This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
I was introduced to Tolkien by my father, who read me The Hobbit as a boy. My first, and clearest, memory remains the dwarves’ first song:
Chip the glasses and crack the plates!
Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates —
Smash the bottles and burn the corks!
Then — a dramatic pause — and confirmation that it was all a joke. Tolkien is rarely admired for either his poetry or his sense of whimsy, but neither is without effect.
There are in fact 24 poems in The Hobbit, a much higher number than I think many would remember. Indeed, even as sensitive an appreciation of its effects as C.S. Lewis’ review in the Times Literary Supplement makes no mention of them. But perhaps it is not an accident that the highlight of Peter Jackson’s much and deservingly maligned Hobbit films is the dwarves’ second song, “Far over misty mountains cold”.
Of The Hobbit’s poems, eight are included amongst the 195 recently published in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond. Over 70 are published for the first time, many of which have long been known to fans only by their titles.
Even the number of 195 undersells the achievement of the editors, who track the development of many poems across multiple versions and decades of revisions. Presented in three handsome hardcover volumes, the result is a treasury for the Tolkien completionist.
To write poetry was one of Tolkien’s first ambitions. He learned the art in school, and, like so many others of his generation, he found in it a power to make sense of the horrors of the Great War:
Songs of old memory amidst thy present tears,
Or hope of days to come half-sad with many fears.
Many of his war poems are given their first outing. They are a poignant testament to the fears and loss of war:
For men’s laughter grows so empty
Whilst the stately woods at eve
Are full of unknown whispers
For the hearts of those that grieve.
But Tolkien was fated to survive, although many of his friends did not: his combat service ended with trench fever. Withdrawn from the front, the hospital represented a taste of civilisation, and he was moved to write an ode to that most English of pleasures — a cup of tea.
Most precious distillation of the herbs
Of Ind or of Cathay
It is in other poems of the same period that Tolkien began developing his private mythology. This story has well been told by John Garth, but can now be charted across far more poems. Particularly delightful is “The Trumpet of Faery”, a lyrical piece with a density of rhyme reminiscent of Poe:
What a fading and a dying
What a waning and a sighing
How those trumpets call for ever
From an endless long way off
O what echoes out from yonder
Down the dimming music wander
What a sound of sea for ever
And of foaming rocks far off.
The subject is an elfin procession, the music played on “little horns”. there is a connection, but a distant one, to the elvish procession encountered by Frodo in Fellowship of the Ring.
As Tolkien matured as a scholar, his poetic tastes became increasingly mediaeval. The collection includes poems in Latin, Old and Middle English and Gothic. Remarkable for many reasons is “Bealuwérig”, a translation of Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” into Old English: is it mere coincidence that Tolkien once also gave “Bealuwearg” as the Old English word for “Balrog”?
Verse composition is more than idle amusement, and Tolkien took the complex meters of these dead languages seriously. Perhaps his greatest achievement as a poet was in the revival of Old English alliterative poetry in modern English. This is often appreciated but little recognised, as in Théoden’s rallying cry to the Rohirrim:
Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
A sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!
It is no coincidence that Bernard Hill’s reading of these lines, almost verbatim, became one of the most memorable moments in Peter Jackson’s film Return of the King. For Tolkien fans put off by a stream of ersatz offerings, from Amazon’s Rings of Power to the animated War of the Rohirrim, The Collected Poems offers up the pleasure of Tolkien’s creativity unalloyed.
