The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2. Christina Scull
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octosyllabic couplet of romance’ he had chosen one of the most difficult of forms ‘if one wishes to avoid monotony and sing-song in a very long poem. I am often astonished by your success, but it is by no means consistently maintained’ (quoted in *The Lays of Beleriand, p. 1).
Tolkien liked to try his hand at poetry with complex metrical demands, including alliteration, the repetition of words, and rhyming schemes, often inspired by styles of the past. He wrote to *W.H. Auden on 29 March 1967 that many years earlier, ‘when trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry’, he composed a poem in which he attempted ‘to unify the lays about the Völsungs from the Elder Edda, written in the old eight-line fornyrðislag stanza’ (Letters, p. 379; see *The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún). Most of the riddles in Chapter 5 of *The Hobbit, all of them Tolkien’s own work, in style and method were modelled on old literary riddles. At least two of his poems were in written to provide an explanation of apparent nonsense in nursery rhymes (see *The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon and *The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late). Poems such as Iumbo and its descendent *Oliphaunt, and *Fastitocalon were inspired by the medieval bestiary. *The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun is in the style of a Breton ballad, and the poem *Imram was inspired by Irish tales and legends of voyages. Tolkien wrote the first version of *The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son in rhyming verse, but later rewrote it in alliterative verse, a form he used with pleasure, also for his unfinished poem *The Fall of Arthur (written in the same style as the Middle English alliterative Morte Arthure) and in *The Lord of the Rings to mark the Anglo-Saxon affinities of the Rohirrim.
The poems and songs found in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote to Margaret Carroux, when she was translating the work into German,
are an integral part of the narrative (and of the delineation of the characters) and not a separable ‘decoration’ like pictures by another artist ….
I myself am pleased by metrical devices and verbal skill (now out of fashion), and am amused by representing my imaginary historical period as one in which these arts were delightful to poets and singers, and their audiences. But otherwise the verses are all impersonal; they are as I say dramatic, and fitted with care in style and content to the characters and the situations in the story of the actors who speak or sing. [29 September 1968, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins]
In October 1968 he wrote to his son *Michael that his poetry had ‘received little praise – comment even by some admirers being as often as not contemptuous …. Perhaps largely because in the contemporary atmosphere – in which “poetry” must only reflect one’s personal agonies of mind or soul, and exterior things are only valued by one’s own “reactions” – it seems hardly ever recognized that the verses in The [Lord of the Rings] are all dramatic …’ (Letters, p. 396). Both William Reynolds in ‘Poetry as Metaphor in The Lord of the Rings’, Mythlore 4, no. 4, whole no. 16 (June 1977), and T.A. Shippey in J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000) examine two poems from The Lord of the Rings – The Road Goes Ever On (bk. I, ch. 1, 2; bk. VI, ch. 6) and Upon the Hearth the Fire Is Red (bk. I, ch. 3; bk. VI, ch. 9) – and how by subtle changes Tolkien uses them to reveal character, emotion, and situation.
From the beginning Tolkien often revised and rewrote his poems, sometimes after gaps of years, improving, changing emphasis, or transforming to fit into one of his narrative works. The most extraordinary example of this is *Errantry, which evolved through many stages to become the poem ‘Eärendil was a mariner’ which Bilbo recites at Rivendell in The Lord of the Rings, Book II, Chapter 1. By that time only one line survived from the version of Errantry published in 1933. The poem, Tolkien said, is ‘in a metre I invented (depending on trisyllabic assonances or near-assonances, which is so difficult that except in this one example I have never been able to use it again – it just blew out in a single impulse)’ (letter to Rayner Unwin, 22 June 1952, Letters, pp. 162–3).
When he needed a theme for the mostly light-hearted collection published as *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), Tolkien was able to pretend that the contents were Hobbit poetry, and even attributed some of them to characters in The Lord of the Rings. He told *Pauline Baynes, who was illustrating the book, that the poems ‘were conceived as a series of very definite, clear and precise, pictures – fantastical, or nonsensical perhaps, but not dreamlike!’ and were, he thought, ‘dexterous in words, but not very profound in intention’. *The Hoard was an exception, ‘written in [a] mode rather resembling the oldest English verse – and was in fact inspired by a single line of ancient verse’ from Beowulf (6 December 1961, Letters, p. 312).
TRANSLATION OF POETRY
Tolkien probably first undertook the translation of poetry at *King Edward’s School, Birmingham, where pupils were required to translate English verse into Latin. In the early 1920s, while employed at the University of Leeds, he translated the traditional song ‘The Mermaid’ (‘It was in the broad Atlantic’) into Old English to be recited or sung by the Viking Club (*Societies and clubs). But his most important translations are those that he made of Old and Middle English poems into Modern English. In these he took pains to preserve as far as possible the original metre, rhyming pattern, alliteration, and style. In reply to a letter from Professor John Leyerle, who had evidently expressed different ideas, Tolkien wrote on 28 April 1967: ‘You of course go clean contrary to my own views on translation of works of a former time in your remarks about “aping features that are anachronistic today”. If the taste and sympathies of the present day are to be the criterion, why bother to present to moderns things that are anachronistic in feeling and thought?’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford).
In an unpublished essay concerning his thoughts on the translation of poetry, written after reading Poems from the Old English translated by Burton Raffel (1960), Tolkien pointed out first the value of making such translations without intention to publish them: ‘The making of translations should be primarily for private amusement, and profit. The profit, at any rate, will be found in the increased and sharpened understanding of the language of the original which the translator will acquire in the process, and can acquire no other way.’ He then considered how some of the impact of the work on its original audience might be achieved not only for those who could not read the original, but also for those whose appreciation of the texts had been spoiled because they were objects of study:
First of all by absolute allegiance to the thing translated: to its meaning, its style, technique, and form. The language used in translation is, for this purpose, merely an instrument, that must be handled so as to reproduce, to make audible again, as nearly as possible, the antique work. Fortunately modern (modern literary, not present-day colloquial) English is an instrument of very great capacity and resources, it has long experience not yet forgotten, and deep roots in the past not yet all pulled up. It can, if asked, still play in modes no longer favoured and remember airs not now popular; it is not limited to the fashionable cacophonies. I have little sympathy with contemporary theories of translation, and no liking for their results. In these the allegiance is changed. Too often it seems given primarily to ‘contemporary English’, the present-day colloquial idiom as if being ‘contemporary’, that most evanescent of qualities, by itself guaranteed its superiority. In many the primary allegiance of the ‘translator’ is to himself, to his own whims and notions, and the original author is evidently considered fortunate to have aroused the interest of a superior writer. This attitude is often a mask for incompetence, and for ignorance of the original idiom; in any case it does not encourage close study of the text and its language, the laborious but only sure way of acquiring a sensitive understanding and appreciation, even for those of poetic temperament, who might have acquired them, if they had started with a more humble and loyal allegiance. [Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford]
Tolkien remarked to Jane Neave that translations which follow the original closely are more difficult to create than original verse, since the translator does not have the freedom of the original poet. By example, he described the complexities of Pearl, the rhyming pattern of its twelve-line stanzas, its internal alliteration of line, and its requirement that certain words and