumes tell their own story: five hundred pages for 1910–1919 (which is, in fact, almost entirely 1914–1919); then five hundred pages for the twelve years 1919–1931, then the 35 years 1931–67 in the final volume. Tolkien wrote a lot of poetry during the war years, and carried-on in the 1920s, writing further in the modes that occupied him in the previous decade, as well as translations from Old and Middle English, and slowly developing and articulating in verse his personal mythology. But from the later 1930s and the 1940s he wrote less and less verse, concentrating on his prose.

The question is: was Tolkien a good poet? Let’s come at an answer by considering the kinds of poetry he wrote: old-school, traditionalist, rhymed or alliterated verse — often rhymed and alliterative verse — comic verse, pastoral lyrics, fairy poems, ballads and long narrative works. The poem ‘Mythopoeia’, a disquisition on the validity of myth as a means of expressing truth in slightly facile rhyming couplets, is an unusual piece in terms of his larger output, and there are a few personal poems from late in his life that articulate personal moods: ‘Though All Things Fail and Come to Naught’ (1964), in rhymed tetrameters, laments the ‘remorseless wraith’ that haunts Tolkien, ‘the Ghost of Ghosts, the Might-have-been’; and ‘My Heart is Not in This Land Where I Live’ (1966) — I think the only poem in the whole collection structured neither by rhyme nor alliteration — expresses a mournful yearning: ‘longing is on me, for those I have/lost … nowhere now in/this world can I find my home’. But these are not typical. Overwhelmingly Tolkien wrote in rhyme, stanzaic or couplets, traditional forms, old-school idioms, old-fashioned diction. Descriptions of landscapes and nature; much bejewelling of imagery and subject. A sub-Tennysonian or William-Morrisian style.

His ear was finely tuned to rhyme, to alliteration, to the musicality of verse, but his judgment was not always reliable, and he could lapse tonally or in terms of resonance. A writer who could, with a straight face, invent character-names such as Teleporno the Elf or Tinfang Warble, and not sense their ridiculousness, is lacking somewhat in a capacity for writerly checks and balances (Frodo was called Bingo in early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, but at least here Tolkien spotted the ludicrousness before going to print). Tinfang Warble appears in this collection several times actually, not least in the poem named for him, of which more below.

Tolkien was skilled at writing doggerel, a term I do not deploy here as a disparagement. ‘Cat’ (1956) is charming, and expertly folded together with its rhymes:

The fat cat on the mat
may seem to dream
of nice mice that suffice
for him, and cream;
but he free, maybe,
walks in thought
unbowed, proud, where loud
roared and fought
his kin, lean and slim
or deep in den
in the East feasted on beasts
and tender men.

These three volumes show Tolkien’s fascination with traditional nursery rhymes, which he repeatedly reworked and rewrote, or translated into Old English, or imitated — some of this work made its way into Lord of the Rings. There’s a good deal here of what used to be called ‘light verse’, comic and curious pieces, children’s verse, and though much of this isn’t particularly memorable it’s generally well-enough done. But there’s also a wincing, cutesy, lisping, tripping-through-the-fairy-glade strand to Tolkien’s versifying, which is harder to bear. ‘Goblin Feet’ (surely the best known of Tolkien’s early poetry’ say the editors) was published in 1915, and republished several times. It is painfully twee.

O! I hear the tiny horns
Of enchanted leprechauns
And the padding feet of many gnomes a-coming!

Tweer yet is ‘Tinfang Warble’, which begins:

O the hoot! O the hoot!
Of his jolly little flute!
O the hoot of Tinfang Warble!
There! He’s dancing all alone
In the twilight of the lawn
’Cause the little stars have grown:
O the dear old mad leprechaun
And his name is Tinfang Warble.

Was it not Eminem who sang ‘my name is — my name is — my name is: Tinfang Warble’? Dorothy Parker’s tonstant weader fwowed up comes to mind. Tolkien revisions to this lyric worsened it:

O the hoot! O the hoot!
How he trillups on his flute!
O the hoot of Tinfang Warble!

