Update on Tolkien's Skaldic Poetry

So, a little over a week ago I blogged about finding a published version of an skaldic poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, which appeared in a article on the dróttkvætt form by Roberta Frank, a well-known medievalist from Yale. Since I'd never heard of any such poems by Tolkien, naturally I was curious, so I contacted Frank, who couldn't have been friendlier or more helpful. Since the Tolkien Estate would still hold the copyright for those poems (even if they weren't previously aware of the poems' existence), I told Frank that I'd dig a little deeper into who knew about these mysterious skaldic verses.

Well, the search ended up being rather quick. Before I contacted the Tolkien Estate, I first contacted another Tolkienist, Douglas A. Anderson, who runs the Tolkien and Fantasy blog. Well, he keeps insanely thorough notes . . . and he told me that the three skaldic poems in question were known to the Estate and listed within Tolkien's unpublished papers. Intriguingly, the version in Frank's possession & included within her article seems to have been a slightly previous version of the poem -- that version has the phrase "shrouded ship laden," which Tolkien later emended to "lordly ship laden."

Oh well. Discovering unknown Tolkien poems was a fun fantasy while it lasted. Yet it goes to show (luckily for literary history) what a packrat Tolkien happened to be.