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…