Trillups, forsooth. ‘May Day in a Backward Year’ is a lyric of spring fulness, with some beautiful descriptive lines, but Tolkien seemed deaf to his own lapses of tone and signification:

Dance in the dingles and lilt in the dells
Or propped under feather-green-larches behold
The leafy thrones ready for coming bluebells
Mid the crozier fern fronds in warm matted mould
Let the lutanist weave us a music of smells.

That ‘music of smells’, especially following from the description of that dungy ‘matted mould’, is simply laughable. Tolkien revised this poem repeatedly, tweaking minutiae: — for instance, he decided that the line ‘the primrose pale-face is wan in the gloaming’ was tautological (since pale and wan mean the same thing) so altered it to ‘the glimmering primroses faint in the gloam’ and then again to ‘in the gloaming the primroses glimmering wan’. But the music of smells stayed untouched from draft to draft. Could Tolkien not see how risible it is?

Tolkien’s alliterative verse is better. His translations of Old and Middle English alliterative originals are expert and readable, though he is prone to creaky archaisms and word-order inversions. But he used alliterative forms for original poems too. ‘The Motor-cylists’ (1919) is a fine blast at the noise, pollution and danger of motorbikes, a mode of transport Tolkien disliked: ‘O Filth-spattered fools with your foul fumes/riding on a racket of rackety iron …’ [1:446] The alliteration is beautifully handled, tucked into the rhythm:

strewing the streets with the innocent dying
dressed like demons in an indigestive dream
goggled like godforsaken ghouls or gorgons
affecting a pose of impossible heathens …

— right up until Tolkien collapses the poem into ridiculousness:

crank harrack poof harrack, poof harrack, honk
bap bap harrack carrack puf bap puf bap
bubber rubber bubber rubber bub — bang bang

Constant reader buries his head in his hands. Honk indeed. It would be nice to report that Tolkien grew out of this early mannerism; but here he is in the 1960s, with ‘The Complaint of Mim the Dwarf’:

Tink-tink-tink tink-donk donk-donk tink!
no time to eat, no time to drink!
Tink-donk no time donk tink to play
But gold and [garnet>] red [deleted: and] silver and green jet and crystal

You know what you want to do with that, right? You want to put a tinking donk on it.

It’s not all twee — though the twee-quotient is rather higher than is compatible with readerly comfort. There’s also a strand of versifying that aims for high seriousness, dignity, fin-de-siecle colour and atmosphere. His sonnet, ‘Kôr: in a City Lost and Dead’ is stolid, High Victorian, tonally over-strained, clunky; but there is something interesting in its architectural solidity, its strenuous sense of built structure:

A sable hill, gigantic, rampart-crowned
Stands gazing out across an azure sea
Under an azure sky, on whose dark ground
Impearled as ’gainst a floor of porphyry
Gleam marble temples white, and dazzling halls;
And tawny shadows fingered long are made
In fretted bars upon the ivory walls
By massy trees rock-rooted in the shade
Like stony chiselled pillars of the vault
With shaft and capital of black basalt.
There slow forgotten days forever reap
The silent shadows counting out rich hours;
And no bird sings; and all the marble towers
White, hot and soundless, ever burn and sleep.

It is also interesting to contrast those poems (few, though they are) in which Tolkien essays a personal, direct voice with those in which subjectivity is subsumed into fantasy and mythopoeic invention. In a number of poems from the war years, Tolkien labours to articulate his earnest patriotism. ‘Empty Chapel’ sees him praying in church and hearing the army marching past outside.

O men of England marching in the dark
Most warlike of all peoples of the Earth
Is there no light before you on the land
Nor have ye seen a great star out at sea?

Ye children of the fair isles of the north
There your fathers named the dowry of the Queen
Lo war is in your nostrils and your heart
And burning with just anger as of old.

