Tolkien the Skald

The guest-post series by Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf," furthers its investigation of Tolkien's works, most recently here.

If you like the work Wise does, find more of it in his edited collection, Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, reviewed by Daniel A. Rabuzzi at Strange Horizons.

Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

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[Last week, I outlined the shape of Tolkien’s career as an alliterative poet and noted his immense productivity between 1932 and 1934—the moment he turned to Old Norse meters. Now I’ll tackle specific issues with his two shorter Old Norse poems.]

Tolkien’s “Lost” Stanzas: The Derelicts

ℑf your puppy ever runs away from home, everyone knows what to do. First you search. Then you plaster posters on telephone poles. Then you panic. Though not in that order. Personally, I prefer panic first.

But if your poem runs away from home, well, that’s a tougher situation.

To be fair, the story behind Tolkien’s dróttkvætt sequence “The Derelicts” doesn’t relate directly to whenever he wrote anything, but the tale’s too good to pass up. These stanzas first came to my attention when researching skaldic meters for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival. My search uncovered an article entitled “Dróttkvætt” by medievalist Roberta Frank, and you can imagine my shock when, suddenly, I found myself reading a never before published skaldic poem by Tolkien. 

Not quite...
Image provided by Wise

Apparently what happened was that, forty-some years ago, Frank’s advisor Eric Christiansen gave her a copy of Tolkien’s three stanzas he made himself. Christiansen himself, it seems, knew Tolkien personally and had borrowed his colleague’s copy of Heimskringla, which contained a typed loose-leaf copy of “The Derelicts.” No idea if Tolkien knew he was sharing the poem or not, but at any rate Professor Frank held onto “The Derelicts” for nine different U. S. presidential administrations before unobtrusively inserting a single stanza into her short article for New Literary History.

Except she made a few…“corrections.” Which was a choice. Here’s the text as reproduced by Frank:

Winter’s winds had hunted
waves as dark as ravens,
their [leaden] ship laden,
lightless, sea-benighted.
Forth now fared they mirthless
far from mortal [portals]
in caves coldly-builded
kindled fires that dwindled.

Officially, the rationale Frank offers is that Tolkien’s original stanzas missed the true poetry of dróttkvætt. So a few touch-ups were necessary; just a light makeover to bring out the skaldic magic. For my part, I strongly suspect Frank was just nervous about printing her (copyrighted) stanza without the Tolkien Estate’s knowledge or permission. But four decades is too long to withstand temptation, apparently, so when she finally succumbed, she decided to hedge her bets. Publishing in a non-profit academic journal provides one layer of copyright protection, but “adapting” that material with slightly new wording adds another small layer of protection as well.

(By the way, Professor Frank’s nervousness became clear to me when I emailed her asking if “The Derelicts” was previously unknown, but even so, she couldn’t have been nicer in her responses to me, an unknown scholar.)

Anyway, these “lost” stanzas—as it turns out—were not actually lost. The Tolkien Estate had had copies of them the whole time, and with The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien now printing all three stanzas, all’s well that ends well.

But back to dating.

Scull and Hammond place “The Derelicts” at c. 1930. I think that’s two years too soon, coming as it does right at the tail-end of Tolkien’s Anglo-Norman phase, but I’m primarily interested in their subject-matter rationale. Although “The Derelicts” doesn’t contain any proper names or even individualized characters, Scull and Hammond detect a certain sense of atmospheric isolation and tragedy, and they think this atmosphere vaguely reminiscent of another poem written by Tolkien, “Hengest” (poem #118; c. 1930).

For the record, “Hengest” builds upon a barely coherent Germanic legend recounted by several different Old English texts. To summarize briefly, a Frisian king named Finn marries a Danish woman named Hildeburh, but as far as political marriages go, this one somehow culminates into a post-wedding bloodbath between their respective tribes. A brief truce ends the killing, but since it’s wintertime, Hildeburh’s countrymen cannot return home until the seas unfreeze. In Tolkien’s poem, he describes Hengest’s long wait through this long winter, knowing that when spring arrives, he’ll break the truce and slaughter the remaining Frisians anyway. And since Tolkien started lecturing on Finn and Hengest at Oxford in 1930, Scull and Hammond believe it makes sense to pair “Hengest” with “The Derelicts” at c. 1930.

As educated guesses go, this isn’t too bad. Still, I’m more than a little skeptical that Tolkien would use a skaldic Norse form to describe material so strongly associated with Old English literature. At least with “The Prophecy of the Sibyl,” Tolkien was using an Anglo-Norman form that had become his main vehicle for verse. (The “Hengest” text itself, incidentally, is one of Tolkien’s rare efforts in pentameter, although the rhyming couplets continue.) Yet, for him, dróttkvætt was entirely new, a form he never again repeated, and outside of sheer unpredictable whimsy, I see no compelling reason for him to have applied it to the Hengest legend.

This point brings me back to “Black Heave the Billows,” which Scull and Hammond place at c. 1932. This timeframe seems correct to me, but again, I’m skeptical of their subject-matter rationale. But now I’m going to feel like nitpicking jerk, ’cuz my argument will basically boil down to, “Wait, whaddaya mean you don’t know the esoteric technical details of a medieval meter obsolete for over 600 years?”

Nonetheless, maybe this is a good lesson for you kids out there. Never piss off a nitpicker. We’re armed with pedantry, and we’re not afraid to use it.

The Secret Meter of “Black Heave the Billows”

In Tolkien’s original manuscript for “The Derelicts,” he clearly labels this text as dróttkvætt. However, for “Black Heave the Billows,” no such authorial label exists. Accordingly, Scull and Hammond describe it merely as a work in “alliterative verse” (p. 1006), but while that’s not untrue, it’s also like discovering a bluejay and saying, “Yep, that’s definitely a bird. Don’t confuse it with an aardvark or an elephant. Bird all the way.”

With “Black Heave the Billows,” it’s easy for us to go more specific than that. In fact, Tolkien actually composes this poem in the “song” meter of Old Norse verse, ljódaháttr.

Granted, there’s no real reason any non-specialist should recognize the form, but the proof’s easy to see. Just set “Black Heave the Billows” side-by-side with another known ljódaháttr stanza by Tolkien. My example comes from The New Lay of the Völsungs, a long narrative work otherwise in fornyrðislag; I’ve modified the lineation to align with standard editorial practice. 

Wise's reference

As you can see, ljódaháttr’s odd-numbered lines look like normal alliterative poetry. Two half-lines separated by a caesura and connected by alliteration. The even-numbered lines, however, are hypermetric—i.e., longer and heavier than in normal verses.

