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 lines be echoed from stanza to stanza. The translation of Pearl attracted him because of the poem’s ‘apparently insoluble metrical problems’ (18 July 1962, Letters, p. 317). Later, in a letter to his grandson Michael George (see *Michael Tolkien), he wrote that ‘Pearl is, of course, about as difficult a task as any translator could be set. It is impossible to make a version in the same metre close enough to serve as a “crib”. But I think anyone who reads my version, however learned a Middle English scholar, will get a more direct impression of the poem’s impact (on one who knew the language)’ (6 January 1965, Letters, p. 352).
For Tolkien, translation not only made a work of the past available to modern readers who could not read the older language, it was also a means by which the translator could study the poem and get close to the thought of its author, and could by the words he chose for the translation provide a commentary on the original. Tolkien had begun translations of Pearl and of *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for his own instruction, since ‘a translator must first try to discover as precisely as he can what his original means, and may be led by ever closer attention to understand it better for its own sake. Since I first began I have given to the idiom of these texts very close study, and I have certainly learned more about them than when I first presumed to translate them’ (*Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, p. 7).
His translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and *Sir Orfeo were published together in 1975. His unfinished verse translation of Beowulf is still largely unpublished, but his prose translation was published in 2014. That Tolkien had a translation of the Middle English Owl and the Nightingale apparently complete by 8 April 1932 is indicated by C.S. Lewis in a letter to his brother; it was, however, apparently not complete to Tolkien’s satisfaction. In 1967 he wrote to Professor Leyerle: ‘I have at present given up the task …. It comes off well enough in certain passages, but in general octosyllabic couplets are defeating for a translator; there is no room to move’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford).
In addition to his verse in English, Tolkien composed poetry in his created Elven languages (perhaps most notably Galadriel’s lament, Namárië) and in Old English, Middle English and Gothic.
CRITICISM
Carl Phelpstead in ‘“With Chunks of Poetry in Between”: The Lord of the Rings and Saga Poetics’, Tolkien Studies 5 (2008), explores how Tolkien’s incorporation of verse within several of his prose tales, from The Story of Kullervo to The Lord of the Rings, was derived from the Icelandic sagas, in part through
