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!
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.
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| 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.
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| 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…