An interesting wrinkle is something called Bugge’s rule. In Old Norse languages, words tend to follow a trochaic stress pattern. So something like “GUN-wale” is more common than “a-LONE.” Norse poetry thus tends to follow suit naturally. The exception is ljódaháttr’s hypermetric lines. As the brilliantly named Sophus Bugge discovered about two centuries ago, these hypermetrics usually end on an iambic phrase. Sometimes a heavy monosyllable, but more often a “resolved” two-syllable phrase. Above, I’ve bolded Tolkien’s two most obvious examples: brother and furrow.

An apparent outlier to Bugge’s rule, however, occurs in Tolkien’s second hypermetric line in stanza 43. That seemingly ends on a light monosyllable, “it.” As Tolkien scholar Nelson Goering observes, this verse “really deviates from normal medieval practice.” However, I’ve gathered decent evidence that Tolkien believed in multi-word resolution, so if we resolve “won it” into a single two-syllable phrase, his stanza follows Bugge’s rule perfectly.

So that settles things. “The Derelicts” is dróttkvætt and “Black Heaves the Billows” is ljódaháttr, and given the timeline I’ve established, it makes perfect sense that Tolkien would have composed all four of his Norse texts together in a single burst of Scandinavian inspiration. Thus these shorter poems join The New Lay of the Völsungs and The New Lay of Gudrún as an Old Norse “quartet” that Tolkien began shortly after parting ways with octosyllabic rhyming couplets.

And by relying on meter – not subject matter – for dates of composition, we avoid the sketchy problem of why Tolkien might have chosen Old Norse forms for Old English material. So as far as educated guesses go, everything seems perfectly reasonable. Right?

Well…as it turns out, there may be just the tiniest hitch (or two) to my theory…

The Norse Connection and JRR Tolkien (Part II), Tolkien’s Alliterative Anni Mirabiles

The guest-post series by Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf," continues its investigation of Tolkien's works, begun here.

If you like the work Wise does, find more of it in his edited collection, Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, reviewed by Daniel A. Rabuzzi at Strange Horizons.

Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

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[Last work, I opened this four-part entry with an introduction to Tolkien’s immense versatility as an alliterative poet. Now we turn to looking at his career and his most productive years.]

𝔗oday, most readers of SFF have a bias for prose. That’s safe to say, right? As a young’un, I certainly did. Novels were where the action was. So for many contemporary readers, it might come as a surprise to learn just how much poetry dominated the literary world of Tolkien’s day.

Notably, when Tolkien and Lewis started their respective literary careers, each saw themselves foremost as a poet. And like his fellow Inkling, Tolkien composed verse all through his life. Most never saw print, naturally, but many were in rhymed trimeter, rhymed tetrameter, and so on. In other words, traditional syllable-counting meters, but Tolkien apparently held iambic pentameter in disdain. That is, he never composed blank verse or anything quite as “modern” as all that.

But Tolkien’s alliterative career seems to have operated in stages – a picture now clearer thanks to The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Unfortunately, most of Tolkien’s texts lack firm composition dates. Moreover, he often returned to and revised old drafts over time, so the waters of dating can look quite murky. Still, if you examine the overall corpus, a compelling story begins to emerge.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll ignore his translations, which muddy the waters even more, and focus only on original compositions. For instance, we’ll start with the two most obvious alliterative traditions from the Middle Ages:

1. Old English. Tolkien’s first stage lasts from 1920-1925, mainly The Lay of the Children of Húrin (poem #67). His second stage follows 1933 and includes about fifteen additional texts, including those in The Lord of the Rings.
2. Middle English. Tolkien only dipped into this tradition intermittently, but when he did, he always had an explicit medieval model in mind. We have three poems overall:
   • “The Motor-cyclists” (poem #63; ?1919). Modeled on the 14th-century Complaint Against the Black Smiths.
   • “The Nameless Land” (poem #74; 1924). Modeled on Pearl, which survives in the same late 14th-century manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
   • “Doworst” (poem #139; ?1933). Modeled on Piers Plowman.

Interestingly, Tolkien scholars formerly believed the third poem, “Doworst,” completely lost except for nineteen lines, but after C. S. Lewis’s literary executor, Walter Hooper, passed away in 2020, a complete copy from his papers meandered over to the Bodleian Library. That text is reprinted in full by Scull and Hammond…and thank the Allegory of Goodness they did, too. Besides being the longest original poem by Tolkien in a Middle English meter, it’s utterly hilarious to anyone who teaches at a university.

But Tolkien had no qualms about crossing the North Sea, either. His four Old Norse texts span the following three forms:

• fornyrðislag. Tolkien’s two New Lays (poem #131), both quite long, appear in this meter. The only exception are three stanzas in the one about Sigurd in ljódaháttr.

These New Lays first appeared in The Legend of Sigurd and Gúdrun (2009). Although the original manuscript lacks a date, Christopher Tolkien believes—perfectly reasonably, in my view—that they stem from 1932 through 1934.

• dróttkvætt. “The Derelicts” (poem #119). No known date of composition.
• ljódaháttr. “Black Heave the Billows” (poem #133). No known date for this one, either.

For people paying close attention, you might have noticed a six-year gap in Tolkien’s alliterative career. Between 1925 and 1931, we don’t have any firmly dated poem in an alliterative meter. What gives?

So glad you asked, because I got two explanations. Professionally, this interregnum coincides with Tolkien moving from the University of Leeds to the University of Oxford. That happened in summer 1925. Creatively, this transitional summer also coincides with Tolkien ditching The Lay of the Children of Húrin, an alliterative epic, and starting a brand new long poem called The Lay of Leithian.

For Leithian, he used octosyllabic rhyming couplets. Thus Tolkien had turned from the meter of Beowulf, the quintessential Old English poem, to a meter strongly associated with post-Conquest Anglo-Norman poets like Marie de France and the various anonymous authors of Breton lays.

In other words, after six years of foundering on an incomplete (and incompletable) epic poem, Tolkien had simply grown bored and frustrated with the alliterative meter. As a result, he decided to reinvent himself. A new medieval model was what he needed. And for six years after that, Leithian would absorb that vast majority of Tolkien’s poetic energy.

Unfortunately, a pattern slowly established itself for Tolkien. Leithian bloated to over 4,000 lines, and Tolkien once again found himself exhausted by his inability to edit himself or bring his stories down to manageable length. By September 1931, Tolkien once again abandoned a major epic poem.

In this post-Leithian aftermath, Tolkien tried a few more poems in his Anglo-Norman meter. Actually, he completed two of them, The Corrigian and Atrou and Itroun (#116), about a year earlier, but following Leithian he tried returning to his Húrin material (#130) only to abort this newly reimagined story after a scant 170 lines. His enthusiasm for that story, it seems, still had not returned. He needed a break from the Legendarium.

