“Writer, Poet, Scholar”: these words appear on the UK Royal Mint’s £2 coin commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Tolkien’s death in 2023. Writer, of course: Tolkien has worldwide fame as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Scholar, yes, for Tolkien was an Oxford professor, a master of medieval literature and languages. But surprising though it might seem, it is no accident that “Poet” has central placement here. As a young man, Tolkien’s literary ambition was to be a poet, and it was to that end that he devoted his creative gifts in the early decades of his life.1 Nor did his dedication to poetry wane as he grew older. He continued to write for self-expression and to share with his friends and loved ones, but also for publication; he wrote poetry connected to his academic work as a philologist, and also connected to his invented world of Middle-earth. However, we have had relatively little opportunity to explore this important aspect of Tolkien’s creative output—that is, until now, with the publication of a collection that surpasses anything I’d hoped for: a three-volume set of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond.
Before we turn to considering the contents of the Collected Poems, it is worth pausing to consider why this is such a landmark publication. What did we already know of Tolkien as a poet?
There is a great deal of poetry included in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but, as Scull and Hammond remark, “Many who enjoy his stories of Middle-earth pass over their poems very quickly or avoid them altogether, either in haste to get on with the prose narrative or because they dislike poetry in general, or think they do. It is their loss.”2 Hitherto, the only stand-alone collection of Tolkien’s poetry was the small volume The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, which used the conceit that the poems were from the Red Book of Westmarch, written by hobbits such as Bilbo Baggins and his friends. This decision gave a certain unity to a collection of otherwise varied poems, but the reiterated association between Tolkien’s poetry and Middle-earth may have made it less likely for readers to consider his poetry on its own merits. Tolkien’s long poem “Mythopoeia” appeared only in the UK edition of Tree and Leaf; many readers have only encountered the one stanza that Tolkien quoted in his essay “On Fairy-stories.”3 Over the years, Tolkien also published a substantial number of poems in magazines such as the Oxford Magazine or Time and Tide. However, most of these poems have never been reprinted and have been accessible only to researchers in the archives of places like the Wade Center, Marquette University, or the Bodleian Library. And, of course, there were many unpublished poems in the Tolkien papers, tantalizingly hinted at by references to titles in the Letters and works such as Scull and Hammond’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Companion and Guide.
In short, until now, we have had relatively limited access to Tolkien’s poetry. With the Collected Poems, we are now able to gain a much richer and fuller understanding and appreciation of a mode of Tolkien’s creative output that was deeply meaningful to him and that he worked in throughout his life.
It is an astonishment of riches: the majority of the poetry included in the Collected Poems is brand new even to those of us who have delved deeply into archives and scoured shelves for obscure volumes. 195 separate, numbered poems are included, with variant versions indicated by letters; in many cases, these versions are substantially different. Scull and Hammond note that the set includes “at least 240 discrete poems depending on how one distinguishes titles and versions.”4 The meticulous editorial work of Scull and Hammond is on display here, as they have deciphered Tolkien’s drafts and revisions (no easy feat, as his handwriting ranges from calligraphic clarity to unintelligible squiggles) and provided as much chronological context as can be determined. For each entry, there is a short paragraph of introductory commentary, followed by the first version of the poem; subsequent versions follow, framed by additional commentary. It is easy to dip in and read just the poems, if one wishes. The third volume also includes a helpful Glossary of unusual or archaic words that Tolkien uses and an Index to the whole collection.
We can now see that Tolkien wrote poetry seriously throughout his life, actively writing new poetry and revising earlier pieces: the scope of the collection runs from 1910, when Tolkien was eighteen, to 1967, just a few years before his death. The Collected Poems reveals that he wrote both playfully and seriously, engaging with religious themes and with current events, expressing himself in satiric, comic, reflective, philosophical, elegiac, and pastoral modes, using complex metrical and rhyme schemes and also stark, simple diction.
