A Skaldic Poem by Tolkien Uncovered

What, what?

Well, apparently, an example of Tolkien writing skaldic verse has just been uncovered. . . . and, as far as I can tell, this may be the first evidence we've ever had that Tolkien even wrote skaldic verse.

So, Tolkien wrote a lot of alliterative poetry, most of it using Old English metrics, but sometimes in Old Norse. For example, the two long poems in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. However, that is specifically eddic verse, and I've never seen anything that suggested that Tolkien wrote skaldic forms.

In the following article on skaldic dróttkvætt, though, Roberta Frank reproduces one of Tolkien's skaldic verses. In a footnote, she gives the following source:

A typed copy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s dróttkvætt imitation was presented to me more than forty years ago by the late Eric Christiansen, New College, Oxford, who had discovered three stanzas in Tolkien’s hand inside the latter’s copy of Heimskringla (The Saga Library, ed. and trans. William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon [London: Quarich, 1891–1905], vol. 3). In the manuscript text, the second word in line three is “shrouded” and the last, in line six, “laughter,” both emended by me (in brackets) to procure a correct half- and full rhyme respectively.

As that last sentence indicates, Frank actually amends the poem Tolkien wrote in order to "correct" its meter. Here is the original version of Tolkien's poem:

Winter’s winds had hunted
waves as dark as ravens,
their shrouded ship laden,
lightless, sea-benighted.
Forth now fared they mirthless
far from mortal laughter
in caves coldly-builded
kindled fires that dwindled.

When I posted this article on the Tolkien Society webpage, looking to see if anyone had known this poem (or the other two unprinted ones) existed, a scholar named Nelson Goering gave a pretty good impromptu analysis where he disagreed with Frank's (rather frank) assessment of the poem's quality. His real quibble is with Tolkien's syntax -- it's much more straightforward then skaldic verse usually likes. I'm linking to my original post here.

But this is a pretty fascinating find, especially from a scholar (Frank) who doesn't seem to care that it is a find.