So he puttered around with a few more brief poems in octosyllabic couplets – “Monday Morning” (#122), “The Last of the Old Gods” (#126), “The Prophecy of the Sibyl” (#132) – but, ultimately, nothing seemed to stick.

So I’m arguing the time had arrived in 1932 for another metrical reinvention. Octosyllabic couplets were passe. Yet where to go? Well, after the Old English and Anglo-Norman meters, the next obvious candidate would have been Chaucerian pentameter, the last major meter in English from the Middle Ages. But as I mentioned, that never happened. Tolkien was well content to study The Canterbury Tales, but he declined to write anything resembling it.

That left metrical traditions outside the British Isles, so in 1932 Tolkien crossed the Baltic Sea and decided to go Viking.

A new question thus appears before us. Namely, what specifically drove Tolkien in 1932 (or so) to take his post-Leithian poetry away from metrical traditions associated with the British Isles? Sure, boredom with octosyllabic couplets got him started, but why medieval Norse literature in particular?

Well, for one thing, I’m sure Tolkien noticed the oddness of using an Anglo-Norman meter for something like “The Prophecy of the Sibyl,” a poem whose Old Norse subject was taken straight from Völuspá. So that would have jarred Tolkien’s scholarly sense of appropriate metrical form.

Distinctly professorial...
Image provided by Wise

Second factor – though this one is purely speculative. At the same time that Tolkien abandoned Leithian, he also accepted a new B.Litt student highly interested in Old Norse languages and literature. In due time, this young fella—E. O. G. Turville-Petre—would become one of his generation’s foremost authorities on Icelandic sagas, and in a curious twist of fate, he’d even supervise the B.Litt thesis of Tolkien’s own son Christopher.

So through the early 1930s, while Tolkien never stopped lecturing on Old English and Old Norse subjects, supervising the precocious Turville-Petre might have re-triggered his creativity into an Old Norse direction. Say what one will about Tolkien’s lecturing style—Kinsley Amis certainly did—but nobody can deny that Tolkien was a professor for whom teaching and scholarship went hand-in-hand. If nothing else, the New Lays are the creative expression of a scholarly problem that had long occupied him.

My third factor? Clive Staples Lewis.

So, I’ve written before about Lewis’s slow education into alliterative verse. Long story short, the key factor was the Coalbiters, a study group founded by Tolkien in 1926 for studying and translating Old Norse texts. Over the next few years, both men became friendly, but their relationship took a turn in December 1929 when Tolkien lent Lewis his manuscript for The Lay of Leithian. This romance utterly enchanted Lewis. Notably, though, this time also coincided with Lewis himself trying his hand at the alliterative meter. Less than nine months after reading Leithian (and just over a year after doing his first surviving alliterative poem), Lewis finished the fair copy version of a 742-line narrative romance in Old English style called The Nameless Isle.

I think it’s a safe assumption that Lewis would have shared The Nameless Isle with Tolkien at some point. And while Tolkien would have surely admired Lewis’s skill with the meter, he might also have remembered his own long-abandoned Húrin…and felt a sense, not only of inspiration, but also creative rivalry. (I’ve written before, too, about how low-key scholarly rivalry led directly to Tolkien’s essay “On Translating Tolkien.”)

In any event, all Tolkien’s greatest—and longest—alliterative poems hail from 1932 through 1934, at least according to our best scholarly estimations. These poems are The Fall of Arthur, Doworst, and both New Lays (The New Lay of the Völsungs, The New Lay of Gudrún). Tolkien even finished the latter three poems—an utter rarity for him. And given that Lewis wrote every single one of his alliterative poems during this period as well, including a few just recently discovered, I’ve dubbed this period their alliterative anni mirabiles.

Honestly, during the early 1930s, the Inklings were just plain rocking the Modern Revival. Which brings me back to “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows,” those two pesky Norse poems by Tolkien without a composition date.

If you look at The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien, Scull and Hammond date these texts c. 1930 and c. 1932 respectively—and actually, that’s pretty close. For my own estimation, I put “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows” within the 1932–1933 time frame. However, I’m less enthusiastic about the subject-matter approach to dating used by Scull and Hammond. To see how the argumentative drama unfolds, however, you’ll have to tune in next week.

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: The Norse Connection and JRR Tolkien (Part I)"

Dennis Wilson Wise's series of guest-posts, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at alliterative verse and its persistence into contemporary writing. This time, Wise looks a little bit back--to Tolkien.

If you like the work Wise does, find more of it in his edited collection, Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, reviewed by Daniel A. Rabuzzi at Strange Horizons.

Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

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𝔖o far in this series, I’ve tended to tackle either individual poets (C. S. Lewis, Amit Majmudar, etc.) or specific issues such as SF or fan verse. Now let’s sneak a peek at what happens by focusing on a specific alliterative tradition in the Modern Revival—namely, Old Norse.

So here’s a riddle for you. What do medieval Norse skalds—folks like Thjódólf of Hvinir or the legendary Bragi Boddason—have in common with medieval English poets wise in the ways of alliterative poetics? People like Cædmon, William Langland, and whoever the hell wrote Beowulf?

Not much, actually.

Got you with a trick question! So, yeah…this riddle’s somewhat like Bilbo asking Gollum what’s in his pockets. Although us moderns might study a wide range of medieval texts side by side—thank you, anthologies—in the Middle Ages, obviously, most people could not. For them, poetry was largely oral. But also…well, northern Europe is a big place, and there are few barriers more formidable than geography, language, and time. Although Latin might have been medieval Europe’s universal language, alliterative poetry belongs to the vernacular. So if one thing besides language separates modern revivalists from their medieval counterparts, it’s how we can access multiple medieval alliteration traditions with ease. Norse or English poet during the Middle Ages simply did not have that advantage.

Given this versatility, someone might naturally ask who our most versatile modern revivalist happens to be, the one fella who takes best advantage of the multiple traditions lying at our fingertips? Well, luckily, this question has a clear answer. I’m depressed to say, however, that it’s the least surprising and most obvious answer of all: the man himself, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. 

As noted, the man, himself
Image provided by Wise

It’s true, though. Most revivalists tend to stick with their preferred tradition, like Poul Anderson with Norse forms, but the viability of impressionism muddies the waters considerably. As brilliant as Pound and Auden are, their innovations and creativity often take them out of any recognizable medieval tradition. Which is fine. But even among purists, folks like C. S. Lewis, Sandra Straubhaar, or Jere Fleck, they tend to concentrate their skills on mastering a single alliterative tradition.

But Tolkien? Mister Oxford was an alliterative jack-of-all-trades…and master of them all, too. Although Old English was his “base” meter, the one he gravitated toward most instinctively, he perfected not only the “scholarly” version of Old English but its more popular lay versions as well. The Fall of Arthur and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, for instance, each respectively imitates the metrical styles of Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon.

