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!
[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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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| Distinctly professorial... Image provided by Wise |
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.
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