The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2 - Christina Scull

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further, Descriptive Bibliography A16. Trade editions were published by HarperCollins, London, in 1992 and by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, in 1994.

      The volume contains the poems of *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book; *The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son; *On Fairy-Stories; *Leaf by Niggle; *Farmer Giles of Ham; and *Smith of Wootton Major. Compare *Tales from the Perilous Realm.

      The manuscript of the list is contained in a notebook with the title Names and Lang[uage] to Book of Lost Tales, later altered to Notebook B, being Names to the Book of Lost Tales. On four pages in the middle of the work Tolkien interposed ‘a chart outlining the different kindreds of Elves and other races of beings in his mythological world, giving the terms for them in both Qenya and Gnomish’ (Parma Eldalamberon, p. xx), and the names of few prominent characters (*‘Early Chart of Names’), as well as a list of names from the ‘Story of Tuor’ in Qenya and Gnomish (*Official Name List).

      According to the Parma Eldalamberon editors, the title The Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa ‘suggests that Tolkien’s intention was to prepare a basic vocabulary list to accompany his poems and mythological tales, and explain the significance of the names and other Elvish words included in them’ (p. xx).

      Tolkien’s earliest surviving poem appears to be Morning, which he included in a letter to Edith Bratt (*Edith Tolkien) written on 26 March 1910. Many of his early verses celebrate his feelings for *nature and landscape, or copy (or parody) poetic styles including those of medieval works that he studied and taught. *The Battle of the Eastern Field (1911), for instance, is a description of a rugby football match written in the style of one of Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. Tolkien also looked for inspiration to the Finnish *Kalevala and to medieval verse which formed part of his professional interests such as the works of *Geoffrey Chaucer (see *The Clerke’s Compleinte and *Errantry) and William Langland (Piers Plowman; see *Doworst). For several years verse was his preferred form of literary composition, except for papers to be read to societies, and some of those were on poetry or poets – the Kalevala, *Francis Thompson, *H.R. Freston.

      Tolkien believed that his poetic voice was stimulated by the meeting of the *T.C.B.S. in London on 12–13 December 1914. He wrote to his friend *G.B. Smith on 12 August 1916 of ‘the hope and ambitions … that first became conscious at the Council of London. That Council was as you know followed in my own case with my finding a voice for all kinds of pent up things and a tremendous opening up of everything for me: – I have always laid that to the credit of the inspiration that even a few hours with the four [core members of the T.C.B.S.] always brought to all of us’ (Letters, p. 10). Smith was himself an amateur poet of some talent; also, poetry had long been a pursuit by which young men of a literary bent sought to make their names.

      In the months following the ‘Council of London’ Tolkien began to write poems more prolifically, and shared them with his T.C.B.S. friends (G.B. Smith, *R.Q. Gilson, and *Christopher Wiseman) and with a former schoolmaster, *R.W. Reynolds, for comment and criticism. He made fair copies of his poems and had them typed, arranging them for possible publication. The prospect of death for a young officer during the war gave such activity a special urgency. With no time for Tolkien to establish himself by publishing individual poems in magazines, he submitted a collection of his verse, with the title The Trumpets of Faerie, to Sidgwick & Jackson of London early in 1916; but it was rejected.

      By now his poem *Goblin Feet had appeared in Oxford Poetry 1915, and he had also written verses such as You & Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (April 1915, see *The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva) and *The Princess Ní (July 1915). Although Tolkien later came to dislike his early depictions of diminutive beings with ‘fairy lanterns’ and ‘little pretty flittermice’, they were not uncommon in poetry of his day. ‘Fairy poetry’ had been popular since the nineteenth century, promoted by the likes of Christina Rossetti and William Allingham. Fairies also featured often in pictorial art. John Garth in Tolkien and the Great War (2003) cites The Piper of Dreams (1914), a painting by Estella Canziani, as a possible influence on Tolkien’s poem *Tinfang Warble. Some of his fairy poetry – which R.W. Reynolds felt to be his strong suit – foreshadows the fairies and elves of his *‘Silmarillion’ mythology, while other verses of the period, such as Kortirion among the Trees (November 1915, see *The Trees of Kortirion), are more clearly within its framework. Tolkien later wrote on one version of *The Shores of Faery (July 1915, illustration May 1915, see Artist and Illustrator, fig. 44) ‘first poem of my mythology’.

      In other respects, Tolkien the poet was like many other men faced with the challenge of war, who found a voice to express feelings of nostalgia for England left behind, so different from life in the trenches, or about the war itself. Verses of this sort by G.B. Smith appeared after his death in A Spring Harvest (1918), edited by Tolkien; of Tolkien’s own poems, *The Lonely Isle and *The Town of Dreams and the City of Present Sorrow have been published, but not A Dream of Coming Home, A Memory of July in England, and Companions of the Rose (dedicated to the memory of Gilson and Smith), among others.

      In the years following his return from service in France Tolkien continued to write new poetry and to revise earlier work, but until he went to *Leeds in 1920 the greater part of his literary writing was *The Book of Lost Tales, in prose. While at Leeds he retold the story of Túrin Turambar (*‘Of Túrin Turambar’) from The Book of Lost Tales at length in alliterative verse as *The Lay of the Children of Húrin, though he left this unfinished. Several of his shorter poems were published in magazines and collections. He also wrote poems and songs in English and other Northern languages to be sung at meetings of the Leeds Viking Club (*Songs for the Philologists). During this time, while he taught Old and Middle English poetry, Tolkien also made verse translations into Modern English of part of *Beowulf and probably the whole of *Pearl. The complex metre of the latter work inspired him to write an original poem, *The Nameless Land (1924). In 1962 he wrote of this to Jane Neave:

      I never agreed with the view of scholars that the metrical form [of Pearl] was almost impossibly difficult to write in, and quite impossible to render in modern English. NO scholars (or, nowadays, poets) have any experience in composing themselves in exacting metres. I made up a few stanzas in the metre to show that composition in it was not at any rate ‘impossible’ (though the result today might be thought bad). [Letters, p. 317]

      In summer 1925 Tolkien began the *Lay of Leithian, a lengthy treatment of the tale of Beren and Lúthien (*‘Of Beren and Lúthien’) written in octosyllabic couplets, but this too he left unfinished. He revised and rewrote parts of it around 1950. *Christopher

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