Similarly, Tolkien has delved into several varieties of Middle English alliterative meter. Nor does he neglect Norse forms, having written several rigorous texts in fornyrðislag, ljódaháttr, and the immensely difficult skaldic dróttkvætt.

Thus Tolkien is the ultimate model, the undisputed Lord of Alliterative Meters. The one person in whom technical skill and scholarly erudition have combined with sheer productivity in order to yield an astounding corpus of alliterative verse.

The recently published Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien (2024), moreover, positions us even better to appreciate Tolkien’s versatility. In this three-volume set, edited brilliantly by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, we can now access dozens of previously unpublished texts, many of them alliterative, that show off Tolkien’s immense range. 

Pretty...and available!
Image provided by Wise

For this four-part entry in “The New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf,” then, I’d like to concentrate on two fascinating texts never before seen in print. The first is “The Derelicts” (poem #119), and the second is “Black Heave the Billows” (poem #133). My discussion will, in addition to providing the action-packed discourse you’ve all come to expect, also prove definitively when Tolkien wrote these particular texts.

Or maybe just semi-definitively. There’ll be some degree of definitiveness, at any rate.

Anyway, to set up argument, which may or may not rock Tolkien Studies to its very core (ahem), let’s first tackle the interesting parabola curve taken by Tolkien’s alliterative career…

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Troubles in SF Poetry—Part III"

The excellent series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at contemporary artists working with alliterative verse. Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

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[Last week in Part II of “Troubles in SF Poetry,” I discussed poems by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff and Math Jones. Here in Part III, we now discuss Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series for how it incorporates alliterative poetry into a science-fictional setting.]

𝔎irstein is one of those hidden gems of a writer who has flown, as sometimes happens, unfortunately, under the radar. For myself, I discovered her thanks to Paul Deane, but in addition to the alliterative verse in Kirstein’s Steerswoman series (1989-2004), she also published with Del Rey Books…a major second research interest of mine.

What to say about Del Rey? Well, if you—like me—grew up reading fantasy in the 1980s or 1990s, chances are that more than a few Del Rey titles lined your home bookshelves. These books were everywhere. Del Rey published big-name SF authors like Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov, not to mention Alan Dean Foster’s ghostwritten novelization for Star Wars. And it was Del Rey who basically turned fantasy into a mass-market category of fiction. Through authors like Terry Brooks, David Eddings, and Stephen R. Donaldson (my own personal favorite,), they launched an entire generation of new fantasy readers.

That’s why, when some critics sneer about “commercial fantasy” or “Tolkien clones” between 1977 and 1990, I prefer to invoke, more simply, the “Del Rey Era”—although “Del Rey Hegemony” has a nice ring about it, too. During those fourteen years, Del Rey had more titles reach a Publisher’s Weekly or New York Times bestseller list than every other SFF publisher…combined.

The architects of this little empire were Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey. The former ran the SF line (and seemingly inspired awe from every author with whom she worked), and the latter, Lester, did the fantasy side of things.

That’s important, because Kirstein’s first novel arrived at the tail end of Del Rey’s hegemony. Judy-Lynn had died a few years earlier, leaving Del Rey’s SF line to Owen Lock, and Lester himself had slowed down considerably. His bosses eventually tried to force him into retirement in 1991, although Lester being Lester, he chose to quit instead. So the waning of Del Rey’s glory days perhaps explains why The Steerswoman never quite found its audience, but even so, I can detect Lester’s impact in at least one tangible way.

Before I explain, though, take a gander at this cover for the British edition of Kirstein’s first novel. Tell me, what genre do you think this is?

Image provided by Wise

Gotta be fantasy, right?

And that makes total sense. The plot is all about evil wizards trying to murder Rowan, the steerswoman, and her only ally is a sword-wielding lady barbarian named Bel…a female Conan, basically, except she’s a sidekick and smells nicer (presumably).

Fantasy, then, all the way. Although this cover doesn’t depict Bel herself, the steerswoman Rowan is a smart, stylishly becloaked young woman standing in a shadow-filled woods laced with cobwebs. Quite mystical, quite intriguing. So if the Big Bad Wolf were suddenly to appear in this story, well, he’d better watch out, is all I’m saying.

Now check the American cover by Del Rey. Tell me if you can spot a difference. Careful, though—it’s subtle.

Image provided by Wise

Yep. Since Pan Books believed that fantasy was read mostly by women, their cover plays up Kirstein’s female protagonist, but Del Rey Books tended to gender its audience as male…heavily. Moreover, Lester himself strongly believed that fantasy readers abhorred anything that smacked of SF, whereas most SF readers didn’t mind the occasional fantasy element. Therefore every time Del Rey published a book that crossed traditional genre boundaries, they marketed it as straight SF.

That’s clearly what happened with this American edition; Del Rey even adds their special “vortex” colophon for SF titles. For all that Rowan is being chased by evil wizards in a pre-industrial society, Kirstein plants several clues that The Steerswoman is actually SF. All units of measurement are in miles or kilometers, for instance. Likewise, the Guidestars—a major plot point—are clearly just orbiting satellites. Finally, the wizards aren’t mystical magic-users. They just have access to advanced technologies unknown to the rest of Rowan’s society.

In fact, it slowly becomes apparent that Rowan’s world is an alien planet being terraformed by colonists who’ve long forgotten their origins. In that sense, Kirstein’s Steerswoman series reminds of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-1996), which tackles terraforming more from a hard SF perspective. Another comparable series is N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo-Award winning Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), which, despite explicit references to magic in the text, I persist in thinking of as SF-coded. A major plot point for Jemisin, however, is the idea of a “missing moon,” and Rowan mentions that her world no longer has a moon, either.

So—science fiction to its bones. And readers with the Gift of Prophecy surely know where I’m going with all this: Alliterative poetry.

Here’s an example from the second book, (1992). The lady barbarian Bel is attempting to build support among her fellow Outskirters against the wizards, and uses their dominant metrical form:

Who will hear, or have the heart
To stand beside me, to stay, and strike?
Outskirters all now understand:
War will come. With weapons wielded
All as one must answer evil.
The call will come, and I shall call it.
The need will be known, by these three names—
      I am Bel, Margasdotter, Chanly.

Like Anderson in “The Scothan Queen,” Kirstein foregoes any explicit mention of SF tropes, and her metrics are highly impressionistic. Yet there’s clear alliterative patterning here, plus a caesura via mid-line punctuation in almost every line. Although this brief verse doesn’t work well as a standalone text, as prosimetrum, it adds several wonderful resonances to Kirstein’s novel’s SF themes.

