Poetry in The Lord of the Rings

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lord of the Rings contains 61 poems, and most readers skip them. The Tolkien scholar Michael Drout confirmed this from his own students. Tolkien himself already knew. What surprised Drout was not the skipping but what the skipping costs. The verse was, in his assessment, essential for the fiction to work both aesthetically and thematically. It added information the prose never gave. It brought out characters in ways that plot alone could not. Verlyn Flieger, another Tolkien scholar, argues that two poems near the novel's opening contain the whole story. One is the Rhyme of the Rings, which also appears in the epigraph. The other is the walking song 'The Road Goes Ever On.' Why Tolkien kept writing verse that most readers skip is the question this documentary tries to answer. He used many different metres and composed in languages he invented from scratch.

• 2. Fitted to Characters

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  In a letter, Tolkien drew a firm line between his verse and the lyrical tradition of Wordsworth or Keats. The poems in The Lord of the Rings, he wrote, 'do not express the poor old professor's soul-searchings.' They are 'fitted in style and contents to the characters in the story that sing or recite them.' Brian Rosebury, a scholar of humanities, called the distinctive result 'individuation of poetic styles to suit the expressive needs of a given character or narrative moment.' The Barrow-Wight sings in what Rosebury calls 'bleak incantation.' Gollum's riddling verse has a 'comic-funereal rhythm.' The Eagles sing a celebratory psalm. The Hobbits produce songs that are, in Rosebury's phrase, 'variously comic and ruminative and joyful.' No two speakers sound alike; each poem was built for its speaker.

  Sandra Ballif Straubhaar, a scholar of Germanic studies, calls the verse 'an indispensable part of the narrative itself.' Some poems provide backstory that the prose never delivers. Sam Gamgee's unprompted prayer to Elbereth at a dark moment in the Tower of Cirith Ungol is one such case. The most intimate example is Gilraen's farewell to her son Aragorn: 'Onen i-Estel Edain, u-chebin estel anim.' Translated from Sindarin, the words mean 'I gave Hope to the Dunedain, I have kept no hope for myself.' Estel, the word used for Hope, is also one of Aragorn's names. Straubhaar notes that the reader does not know why Gilraen suddenly shifts from prose to verse. But the shift into what Icelanders call 'bundidh mal,' meaning 'bound language,' conveys a weight that plain prose cannot carry.

  Rebecca Ankeny, a scholar of English, traces the Hobbit characters' growth through verse. They begin trading silly rhymes and end with Bilbo making what Ankeny calls 'translations of ancient epics.' She reads the progression as a signal of their moral and political growth. Other poems in the text, Ankeny writes, give pleasure by reminding readers of childish pleasures such as fairy tales or children's stories.

• 3. Shire-Poetry

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  Tom Shippey coined the term 'Shire-poetry' to describe the strain of verse he calls 'plain, simple, straightforward in theme and expression.' Suited to hobbits on the surface, it varies continuously to match each character's changing circumstances. Bilbo's Old Walking Song appears first near the novel's opening, with lines about pursuing the road 'with eager feet.' When Frodo sings it shortly before he encounters a Ringwraith, the phrase becomes 'weary feet.' Shippey notes what the reader senses: the mood has darkened without a word of explanation. By the book's end, an aged, forgetful Bilbo sings a third version in Rivendell. The lines have shifted to 'But I at last with weary feet / Will turn towards the lighted inn, / My evening-rest and sleep to meet.' Shippey observes that while Bilbo is simply sleepy, the subject of the poem is now death.

  Bilbo's poem 'When winter first begins to bite' is, Shippey states, a deliberate rewrite of Shakespeare's winter poem from Love's Labour's Lost. Tolkien disliked much of Shakespeare's handling of myth and legend. But Shippey detects in the poem both guarded respect and what he calls 'a sort of fellow-feeling' for another writer from Warwickshire. The Shire-poetry thus reaches back through English literary history while remaining rooted in the here-and-now of the story, which is how Shippey explains its power to relate immediate action to what he calls 'mythic timelessness.'

  Frodo, too, leaves Middle-earth with a walking-song, but it points in a different direction from Bilbo's final verse. Shippey reads Frodo's closing poem as the 'Lost Straight Road' that goes out of the round world toward Elvenhome. The poem speaks of 'hidden paths that run / West of the Moon, East of the Sun,' a destination that the prose of the novel never fully describes.

• 4. Voice of the Fallen

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  'Where now the horse and the rider?' Aragorn introduces those words in The Lord of the Rings by attributing them to 'a forgotten poet long ago in Rohan.' Shippey traces the source: the Old English poem The Wanderer, which opens with the question 'Where is the horse? where the rider?' Tolkien adapted the passage directly, and Shippey considers the result, along with 'The Mounds of Mundburg,' to represent his finest alliterative Modern English verse. All the Rohirrim elegies are composed in what Tolkien himself called 'the strictest form of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.' Each line divides into two half-lines, each carrying two stresses, separated by a rhythmic break called a caesura. Alliteration falls on the first three stressed syllables of a line; the last stressed syllable does not alliterate. Names are constantly varied: the fallen King of Rohan appears as Theoden, then as Thengling, then as 'high lord of the host.'

