This beautiful 3-volume set is definitely a splurge but so important for anyone interested in or working with Tolkien’s poetry. The editors, Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, present the texts in a similar way to Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth in that they intersperse the texts with commentary and include different versions of poems. Over 70 poems have never been seen before, and there are hundreds of titles presented, many with variants that have not been published before as well.  

I have been busy with other research projects until now, so I’ve only had a chance to glance through the volumes. More details to come after I’ve had a chance to spend longer with the books.

But who can resist flipping through the pages even if pressed for time!  As I’m particularly interested in Tolkien’s alliterative verse, I was amused to see an early (1919?) poem, “The Motor-cyclists” – here are the opening lines:

O Filth-spattered fools with your foul fumes
Riding on a racket of rackety iron,
Dead drunk with dust, driven by desire
Of insensate speed you spew your stink
From nowhere to nowhere through nothing worth seeing….  (lines 1-5, p. 446) 

The poem includes lines imitating sounds:  “bap bap harrack crarrack puf bap puf bap” (line 20, p. 446).

More seriously, the volumes include one of my favourite alliterative poems that I’ve only been able to read previously in manuscript in the special collections at the University of Leeds:  “Bleak Heave the Billows,” which opens with these lines:

Bleak heave the Billows
under black mountains,
a wilderness of waves;
Sheer stand the shores
by shouting seas
in lands where dwell the lost.  (lines 1-5, p. 1006)

The edition also includes Tolkien’s poems that appeared in Songs for the Philologists, an extremely difficult and rare text to get hold of, until now.

The longer alliterative poems that I’m interested in, The Fall of Arthur, The Lay of the Children of Húrin, and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son are represented in excerpts, as they all have been previously published. However, I look forward to delving into the commentary that the editors provide for these pieces.

The ability to read Tolkien’s poems together in chronological order (as can best be determined) is a new and invaluable way of assessing Tolkien’s style and development.  A detailed chronology at the beginning of Volume One helps in providing context for Tolkien’s output.

These are only quick first impressions, but if anything was going to wake up my dormant blog (I’ve had a busy year!!!) it was going to be this major publishing event.