For instance, whereas Marcie Lynn Tentchoff chooses to adopt—or more likely reinvent—Anderson’s device of a poetical barbarian people stealing interstellar technology, Kirstein goes in the opposite direction. Instead of an ancient medieval people catapulted into the Space Age, Kirstein has her galaxy-spanning colonists lose their technological sophistication. Although steerswomen as an institution retain a high degree of scientific rationalism, Kirstein inserts alliterative verse into her SF context by simply reversing historical progress.

Again, Kirstein plants several clues about this reversal. Bel’s alliterative poetry is obviously a big “Germanic” hint. In the Inner Lands, moreover, their major city is Wulfshaven. This name builds upon two Germanic root words, the Old English wulf (ON úlfr) and the Old English hæfen (ON hǫfn).

Coincidence? Then consider this. When the Outskirters present their lineage, as Bel does in her poem, she does so in a specifically Norse style: i.e., “Bel Margasdotter.” The menfolk do likewise. Their various patronymics include Karinson, Linson, and Kresson.

In fact, Kirstein’s Outskirters are a particularly fascinating people. In terms of terraforming, they’re something like advance scouts, destroying the alien landscape so that it might better support more Earth-friendly lifeforms in due time. They’re also heavily Germanic in the sense of being “barbarians” who are also, significantly, non-literate.

It makes no sense, after all, for a nomadic people without access to forests to develop a book culture. Hence they need oral poetry, and one seyoh or leader notes that their “true poetry” must be unrhymed, alliterative, and with a caesura in the middle.

Beyond this, though, the folk knowledge of the Outskirters contains vestiges of a once literate society. The most fascinating instance happens when Rowan is questioning a Face Person (a type of extreme Outskirter) about his people’s ancestors. He recites their names as a list, and Rowan realizes this list is in nearly perfect alphabetical order. Only one name, “Lessa,” is an exception. It appears in the m-group…but Rowan, with an intuitive leap to make any medievalist proud, quickly realizes that “Lessa” must be a shorted form of the name Melissa.

So there you have it. An excellent SF series which finds a novel, thematically appropriate way of introducing an archaic medieval meter into its far-future setting. It’s a deft variation on what Anderson and Tentchoff manage in their respective stories, but this is exactly the kind of creativity SF poets need for the Modern Revival.

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Troubles in SF Poetry—Part II"

The excellent series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at contemporary artists working with alliterative verse. Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

---

[Last week in Part I of “Troubles in SF Poetry,” I discussed a poem by Poul Anderson and how he resolved the issue of creating a science-fictional context for a poem in an alliterative meter. Here in Part II, we now discuss Marcie Lynn Tentchoff’s “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” with a brief excursion into a few lines from Math Jones’s “Lenctenlong.”]

𝔚hile researching Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, when I first encountered “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” I instantly knew that here was one of the most throat-catchingly good SF poems yet to appear in an alliterative meter.

Tentchoff herself is hardly new to verse-craft. Back in 2000, her long Arthurian poem, Surrendering the Blade, won Canada’s prestigious Aurora Award, but her love for all things Norse goes back even further. She’d grown up reading Poul Anderson, for instance, but at Simon Fraser University she also took classes in Middle English, Old English, and Old Norse literature…and there she learned the deft intricacies of skaldic meter, which she puts on virtuosic display in “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships.”

It does rather forecast things...
Image provided by Wise.

From that title, you can probably guess our main protagonists will be Vikings, those notorious seafarers famed for their longships with dragon-headed prows, but these particular Vikings face a problem. Much like Alexander who wept because he had no more worlds to conquer, Tentchoff’s “red-grimed / reavers of doom’s grieving” have conquered nearly all the lands their terrifying longships can reach.

Yet here we encounter no half-hearted skaldic metrics such as those found in “The Scothan Queen” by Anderson. Here, Tentchoff is dróttkvætt meter’s master, and she marshals all the considerable power of that form to articulate the existential despair of her Vikings, their frustrated lust for great and dangerous deeds of glory.

As she says:

Dark-eyed, we sat drinking,
daunted by scalds’ taunting,
songs not worth the singing,
sighing for dreams dying…

More than anything else, the dróttkvætt form is best designed for praise. It excels when flattering kings, but aggressive marauding pirates need their own encomiums, too. Yet in a world where opportunities for such marauding have declined, we can readily imagine how Tentchoff’s poor, mocked Vikings are feeling quite sorry for themselves.

As is traditional.
Image provided by Wise.

Luckily, that’s when the aliens arrive.

Now, for anyone not previously aware that this is a SF poem, the sudden appearance of alien star-farers can seem as genre-jarring as From Dawn to Dusk (1996), the film that starts off as an excellent prison-break movie before inexplicably—and hilariously—turning into a gore-ridden vampire flick. Despite her suddenly materialized aliens, though, Tentchoff employs a more believable premise Poul Anderson. For example, in “Tiger by the Tail,” I can’t for the life of me figure out how any “barbarian” people can successfully steal interstellar technology. Simply using it would require vast educational and social resources the Scothani simply don’t have.

Anderson mostly punts on that problem, but Tentchoff finds something a little more workable even while borrowing his “steal alien technology” idea. As her Vikings sit at home, crying into their mead, an alien starship crash-lands into port. Other than “strange-made,” we’re offered no description of these aliens. Apparently, though, advanced technology hasn’t translated into robust physical fitness, so once Tentchoff’s bored Vikings get over their initial shock, they make quick violent work of the survivors.

A few aliens show some backbone during the fight, however, and, as a reward, instead of killing them, Tentchoff’s Vikings turn them into thralls…a perfectly normal Viking thing to do. But it’s these alien thralls who then build and staff a new starship capable of transporting the Viking victors to the stars. Thus Tentchoff ends her poem on a surprisingly upbeat note—at least if you’re a blood-thirsty reaver:

Seek we now the skypaths,
sailing till blades fail us,
raiders, star-ship riders,
red-drenched moonbeam treaders.

So if your friendly neighborhood skalds are making fun of you, the solution’s simple—capture a couple alien thralls capable of building you a few dragon-prowed ships of the interstellar variety. You’ll never need to weep for lack of worlds to conquer. The galaxy is a big place.

This little seven-stanza dróttkvætt poem is thus remarkable not only for Tentchoff’s dazzling use of skaldic meter, but also for how she combines our medieval past (Vikings) with a technological future (aliens) in a way both reasonable and that aligns thematically with her chosen form. “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships” is a smart SF poem smartly handled.

At this point, I can’t resist mentioning one more excellent poem that, although not technically SF, still combines an ancient Norse past with folks leaving the cozy confines of our native planet. Although I’ll later dedicate an entire entry to Math Jones, whose “Mother’s Song” is one of the finest texts in the Modern Alliterative, his skaldic poem “Lenctenlong” deserves special praise in its own right.

