The Weirdness of Tolkien’s Old Norse Poems

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

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[Last week, I discussed Tolkien’s poem in dróttkvætt meter, “The Derelicts,” and showed how “Black Heave the Billows” is in ljódaháttr meter. This helps date both texts to 1932-1934. As I’ll show here, however, the picture is actually more complicated than that.]

The Problem

𝔗o pick up where I left off last week, I’ve been arguing that Tolkien’s four poems in Norse meters all appeared roughly together during the period of 1932–1933. By relying on metrical form rather than subject matter, I also avoid the problem of why Tolkien might have chosen Old Norse meters for Old English subject matter.

That problem is mainly why I hesitated with the dating provided by Scull and Hammond. After all, they linked “The Derelicts” with Tolkien’s first lectures on the old Germanic legend of Finn and Hengest, which in my view puts the poem two years too soon, and they also linked “Black Heave the Billows” thematically with the Old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Although I ultimately agree with their c. 1932 dating, there’s nothing concrete about any of these poems’ contents to suggest this linkage. Nothing except vibes, anyway.

Here’s the hitch. Even if “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows” are Old Norse-style poems (and they most definitely are), they sure are weird Old Norse-style poems.

Actually, let me back up a moment. Earlier, I had harped on the idea of Tolkien using a metrical form that misaligns with his content. However…well, he sometimes did do exactly that. At least for “The Prophecy of the Sibyl,” we can blame things on habit. Tolkien was just used to writing poetry in octosyllabic rhyming couplets. In something like The Fall of Arthur, though, he clearly uses Old English meter for an Arthurian subject, but the Anglo-Saxons, of course, never had an Arthurian tradition. It was the Saxons, after all, whom Arthur was most famous for trouncing from one end of the British Isles to another.

My best explanation for that one is that Tolkien just wished to combine the “Matter of Britain” with a metrical form especially connected with the English language prior to the Norman Conquest. Yet it’s relevant, too, I think, that Tolkien had just completed his Norse quartet. He remained bored with octosyllabic couplets and had rediscovered his joy in alliterative verse. The Fall of Arthur helped him continue in that vein.

Which brings me back to the weirdness of “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows.”

Now: Old Norse and Old English alliterative poetics share the same basic fundamentals. In terms of content, however, they had some differences. Norse poets generally used fornyrðislag for heroic legends and ancient myths. Dróttkvætt is a court poetry for praising kings. Ljódaháttr typically applies to wisdom poetry, magical charms, and dialogue.

None of these conditions apply to “The Derelicts” or “Black Heave the Billows.” In fact, according to Tolkien’s own lecture notes, Old Norse poets like to “seize the situation.” They had a flair for the dramatic and the shocking. In other words, these poets (says Tolkien) wanted to “poke you in the eye,” or to borrow a more contemporary idiom, Old Norse poets wanted to present their audiences with a nice swift kick in the gonads. 

E.g.
Taken from Giphy

What does such gonad-kicking entail? You know, the standard things. Murder. Incest. Bloody betrayals. Or maybe eating a dragon’s heart cooked over an open flame. Perhaps even forcing your (semi-) beloved young sons to knead dough filled with poisonous serpents, but after they start whining about the snakes like the sniveling little cowards they are, asking your handsome brother to decapitate them with a battle-axe. The usual.

In the Old English tradition, however, scopas brought a slightly different sensibility to things. Oh, don’t get me wrong. They liked a good old-fashioned blood feud just as much as the next guy, particularly if everyone winds up dead at the end. But they at least expected you to feel sad about it.

Their sense of elegy, this mournful melancholy, is certainly a mood that pervades Tolkien’s two Norse-metered texts. In the first one, “The Derelicts,” Tolkien hits on bleak nature imagery especially hard. A nameless “they” are gazing upon a lonely beach at night, and various pools are reflecting “winter’s candles,” the stars, as a wind causes ripples across their surface. Tolkien’s next stanza then transitions to the stanza reprinted by Roberta Frank, then moves onto a third stanza that emphasizes gloom and silence. By this time, however, a mist had enshrouded the shore, so now the repeated phrase “winter’s candles” no longer refers to pool-reflected starlight but to starlight as “twisted” by the thick encroaching mist. 

Seems nice to me, actually.
Image provided by Wise

Which, you know, seems pretty bad. Somehow.

