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 Tolkien quotes the remarks of an unnamed critic who wrote to his father (c. 1948 or a little later) that in ‘the staple 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