Like Tentchoff, he’s writing in the dróttkvætt meter, and “Lenctenlong” praises a Yuletide present—a shield—given to him by Thorskegga Thorn, a friend. On this shield, Thorskegga has painted four scenes from Norse mythology, and the third depicts the comic tale of when Thor accidentally hooks the Midgard Serpent, Jörmungand, on a fishing trip gone awry.

The incident goes down like this. Thor and the jötun Hymir go out fishing, but Thor, not always the best of listeners (and holding a grudge again Hymir), disregards his companion’s advice by going farther and farther out to sea … where, conveniently, there are no witnesses. At any rate, Thor has baited his fishing hook with a bull’s head, and the Midgard Serpent decides to take a nibble. Determined to catch the monster at all costs, Thor then sets his feet on the ocean floor. This starts to split their boat asunder, which so terrifies poor Hymir that the jötun cuts Thor’s fishing line. According to Thorskegga’s image, Thor still manages to kill Jörmungand by splitting its head in half with Mjöllnir. Unfortunately, Thor is then so irritated by Hymir’s punk line-cutting move that he—incurable scamp that he is—pushes Hymir overboard. To his death. Ha ha. See, Norse mythology is hilarious.

What’s important about this tale for our purposes, however, is how this section of “Lenctenlong” ends. Jones writes,

…Now,
the heirs of Heimdall fare
o’er leagues with lifting steeds
to lands beyond Jörmungandr,
have e’en moored in the meres
of Mundilfari’s son.

Unless you know Norse mythology well, this passage will probably seem puzzling, but the three big references are that “heirs of Heimdall” is a kenning for mankind, “Mundilafari’s son” is a kenning for moon, and that Jörmungand—the world-encircling serpent—can also mean Earth. So just as Thor during his fishing trip has fared boldly on the world’s welkin, so someday, Math Jones hints, humanity will fare even more boldly into the lands beyond Earth, sailing on space-faring vessels to the seas of the moon—the Mare Humorum, the Mare Imbrium, and so on.

In other words, spaceflight.

Between Jones and Tentchoff, SF poetry therefore finds powerful expression through skaldic meter. Yet for a slightly different spin on how SF can meet the Modern Alliterative Revival, we must next turn to the incomparable Rosemary Kirstein.

[Here ends Part II of “Troubles in SF Poetry.” For my discussion of Kirstein in Part III, tune in next week.]

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Troubles in SF Poetry—Part I"

This triumphant return of the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at contemporary artists working with alliterative verse. As before, editorial intrusion is minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

---

𝔉or this entry, indulge me—I’d like to spend a moment on an alliterative poem that, at first glance, looks entirely humdrum. And at second glance too, in fact. Honestly, it’s a real snoozer of a poem. Still, if you remember, I once devoted a whole entry several months back to Poul Anderson, the second most prolific revivalist (after Tolkien) in the 20th century. Several poems from him do range between interesting and outstanding. Off the top of my head, I can name “Route Song of the Winged Folk,” “Autumn,” and his skaldic translations for the fanzine Amra.

Nonetheless, if you picked out any random poem by Anderson, I doubt most people would be impressed. One such “filler” poem is “The Scothan Queen.” This eight-liner appears in loose dróttkvætt meter, and it originated in a short story for the January 1951 issue of Planet Stories, “Tiger by the Tail,” the inaugural Dominic Flandry entry in Anderson’s Technic History series.

Source in image. Image provided by Wise.

Mr. Flandry is your prototypical dashing male pulp hero, and as an agent for the Terran Empire, he often does his best James Bond impression by wooing a new ladyfriend whenever possible. “Tiger by the Tail” is no exception. Here, Anderson’s Scothani are a barbarian tribe who had just recently stolen interstellar technology from another people, and to complete his mission, poor Flandry—always willing to take one for the team—must seduce the queen of the Scothani. (Duty, amiright?) Luckily, Queen Gunli is more of a poetry than a flowers kind of gal, so one measly verse is all Flandry requires to sweep the royal lady off her feet. And since the Scothani are barbarians, naturally he selects a meter in their native bardic form: the alliterative Old Norse court meter, dróttkvætt.

Only one thing, indeed, makes this dull little sexist romp of a poem worthwhile—the sheer fact that it counts as science fiction.

Granted, Anderson never invokes any SF tropes in these scant eight lines of text. Dominic Flandry, though, is clearly a science fiction protagonist dashing about in a science fiction magazine, so that largely determines our genre expectations for “The Scothan Queen.” And moreover, SF poems in the Modern Revival are remarkably rare. The revivalists’ most common genre is fantasy…and it’s not even close. Horror follows at a distant second, and non-genre speculative verse has a strong showing thanks to pagan poets and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

SF poetry, though? Not so much. That’s about as common as finding enlightened gender relations in pulp-era interplanetary adventure stories.

The main hurdle, I think, is how strongly most speculative poets associate medieval content with the Germanic alliterative meters. Now, obviously, there’s no strict, logical, or unbreakable connection between poetic form and historical period, but insofar as “fantasy=past” and “SF=future” in most people’s minds, yeah, most revivalist poems are going to be fantasy. Anderson’s solution to this little conundrum is to combine past with future in “The Scothan Queen.” He grants his barbarian people, the Scothani, just enough interstellar technology that an SF magazine could legitimately publish “Tiger by the Tail.” Yet that’s a very specific plot premise that can’t be utilized too often…and as it happens, Anderson’s second SF poem in an unmodified alliterative meter wouldn’t arrive until 38 years later in Boat of a Million Years.

Still, Anderson’s method of combining a poetic form linked to pre-industrial Europe with a technologically advanced far-future society, in due time, found two remarkable heirs. And it’s precisely Marcie Lynn Tentchoff and Rosemary Kirstein whom I would like to discuss next.

So, without further ado…

[Here ends Part I of “Troubles in SF Poetry.” For my discussion of Tentchoff in Part II, tune in next week.]

Getting Started on #Kzoo2025

ℌello, all, and may you all be well!

The Tales after Tolkien Society is pleased to report having received the following information from the International Congress on Medieval Studies, namely that the Society's proposal for a session titled Return of the Franchise: Twenty-First-Century Continuations of Tolkien's Medievalism has been accepted. It is session ID 6320, and it has been accepted as a hybrid session--meaning that there will be a physical presence on site as well as openness to virtual presentation!

Please view the official call for papers, here, and consider sending your submission directly to the Society's session, here. Abstracts are due no later than 15 September 2024. In the meantime, the public description of the session is

Seventy years after the release of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, his work continues to circulate and inspire. However, the franchise built around his work has also expanded recently. Whether looking at the upcoming movies, The War of the Rohirrim and Hunt for Gollum, the imminent second season of the Rings of Power show, or video games like Return to Moria and Tales of the Shire, we have seen a marked increase of licensed Middle-earth media over the last few years. It is in this proliferation of Tolkienian works that this paper panel aims to discuss the new iterations and additions to the Lord of the Rings franchise.