Volume 1 opens with a highly informative fifty-five-page introduction to the collection, which provides an overview of Tolkien’s literary career as a poet, helpfully placing him in context. In the Introduction, Scull and Hammond also give the history of the Collected Poems, years in the making, and their approach to selecting the contents of this collection. As they are careful to make clear, “The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien is not a Complete Poems, though it represents most of the works of poetry Tolkien is known to have written.”5 Their decision was to include only a selection of the many poems that appear in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, given the ready availability of this material already. Scull and Hammond also chose to omit “the majority of poems Tolkien composed in languages other than Modern English, while admitting a few examples in Old and Middle English, Latin, Gothic, Qenya (Quenya), and Sindarin.”6
As I dipped into the poems, I was naturally drawn to those poems that have biographical significance. The Collected Poems begins with “Morning Song,” marking an important era in Tolkien’s life. As a teenager, he had fallen in love with Edith Bratt, but his guardian, Fr. Francis Morgan, was concerned that their relationship was undermining Tolkien’s very necessary efforts to get a scholarship to go to Oxford; he eventually forbade them to be in contact until Tolkien came of age, a stricture which both young people obeyed. Fr. Francis did, however, allow Tolkien to write a long letter to Edith on Holy Saturday of 1910. Scull and Hammond explain that two days later, Tolkien “composed a shorter message, together with the poem “Morning” but did not send it to Edith until they were reunited in April 1913. It is a moving testament to his cautious hopes for the future: “Lo! morning gilds the skies . . . Lo! the gloomy hush of night / from the Sun has taken flight”, but although “a song of day doth rise / from glad Earth to God above” for him, the night will be over “only when in joy once more / I clasp thee too me little one.” Tolkien developed three additional versions over the following years that show his growing confidence in his poetic skills, and by 1915 he had it professionally typed, in the hopes of publishing it.7
Other poems from the young Tolkien bubble over with humor, such as “The New Lemminkainen,” written in the meter of the Finnish epic Kalevala, in which Tolkien imagines the epic hero attempting to make a journey by train (on the “Millionfooted Pufpuffainen / he the firedevouring pufpuf”8).
A number of previously unknown poems in the first volume suggest that Tolkien should now be reckoned among the poets of the First World War: “The Thatch of Poppies,” “I Stood upon an Empty Shore,” and “Build Me a Grave beside the Sea / Brothers-in-Arms.” Perhaps the most moving of the war poems for me to read was one that, until now, was known only by its variant titles and first line: “O Lady Mother Throned amid the Stars / Consolatrix Afflictorum / Stella Vespertina / Mother! O Lady Throned beyond the Stars.” As I discuss in Tolkien’s Faith, Tolkien’s use of “Stella Vespertina” (Evening Star) as an image of Mary is his own adaptation of the traditional Marian title of “Stella Matutina” (Morning Star), one that is particularly thematically appropriate to his situation in the trenches. The poem in full is deeply moving: written first in 1916, when Tolkien was on the front lines in France, it is in fact a prayer in poetic form, envisioning Tolkien and his fellow soldiers praying “our small prayers kneeling without light” and asking Mary to comfort his wife Edith, whom he knows is fearful and unhappy. Tolkien continued to work on the poem for decades, with a later version becoming a prayer for himself: “Heal me my blinded eyes that I may see / The glory of thy Son that shines in thee!”9
All three volumes show that Tolkien returned to religious themes in his poetry throughout his life, in moments of both joy and depression, as with the Christmas poem “Noel” and the bleak meditation “Though All Things Fail and Come to Naught.”10
Even poems that are already reasonably well known benefit from placement in context in the Collected Poems. For instance, Tolkien’s 1915 fairy poem “Goblin Feet,” first published in Oxford Poetry 1915, has been regularly reprinted in anthologies, but when it is discussed in biographies, it is often presented in the context of Tolkien’s later dislike of the poem. He remarked near the end of his life, “I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.”11 Very probably he came to regret the poem’s idea of diminutive fairies and its mixing of fairies, leprechauns, gnomes, and goblins, given that he would later develop his complete legendarium with human-sized elves and goblins (or orcs). Tolkien’s turn against his own poem, with his specific objections remaining unspecified, may have unduly influenced later readers’ reactions to it. However, despite what Tolkien thought in later years, the poem was well regarded by his contemporaries on its original publication, as Scull and Hammond show in their commentary; they also point out that “Goblin Feet” is a contribution to the long tradition of fairy poetry that included luminaries such as William Butler Yeats and Christina Rossetti.12 “Goblin Feet” may not be an especially remarkable poem in that tradition, but it is a respectable one, and in context, shows Tolkien’s engagement with, and response to, the poetic ideals of the Edwardian and Georgian periods.