Queen of Heaven, that is: the Virgin Mary. There’s an awkwardness to this, that is dissolved, to some extent, when Tolkien mythologises his homeland via his personal legendarium. Having been shipped to France in 1915, waiting to be deployed, and very far from sure he would survive what was coming, Lieutenant Tolkien wrote ‘Tol Eressea: the Lonely Isle’ — tol being Tolkien’s invented Elvish (Quenya) for island, and eressëa ‘lonely’:

O Tol Eressea sea-girdled isle alone
A gleam of white rock through a sunny haze
O all ye hoary caverns ringing with the moan
Of long green waters in the southern bays;
Ye murmurous never-ceasing voices of a tide;
Ye pluméd foams wherein the Solosimpe ride;
Ye white birds flying from the fading coast
And wailing conclaves of the silver shore
Sea-voiced, sea-wingéd, lamentable host
Who cry like old things lost for evermore,
Who sadly whistling skim the waters grey
And wheel about my lonely outward way.

This is quite movingly done, despite its ‘ye’s and accented -éd preterites: ‘Never shall I forget this farewell gaze … O Tol Eressea farewell’. It speaks to the functionality of the legendarium to Tolkien’s imagination: giving him the distance that enabled, paradoxically, a more immediate and intimate self-expression.

This edition includes lots of poems written in Old English, some translating modern poems back into that idiom, some simply Tolkien flexing his muscles in that language as writing (there are also poems in Old Gothic, and Latin). Now this is fine — I’ve done it myself — but (having done it myself I can say) the kind of thing that’s more fun for the author than the reader.

Was Tolkien a good poet? Not especially. He was prolific, and possessed a degree of sonic facility, a pleasant fluency with rhyme, assonance and alliteration. But there are no major works in this collection, really (perhaps the ‘Ring Rhyme’, despite its brevity, counts as major: it certainly remains current, and is well done — those eight lines get six detailed pages to themselves in this edition). The very last piece included in this edition is the Old English poem Tolkien wrote in praise of his friend W H Auden, ‘For W.H.A.’

Ic þis gied be þé to grétinge
awræc wintrum fród, Wíhstan léofa,
þeah ic þorfte hraðor þancword sprecan.

These lines about you I linked together,
though weighted by years, Wystan my friend:
a tardy tribute and token of thanks.

— which is very nicely done. But Tolkien is not a patch on Auden, as a poet: he lacks graceful expressiveness, the insight and the power of which Auden was capable. Auden also inhabited traditional forms, was fond of rhyme, and was drawn to many of the same subjects as Tolkien; but Tolkien’s poetry is weighed down with an archaism to which Auden never succumbed. And Auden has more important, more relevant things to say, and says them with more penetration, eloquence and memorability. Still, at his best, there is joy and beautiful music in Tolkien’s verse.

Eärendil was a mariner
that tarried in Arvernien;
he built a boat of timber felled
in Nimbrethil to journey in;
her sails he wove of silver fair,
of silver were her lanterns made,
her prow was fashioned like a swan,
and light upon her banners laid.

In panoply of ancient kings,
in chainéd rings he armoured him;
his shining shield was scored with runes
to ward all wounds and harm from him;
his bow was made of dragon-horn,
his arrows shorn of ebony;
of silver was his habergeon,
his scabbard of chalcedony;
his sword of steel was valiant,
of adamant his helmet tall,
an eagle-plume upon his crest,
upon his breast an emerald.

You will know this poem already (it appears in Lord of the Rings) and Scull and Hammond give us every step in the process by which it evolved out of an original poem on a rather different topic, ‘Errantry’. 60 pages! Fascinating though they evidently find all that, the ordinary reader and Tolkien fan doesn’t need it. The poem needs to stand alone, in its pre-raphaelite beauty and music.

It would be hard to justify a full MS variorum actual print edition of any text these days: the kind of data it includes is better notated in online or e-book. It’s particularly hard to justify in this case, where the listing of variants bulks so disproportionately to the actual poems, and takes up so much space. Better would have been: an actual complete poetry of Tolkien, in a thousand pages or so, one clean reading text per poem, lightly annotated for meaning, including all JRRT’s long poems as well as his shorter ones. Hell, HarperCollins could have issued that alongside this and would have sold plenty of both — I would (for all my griping, here) have bought them.