Approaches that take in diverse media and/or work from a variety of theoretical approaches are welcome. Proposals from those typically excluded from formal academe are particularly welcome.

#Kzoo2024 Report (with an eye toward #Kzoo2025)

𝔗he Tales after Tolkien Society continued its work at the online International Congress on Medieval Studies hosted by Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. For the 2024 iteration of the event, the Society conducted its annual general meeting; it also sponsored and presented a paper session and a roundtable discussion. Notes about each appear below.

The Meeting

Per §5.1 of the Society Constitution, an Annual General Meeting of the Society was held during the 2023 Congress, taking place online via the Congress. It was called to order on 9 May 2024 at 8:32pm, GMT-4hrs. Presiding was President Geoffrey B. Elliott; in attendance were Secretary and Social Media Officer Rachel Sikorski, as well as Kris Swank and John D. Rateliff.

As previously noted, the agenda for the meeting consisted of two items: determination of offerings for the 2025 Congress and election of the Society President for the term 2024-2027 (as provided for by §4.2.2 of the Society Constitution and subsections). Regarding the first, the Society purposes to focus on session co-sponsorships with groups whose aims are similar to those of the Society, with Kris Swank agreeing to liaise with the Tolkien at Kalamazoo group and Geoffrey B. Elliott agreeing to liaise with the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. The Society will also be proposing a roundtable session, Off of the Printed Prose Page: Multimodal Medievalisms. A second session topic will be held in reserve against need.

Regarding the election of Society President, Geoffrey B. Elliott reaffirmed his recusal from consideration, citing outside concerns, previous terms in office, and the need for new direction. By agreement, Rachel Sikorski resigned as Social Media Officer and was acclaimed as President, appointing Geoffrey B. Elliott to the position of Social Media Officer for the duration of the current term (until 2025), which agreement was approved by the membership present.

The discussion that followed clarified points of action to be taken and understandings of the above agenda items for members present. Clarification of past years' discussions was also made. No additional business was brought up by the Society for consideration.

A motion to adjourn the meeting was made by Rachel Sikorski and seconded by Kris Swank. No opposition being heard, the meeting was adjourned at 9:31pm, UTC-4hrs.

The Paper Session

The paper session, "Alternative Medievalisms against the Tolkienian Tradition," was scheduled for 10 May 2024 at 1:30pm, UTC-4hrs. Kris Swank presided over the session. Geoffrey B. Elliott and Rachel Sikorski presented papers.

Geoffrey B. Elliott's paper, "An Update to 'Moving Beyond Tolkien's Medievalism,'" referenced early work the Society had done before adding to an argument that had been made at earlier Congresses and in print--namely that Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings milieu, by presenting refiguration of North America, expands upon the Tolkienian fantasy tradition in useful ways. A copy of his paper will appear on his personal website, www.elliottrwi.com.

Rachel Sikorski's paper, "Critical Successes: Celebrating and Exploring the Rise of Diverse Settings Within Tabletop Role-Playing Games,” analyzed three recently published sourcebooks/guides—Journeys Through The Radiant Citadel, The Islands Of Sina Una, and Coyote & Crow—in the TTRPG hobby. Her paper focused on the recent push for non-Eurocentric settings and stories in the community and how that market shift is currently being addressed by the large companies in the space, as well as independent publishers and game-makers. An (unabridged) version of her paper will be posted on this blog in the coming weeks.

The Roundtable

The roundtable session, "Tolkien and Twenty-First Century Challenges," featured two speakers. The first, Hafsah Khan (she/her), was introduced as "a second-year MA student in the English department at New York University. She is interested in exploring how imperial structures seep into fantastical landscapes, colonizing the imagination, as well as the way sociopolitical otherizations processes are mimicked in fantasy world-building. She is currently working on completing her thesis which explores constructions of monstrosity and blackness in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings by examining the geographical and linguistic cultural codes used in association with the Orc race. The second, Brenna Duperron, was introduced as "a recent graduate of the doctoral program in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral project, 'Fear Not the Language of the World: Red Reading Literacy in The Book of Margery Kempe,' bridges Indigenous and premodern scholarship, disrupting the borders of orality/literacy in medieval texts. Her next project interrogates the intersection between Indigeneity and fantasy medievalism, and how the genre reasserts settler-colonial frameworks and ideologies."

Following remarks by the featured speakers, robust discussion ensued, taking in a number of topics of interest. Representations of settler-colonial ideologies and complications of those representations were treated at some length, and participants in the discussion offered several useful links for further reading and research:

• https://www.srbombadil.com/fearteymito/categoria-producto/congreso/
• https://theconversation.com/italys-far-right-claim-the-lord-of-the-rings-but-theyve-misread-tolkiens-message-218148
• https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2023/04/new-society-publication-tolkien-and-diversity/
• https://signumuniversity.org/event/thesis-theater-eugene-sullivan/

Noted also was Society contact information. In addition to this webspace, the Society has a presence on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/726754757384460/, at https://twitter.com/posttolkien, and on Discord at https://discord.gg/bckushTH. Please join us!

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Zach Weinersmith and Boulet"

The twelfth in the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at contemporary artists working with alliterative verse. As before, editorial intrusion is minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon! Hopefully, it won't be too taxing an experience...

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ℑn the opening paragraph of my metrical appendix to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, I raised a conundrum: how do revivalists today officially arrive at an alliterative meter? The question’s a good one. In every case known to me, at least in English, revivalists never “grow up” with alliterative poetics. They don’t – they cannot – know the meter on an intuitive cultural level, not as medieval skalds or scopas did. In other words, the meter has been moribund for centuries, and if young poets today – those crazy kids – experiment with alliteration at all, it is only of the ornamental variety. That’s what tongue twisters teach you: the rum-ram-ruf of sounds jingle-jangling together. Accordingly, if revivalists know what they are doing at all, they deploy a poetic form learned only as an adult.

The cover, from the publisher

Someday, though, I hope to eat those words – or at least chew them slowly. The parties responsible are author Zach Weinersmith and the artist Boulet, the creators of a wonderful new graphic novel for middle-grade readers, Bea Wolf (2024).

This book has been generating a ton of buzz – glowing write-ups in The New York Times, a Hugo nomination for Best Graphic Story – and, as somebody naturally predisposed to notice such things, I’m impressed by the great blurbs on the cover: from the children’s author’s side, Neil Gaiman and “Lemony Snicket” (pen name of Daniel Handler), and, from the professional medievalist’s side, Jennifer Neville and Kevin Kiernan.