The second and third volumes likewise contain a wealth of marvelous material. Here we have many poems that connect with Tolkien’s work as a scholar, such as his contributions to the Leeds University collection Songs for the Philologists; all thirteen of Tolkien’s poems for that book are included in Volume 2. When Tolkien’s prose translation of Beowulf was published in 2014, it did not include the partial translation that he had made in alliterative verse—but it now appears here as “The Song of Beewolf Son of Echgethew.” Volume 3 contains the nerdily amusing “Doworst,” a comic account of an Oxford English School student who makes a complete hash of his oral examinations, done in the style of Piers Plowman. Tolkien seems to have written himself and his fellow examiners into the poem as well: he is “Grim the Grammar-Man” and C.S. Lewis is “Sir Plato the pilgrim.” Other poems show Tolkien in a somber and reflective mood, such as the elegant and brooding “The Hills Are Old,” a meditation on time and man’s place in the universe, which opens:
The hills are old, but older are the seas,
and older still the earth, more old the sun
and the illimitable stars that shine
upon the confines of the timeless deep
and everlasting nothingness of dark.13
The selections from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings may be familiar, but Scull and Hammond’s inclusion of the draft versions, and their commentary on these poems, brings new insights into the texts. For instance, in Volume 3 we find that there are four versions of the Ring-verse, that famous poem that begins “three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,” revealing that Tolkien originally envisioned nine rings for the Elves and three for Men.
I was also delighted to discover the full sequence of six “Bimble Bay” poems, satiric commentaries on the devastation wrought by tourists on a formerly lovely seaside town. These poems (one of which was published in Oxford Magazine) are a microcosm of Tolkien’s range as a poet, featuring biting social criticism, melancholy reflection on the dark side of modern consumer culture, black humor, and playfulness (a dragon eventually comes to Bimbletown and is defeated by a Miss Biggins.)
The five Appendices must not be overlooked. Appendix I contains Tolkien’s limericks and clerihews and Appendix II, his Latin adages. Appendix III comprises various lists that Tolkien made of his own poems. Appendix IV is a gem in itself, containing “word lists” that Tolkien made as an undergraduate, in which he noted words and phrases of interest and the author in whose work he found the word; a large number come from Francis Thompson, the Catholic poet whom Tolkien admired greatly,14 some from Chaucer, as we might expect, some from Tennyson and Keats, perhaps surprisingly, many from Shakespeare.
Finally, Appendix V contains a remarkable discovery: “Beualuwérig,” Tolkien’s translation of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” into alliterative Old English verse. A modern English translation of Tolkien’s poem is provided, as well as Carroll’s original poem, so that readers who are not up to speed on Old English can appreciate Tolkien’s literary playfulness. Scull and Hammond explain that Tolkien gave the poem (probably written in the 1930s) to C.S. Lewis; after Lewis’s death it went to Walter Hooper, Lewis’s literary executor, and after Hooper’s death in 2020 it went to the Bodleian Library. It appears in an appendix only because it came to Scull and Hammond’s attention too late to be incorporated into the main body of the text.
The Collected Poems is a handsome three-volume hardcover slipcased set, with the poems chronologically arranged by the date of initial composition; the pages are numbered consecutively across all three volumes. Each volume’s cover features a different illustration by Tolkien and has a ribbon marker. The UK edition is printed by HarperCollins and the US edition by William Morrow. The UK edition, which I have, is printed on cream-colored paper; it would have been nicer to have had ‘India’ paper, but it is satisfactory. My copy is cleanly printed, though I must note that the ink is not always as crisply dark as it ought to be. Overall, however, the books are well-bound, pleasing to handle and read.
