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The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien
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Edited by Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond
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Three-volume boxed set
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1620 pages and 240 poems, including 77 previously unpublished
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12 September 2024
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ISBN 9780008628826
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HarperCollins has announced it is to publish The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, in September 2024.
Poetry was the first way in which Tolkien expressed himself creatively and through it the seeds of his literary ambition would be sown. Out of one of his earliest poems, The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star, begun in 1914, would appear the character, Eärendil, and from him would spring the world of ‘the Silmarillion’, and then The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, each of whose stories are enriched with poems both humorous and haunting, magical and moving.
The world-renowned Tolkien scholars, Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, provide the stories behind, and analysis of, each poem, as well as revealing the extraordinary amount of work that Tolkien devoted to every one, creating a landmark new publication which confirms that J.R.R. Tolkien was as fine a poet as he was a writer.
Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond say: ‘It has been an honour to prepare, at Christopher Tolkien’s invitation, these volumes of his father’s poems, putting into print many previously unpublished works and ensuring that Tolkien’s talent for poetry becomes more widely known. Charged at first to review only his early poems, we soon saw the benefits of examining his entire poetic opus across six decades, vast though it is with hundreds of printed and manuscript sources, and of showing its evolution with comments in the manner of Christopher’s magisterial History of Middle-earth series. Not long before his death, we were able to send Christopher a trial portion of the book, which he praised as “remarkable and immensely desirable”.’
Chris Smith, Publishing Director, says: ‘Poetry runs like a vein of mithril through all the books that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote. He delighted in language and storytelling, and the almost 200 poems contained in this collection reveal him at his creative best in verse. Within this new three-volume set, there are worlds in miniature to be discovered and revelled in, populated with unforgettable characters and settings both familiar and full of wonder.’
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World first publication of the collected poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, spanning almost seven decades of the author’s life and presented in an elegant three-volume hardback boxed set.
J.R.R. Tolkien aspired to be a poet in the first instance, and poetry was part of his creative life no less than his prose, his languages, and his art. Although Tolkien’s readers are aware that he wrote poetry, if only from verses in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, its extent is not well known, and its qualities are underappreciated. Within his larger works of fiction, poems help to establish character and place as well as further the story; as individual works, they delight with words and rhyme. They express his love of nature and the seasons, of landscape and music, and of words. They convey his humour and his sense of wonder.
The earliest work in this collection, written for his beloved, is dated to 1910, when Tolkien was eighteen. More poems would follow during his years at Oxford, some of them very elaborate and eccentric. Those he composed during the First World War, in which he served in France, tend to be concerned not with trenches and battle, but with life, loss, faith, and friendship, his longing for England, and the wife he left behind. Beginning in 1914, elements of his legendarium, ‘The Silmarillion’, began to appear, and the ‘Matter of Middle-earth’ would inspire much of Tolkien’s verse for the rest of his life.
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HarperCollins having announced today that The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien will be published this September, we’re able to speak publicly about our next book for the first time since an edition of Tolkien’s verse was suggested to us in HarperCollins’ offices in April 2016. ...
...In the beginning, Christopher had no thought of publishing his father’s entire vast, complex poetic opus. Instead, he focused on what he called the ‘early poems’, which we interpreted as those composed mostly before the 1930s. Many of those were, indeed, not yet published, some not even recorded in our Chronology. But we saw that there were also unpublished poems of note from later decades, as well as some which had been published but were now hard to find, and we knew that not a little of Tolkien’s earlier poetry had evolved into later verse, for example in his 1962 Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Surely, no one can appreciate Tolkien as a poet fully without considering all of these works together.
Discussions with Christopher about the book occurred at intervals; he himself was busy, preparing The Fall of Gondolin. At length, we proposed that it would be a lost opportunity not to collect as many of his father’s poems as possible, regardless of their date of composition, language, or circumstance, and to model such a collection after Christopher’s History of Middle-earth, combining original texts with editorial notes and commentary. For Tolkien’s longer poems already published as separate books, such as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and The Fall of Arthur, or in composite works such as The Lays of Beleriand, we suggested that brief, representative extracts be included, in order to show in full Tolkien’s development as a poet and verse forms he did not use elsewhere; and in the same way, we would draw also from his translations of Old and Middle English poems, such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In March 2019, in what would be the final message he sent to us, Christopher approved our concept and trial entries....
...A number of factors, namely economies of production, ruled out a Complete Poems by Tolkien. Nevertheless, the Collected Poems will include most of the verses Tolkien is known to have written, and for most of these, multiple versions which show their evolution. There are at least 240 discrete poems, depending on how one distinguishes titles and versions, presented in 195 entries and five appendices. When possible, we have used manuscripts and typescripts in the Bodleian Library, at Marquette University, and at the University of Leeds. We have chosen not to include all of the one hundred or so poems contained in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but have made a representative selection – surely, no one who reads the Collected Poems will not already have at least one copy of Tolkien’s two most popular works. His longer poems, as we have said, will be presented as excerpts. The book will also include a long introduction to Tolkien as a poet, a brief chronology of his poetry, and a glossary of archaic, unusual, or unfamiliar words he used in his verse.
HarperCollins have announced the Collected Poems as a three-volume boxed set. The Amazon UK description gives its extent as 1,368 pages, which is close to the number in our typescript; in fact, the printed text will run to more than 1,500 pages. There are currently no plans for a de luxe edition, but we’re aiming for an elegant trade release. We have not yet heard about a U.S. edition.
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The Amazon description, which we didn't see before it was posted, seems to be based on our initial report to Christopher in December 2016, ... We had guessed, way back when, that Tolkien wrote between 250 and 300 poems altogether, without knowing how many one would, or could, include in a collection, and that "some 60" poems among the scans we received were unpublished. We knew, however, of other unpublished poems not in that group of scans, which we had seen at the Bodleian, and later we learned of still more.
We say in our blog post that the Collected Poems will include "at least 240 discrete poems". This does, as we also say, depend on one's definition. Some of the poems morph in their evolution so much that one could either count a work as a single entity in a variety of forms, or as a variety of separate poems that are closely related. Hence our vagueness about the number: we didn't want to overhype it.
There's a similar issue with counting which poems have been published and which haven't. The best we can say is that among the poems we include, 77 have not been published before in any form, or only a few lines from them have appeared, e.g. in Carpenter's biography. But that is to leave out alternate, unpublished forms of some poems included in The History of Middle-earth, an extreme example of which is the sequence The Grimness of the Sea > The Tides > Sea Chant of an Elder Day > Sea-Song of an Elder Day > The Horns of Ulmo > The Horns of Ylmir. Christopher Tolkien included only the latter of these in full in The Shaping of Middle-earth, with notes on and snippets from some earlier versions, and by the time one reaches the text at the end of the evolution, only about one-half of one line of The Grimness of the Sea has survived! At any rate, there will be a lot that's new.