Nor are these blurbs the customary pleasantries, either. Bea Wolf combines engaging writing and mesmerizing artwork into a beguiling adaptation of an ancient Old English poem. The afterward, which Weinersmith acknowledges will predominately interest only librarians and future writers, briefly runs through the history of Beowulf and its manuscript, and it even offers a short, solid account of “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” the famous academic essay by J.R.R. Tolkien. I must confess to feeling “called out,” however, in such passages as the following:

There’s a lot more [says Wienersmith] you can learn about Beowulf and about poetry and writing in Old English. In fact, if you can believe it, there are all these people who just sit around all day learning about this stuff, then yell at each other about it in meetings and over email.

I mean, this isn’t un-true, but it seems impolite to say so explicitly.

In any event, for people who know the original poem well, the little things are what make Bea Wolf such a captivating graphic adaptation. Things like the wordplay. Upon opening page one, the text presents readers with a bare-footed child – her face shadowed by a cowl and coat far too large for her – shouting, “Hey, wait!”: a remarkably phonetic translation of hwæt. Moreover, Weinersmith has fun with Old English names. Everyone knows that the original hero, Beowulf, lost a swimming match against an opponent named Breca, but Weinersmith has his heroine – she’s Beowulf, but a girl – play a game of water-dodgeball with a childhood friend named “Becky.” And the hall in which King Roger holds Hrothgar-like court – technically, it’s a tree house – is dubbed “Treeheart,” a pun on Heorot, which in Old English means “hart” (albeit the deer, not the organ).

One of the slyer bits of wordplay involves Roger’s prior connection to Bea Wolf. In the original text, Hrothgar had met Beowulf’s father Ecgtheow through paying the wergild to resolve his blood feud with the Wulfings. Explaining “blood feuds” to children, however, is probably tricky, so Weinersmith picks the better part of valor. Instead, he has Bea Wolf belong to the “House of Heidi,” a queen whom Roger once helped through a puppy rescue gone awry. (Really.) “Heidi,” of course, is a modernized version of Beowulf’s lord’s wife’s name: Hygd.

Besides these clever adaptations, Weinersmith and Boulet skillfully narrate several understated moments from the original text. In Beowulf, when Unferth is rudely questioning the competence of Beowulf, then newly arrived at Heorot, the poet never once mentions King Hrothgar’s reaction to all this. Strangely, he stays silent while one of his thanes, a known kinslayer (Unferth had killed his brothers), insults an honored guest – one, moreover, promising to cleanse Heorot of its monstrous interloper. This silence never strikes my college students as odd until I point it out to them, but obviously, why risk alienating your kingdom’s hero? In Bea Wolf, though, when “Huffer” bring up the heroine’s failed water-dodgeball match against Becky, Weinersmith and Boulet give us the following panels:

Image from the graphic novel, clearly.

Thanks to these, we know exactly what is going on – Bea Wolf realizes she’s being tested, and both her own boon companions and Roger himself are waiting to see how she will react. It’s a marvelous bit of story-telling, and one that takes full advantage of the graphic-novel format.

In order to qualify for the Modern Revival, though, the verse-making is what matters, and this is what makes Bea Wolf such a powerful gateway into alliterative poetics. Of course, alliteration already appears in children’s literature in an ornamental fashion. It’s even more natural than rhyme, in some ways – one need only imagine Harry Potter and the founders of Hogwarts’s wizarding houses: Godric Gryffindor, Rowena Ravenclaw, Helga Hufflepuff and Salazar Slytherin. Yet revivalism requires structural alliteration, and this is where Bea Wolf goes further than any other book for younger readers.

For instance, Weinersmith’s afterword freely acknowledges that he avoids the finer points of Old English poetics, by which he means Sievers types and the meter’s classic compactness. Nonetheless, several lines in Bea Wolf follow a nearly proper alliterative patterning. Discussing King Carl – the child counterpart to Scyld Scefing – ageing out of his role, the text reads

But time courses on. Coarse hair claimed the kid-king’s chin.
A crack crossed his voice. He called for the pyre.

Although the initial line overloads on strong stresses and alliteration, the second line – complete with caesura – mostly follows a satisfying aa/ab alliterative pattern. Similarly, after a young Roger aids Heidi during her puppy-heist gone wrong (hint: the puppies are actually pigs, and their adult owner isn’t happy about the vandalism), Weinersmith writes,

There would be no pig-related punishment. Parents knew nothing.

Needless to say, the majority of lines in Bea Wolf take advantage of the freedom afforded them by our language, but most impressionists in the Modern Revival do nothing less.

Yet what I find most impressive are the kennings, that special class of poetic compounds prized by Old English and Old Norse poets. Generally speaking, kennings are rarely well done within revivalist verse. They seem obtuse and plodding, at least in Modern English – a jarring poetic diction. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis both avoid them, quite noticeably so, and I myself rarely encounter a kenning that pulls its textual weight. It’s like when a novelist attempts to write dialect by using dialect-specific words instead of (rather than in addition to) the core grammar or syntax. The end result seems superficial and distracting. Same goes for Old English poetic diction.

In Bea Wolf, though, the kennings work. They evoke a delightful mock-heroic style, a comic admixture of the grandiose with the ridiculous. These kennings appear quickly in the text. In the catalogue of great kids who have preceded Carl, we read such things as “Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween, her costume-cache vast,” and “Shawn, peace-shatterer, shrieked he’d never depart the park; his shame-blasted parents bargained” (5, 6). Although perhaps not always true kennings in the technical sense – Old English has a wide array of creative compounds, of which kennings are only one kind – these phrases succeed on a level that other revivalists have not (yet) managed to imitate.

And these kennings do quite well when describing the “age-withered night-walker” who haunts Roger’s hall: the demonic Mr. Grindel, the Faërie-world’s version of a malevolent tax accountant. In a book intended for children, scholars will naturally wonder how Weinersmith will handle the monster’s reign of terror, but we are told that from “Grindel’s family grew all the fun-grinders. The grim-faced joy-gobblers!” (29). Grindel is gloom’s guardian, the teacher of grief; the mustache-mouthed, tie-bound Baron of Boredom. He adultifies every child or creature he touches. He renders them dull, and his worse villainy is tidying up Treeheart and hanging up bland posters that read “Brush Your Teeth” and “Healthy Vegetables are Good for You.”

Aided by Boulet’s vivid illustrations, Weinersmith thus finds a remarkably effective way to portray Beowulf’s original blood-gurgling hall-haunter, striking a note perfect within a graphic novel intended for children. The result is the Modern Revival’s best current opportunity to hook some budding young poet – some future Tolkien or Auden – on an archaic medieval poetics.