  Mark Hall, a Tolkien scholar, draws on the 2276 lines of the unfinished 'Lay of the Children of Hurin.' Christopher Tolkien described those lines as a 'sustained embodiment' of Tolkien's love for the resonance and richness of ancient English metre. Hall finds further connections throughout the verse. Aragorn's lament for Boromir, floated down the Anduin to the Falls of Rauros, echoes the ship-burial of Scyld Scefing in Beowulf. 'The Mounds of Mundburg' has a parallel in the Old English 'Battle of Brunanburh.' Hall reads this work as 'bringing forward to modern readers the ideas of the ancient poets,' using rhythm, metre, and alliteration to convey their style and mood.

  Shippey writes that these Rohirrim poems serve the same purpose as the spears the Riders plant in memory of the fallen. They match the mounds raised over the dead and the flowers growing on those mounds. They are about memory of what Shippey calls 'the barbarian past.' The fragility of oral tradition makes what survives specially valuable, and in a letter Tolkien implied that no author would likely attempt such verse again, since philology as a discipline has effectively disappeared.

• 5. Technical Mastery

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  Melanie Rawls, writing in the early 1990s, attacked Tolkien's verse as 'weighed down with cliches and self-consciously decorative words.' She concluded that he was 'a better writer of prose than of verse.' The Scottish poet Alan Bold similarly said he did 'not think much of Tolkien's poetry as poetry.' But the poet Paul Edwin Zimmer offered a detailed rebuttal. He pointed out that not only are the formal poems metrical. The whole of Tom Bombadil's dialogue, including his prose speeches, is written in a metre built on amphibrachs and amphimacers. Zimmer called these two of the most obscure tools in the poet's workshop. He demonstrated this by analyzing a single line: 'Old Tom Bombadil was a merry fellow.' He found a spondee, two amphimacers, and an amphibrach, with 'metrical tricks' including ambiguous stresses woven throughout.

  Zimmer's analysis of a prose passage proved equally surprising. The sentence reads: 'Horsemen were galloping on the grass of Rohan; wolves poured from Isengard.' Zimmer analyzed it as 'dactyl, dactyl, anapaest, anapaest for the galloping riders; the sudden spondee of the wolves.' He noted that the example was 'chosen at random from hundreds of possible examples,' suggesting metrical shaping pervades the prose.

  Kullmann and Siepmann analyzed all 61 poems and found that Tolkien nearly always avoided iambic pentameter, the dominant metre of modern English verse. He used it only once, for the Elvish poem beginning 'Ai! laurie lantar lassi surinen.' Elsewhere he chose iambic tetrameter, as in 'Gil-galad was an Elven-king.' For 'Earendil was a mariner that tarried in Arvernien,' he chose iambic octameter. The line 'Seek for the Sword that was broken' uses dactylic trimeter. 'Troll sat alone on his seat of stone' deploys an irregular strophic rhyme. Zimmer saw this variety as evidence of 'plenty of originality.'

  The longest poem in the novel is the Song of Earendil, and Shippey uses it to illustrate what he calls an 'elvish streak.' He identifies five mechanisms: rhyme, internal half-rhyme, alliteration, alliterative assonance, and what he calls 'a frequent if irregular variation of syntax.' Together they create what Shippey describes as 'a pattern forever being glimpsed but never quite grasped.' The technique had a historical precedent in the Middle English poem Pearl. Pearl opens with the lines 'Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye / To clanly clos in golde so clere.' It uses a 'fantastically complex metrical scheme,' combining alliteration with rhyme in a tradition that, Shippey observes, died before the age of Shakespeare and Milton. Tolkien, he argues, 'obviously hoped in one way to recreate it.'

  The scholar Randel Helms described Tolkien's 'Errantry' as 'a stunningly skillful piece of versification with smooth and lovely rhythms.' Geoffrey Russom, a scholar of Old and Middle English verse, considered Tolkien's varied metres to have constructed 'good music.' In Zimmer's view, all this metrical discipline extended into the prose itself. Tolkien was, Zimmer wrote, 'a poet of high technical skill, who carried his metrical training into his fiction.'

• 6. Settings and Legacy

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  'Bilbo's Last Song' is a kind of pendant to The Lord of the Rings, describing Bilbo's final departure from Middle-earth. Swann set it to music and added it to the second edition of The Road Goes Ever On in 1978. A third edition followed in 2002, including it again. The original 1967 cycle had comprised seven songs; six came from The Lord of the Rings and the seventh was 'Errantry.'

  A Danish group called The Tolkien Ensemble, founded in 1995, set all 61 poems in The Lord of the Rings to music. The project was approved by the Tolkien family and by the publishers HarperCollins. Four CDs appeared between 1997 and 2005. The illustrations for those CDs were drawn by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. Critics received the settings well.

  Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film series used mostly non-diegetic music, meaning music not heard by the characters. As a result, few of Tolkien's songs appear performed on screen. Aragorn sings a few lines of the Lay of Luthien in Elvish, unaccompanied. Eowyn is heard singing a lament for Theodred in Old English, though the words are not Tolkien's own. In the novel, the hobbit Pippin sings 'The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late' at The Prancing Pony. In the main films, the scene is cut. The song does appear, though, in the extended edition of Jackson's 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. There the Dwarf Bofur sings it at Elrond's feast in Rivendell.

  Poul and Karen Anderson's 1991 short story 'Faith' stands among the very few attempts in fantasy literature to emulate Tolkien's verse. The story appeared in After the King, a homage volume released on the centenary of Tolkien's birth. It ends with two stanzas of alliterative verse in Old English style. The first stanza begins 'Hark! We have heard // of Oric the hunter.' Their verse is the exception that shows how thoroughly Tolkien's poems have been left, by nearly every other fantasy writer, to stand alone.