Scull and Hammond have had to balance the needs of scholars and the interests of readers who simply want to enjoy the poems, with some give and take on both sides. For the reader-for-pleasure, the presence of multiple versions and the framing commentary does make it a little harder to read the volumes simply as collections of poems. However, given the fact that Tolkien revised many of his poems very heavily, often over decades, it would have required fairly arbitrary editorial decisions to choose just one version of the unpublished poems; presenting the multiple versions of the poems benefits ordinary readers as much as it does scholars. We should also not overlook how important contextual information can be for understanding the content.
The layout makes it easy to focus on the poems themselves, which are presented cleanly and are uncluttered by notes or markings of textual emendations. In comparison to the History of Middle-earth volumes, it’s clear that the Collected Poems was edited and laid out with reading for pleasure in mind, as well as scholarly reference.
Scholars, in turn, will eventually wish for a truly complete set of Tolkien’s poems. It would be desirable, at some point, to have another volume giving the same in-depth editorial treatment to all the published Middle-earth poems, as well as all of Tolkien’s poems in other languages, but it was, I believe, a prudent decision to slightly limit the scope of this set. Even with three volumes, they faced constraints of space; a truly complete edition, apart from taking even longer to prepare, would have been prohibitively expensive. As it is, the US list price is $125, which provides value for money but is certainly not inexpensive. We can hope for later volumes ‘filling in the corners,’ as the hobbits would say. It has already been a banner year for Tolkien enthusiasts, with the publication of the Revised and Expanded Letters: we have plenty to be going on with!
In taking this first look through the Collected Poems, I was drawn first to the poems that I knew to be biographically significant, or the poems that had a connection to his other literary and academic work. It is marvelous to report that this is just the starting point: there is much more here to enjoy and to appreciate. This collection will, I believe, significantly advance the growing recognition of Tolkien as a serious poet. It will also give tremendous pleasure to readers who simply want to enjoy his poems for their own sake. I, for one, am looking forward to reading and re-reading these poems.
The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien is, in short, a literary event of no little importance. The poems are moving, delightful, and compelling in themselves, and also valuable for insight into Tolkien’s personal and creative growth. Fifty years after Tolkien’s death, we have even more indications that his genius has not yet been fully explored—and a widening of our horizons to see more fully the range, as well as the depth, of his creative imagination.
1 In Tolkien and the Great War, John Garth shows how important poetry was to Tolkien as a young man on the threshold of developing his Middle-earth legendarium.
2 The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond (London: HarperCollins, 2024), xiii.
3 Many people know of the connection between this poem and C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, but I would suggest that too little note has been taken of its literary excellence. For more on “Mythopoeia,” see my Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography.
4 Collected Poems, lxi.
5 Collected Poems, lxi.
6 Collected Poems, lxi.
7 Collected Poems, 7.
8 Collected Poems, 41.
9 Collected Poems, 372.
10 Tolkien’s “Though All Things Fail and Come to Naught” dates to 1964 or 1965. Hammond and Scull insightfully connect this “philosophical complaint” (p. 1346) with C.S. Lewis’s death and also with Tolkien’s distress over the changes in the liturgy of the Mass. However, it is worth clarifying the latter point: the 1956 reform changed the structure of the Holy Week services, but it was all still in Latin. English was not “increasingly” used in the liturgy in the 1950s: rather, everything remained in Latin until, in November 1964, at the decree of the bishops of England and Wales, portions of the Mass were shifted into English, all at once; the rest followed not long after. (See Tolkien’s Faith chapter 36.) Even though these changes were anticipated and extensively discussed in the Catholic news media beforehand, it was undoubtedly still a severe shock to experience the Mass in English for the first time on the first Sunday of Advent in 1964 (especially since it was probably badly done, the translation being unfamiliar to the priests as well). This clarification of the timeline provides further support for Scull and Hammond’s identification of the change in the liturgy as one of the issues distressing Tolkien at the time he wrote this poem.
11 Quoted in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, and in Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide Part 1.
12 Collected Poems, 162-164.
13 Collected Poems, 698.