Happy times continue with “Black Heave the Billows.” Like Tolkien’s dróttkvætt poem, this one hits the nature imagery hard (i.e., waves–ship–shore), but Tolkien also subtly hints at a vicious, piratical marauding: “On a gleaming gunwale a glint of shields, / a white foaming furrow.” Yet beyond such vague hints of soul-destroying violence, the central situation—the reason for such gloom—is no more spelled out than in “The Derelicts.” We encounter an atmosphere of spiritual desolation as incarnated within bleak seascapes, but nothing specific.

This kind of spiritual desolation goes unparalleled within Old Norse literature. For one thing, skalds rarely bother to describe nature. Even more to the point is how frequently academics comment on the emotional impassivity of folks in Norse texts, especially the sagas. Such characters avoid every demonstrable expression of emotion. When a passionate response arises, poets generally represent them through involuntary gestures such as facial tics or random fist clenching. Or to put matters more bluntly, Norse heroes are about as attuned to their feelings as hard-boiled detectives. Mr. Sigurd Sigmundsson? Meet Sam Spade.

For Old English poets, however, although they don’t ever focus on the psychology of individual people, if you read their work long enough, you soon realize how every scop is basically just an emo goth kid moping his way through life. Emotional coloring suffuses their verse, especially the elegies. Britt Mize in Traditional Subjectivities (2013) does a good job highlighting this general moodiness. In Old English verse, he says, the poets give “generous attention to mental and emotional qualities and states” (p. 6). Even more importantly, they often strive to create an “atmosphere dominated by the portrayal of private emotion” (p. 7)

To me that sure sounds like “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows.” Tolkien punts on individual psychology, and he combines natural seascapes with a randomized sense of spiritual gloom in order to create a particularly un-Norse-like effect. He doesn’t “poke you in the eye”; he takes you by the hand and asks if you’d like to see a priest. So when Scull and Hammond date “Black Heave the Billows” to c. 1932 because of the striking similarities they see between this poem and The Seafarer and The Wanderer…well, damn. I can’t entirely disagree.

In fact, just about the only real Norse quality to these texts (other than meter) is Tolkien’s technique of stanzaic parataxis. Both New Lays use this often. Rather than wasting syllables by describing how episodes relate to one another causally, Tolkien simply sets his episodes side-by-side. He therefore forces readers to make the necessary connective leaps themselves, to deduce how situation A has contributed or led to situation B.

The same paratactic technique occurs throughout “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows.” The former poem has three stanzas; so does the latter. Between these stanzas there exists no explicit causal connections. In fact, we can’t be entirely certain these stanzas even constitute unified texts at all. But if they do form single texts (and I suspect they do), it’s up to readers to glean the narrative situations these poems seem to imply.

At end of day, it’s still not entirely clear to me why Tolkien chooses to mix-and-match medieval traditions in quite this way. What is clearer, at least in my humble estimation, is that “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows” are sister poems, perhaps written consecutively, and each belongs to the 1932–1933 period when Tolkien was likewise experimenting with fornyrðislag for his two New Lays.

The Final Countdown

Finally, though: why does any of this matter?

Well, for me, perhaps the major reason simply involves coming to a better understanding of Tolkien’s trajectory as a poet. Everyone knows that The Lord of the Rings contains verse, and everyone knows several of these verses appear in Old English alliterative meter. For that, Tolkien’s brief Norse phase was a stepping stone.

There’s a more general biographical interest as well. Tolkien was a busy guy, and for him the early 1930s were an especially fruitful time. Besides his alliterative anni mirabiles, Tolkien was also rewriting his “Sketch of the Mythology” in 1930; working to reform the Oxford English Syllabus in 1931; composing A Secret Vice by August of that year; taking on new students like E. O. G. Turville-Petre; writing and drawing his annual Father Christmas letters; and composing The Hobbit up through the death of Smaug. (He lent the manuscript to a friend at the end of 1932 or shortly thereafter.)

Between all this, Tolkien somehow found the time to reinvent himself as a poet. By June 1933, moreover, Tolkien was nominated as an honorary member of the Icelandic Literary Society—a group dedicated to promoting Icelandic language, literature and learning. I have no idea if Tolkien’s membership was connected somehow to his Norse quartet. Maybe. Or maybe he was nominated solely because of his teaching on Norse subjects. In any event, for understanding Tolkien better as a scholar, a poet, and as a fantasy author, everything helps.

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
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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!
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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…