New C.S. Lewis Alliterative Poem Discovered

Thanks to Andoni Cossio scouring the University of Leeds's Tolkien-Gordon collection, we have now discovered a new alliterative poem by C. S. Lewis: "Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg"! This is the problem with research: I just published a whole anthology containing all of Lewis's known alliterative poems, and now another one has been found! Grump grump.

It's a pretty interesting poem, though ... Andoni actually showed it to me prior to publication, and we talked about its dating. The title refers to Beowulf, in particular the evil queen Modthryth (although this isn't a proper name in Old English; Lewis sees the word instead as "Mood of Thyrth"). Despite the title, this 12-line text was written as a thank-you note to Eric and Ida Gordon, two philologists at Leeds, after having stayed at their home for a few days.

According to Andoni, a poem by Tolkien dated June 26, 1935 references Lewis's earlier stay, which therefore puts "Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg" to early 1935. Given my prior studies on how Lewis learned the alliterative meter, I analyzed this new poem's metrics, and yep, they support a 1935 dating.

Interestingly, Andoni provides a Sievers-types scansion of Lewis's poem, and I actually disagree with one scansion. In the first line, "Hail oh hostess, whose heart knows not," Andoni scans the on-verse as type A and the off-verse as type B. However, I think it's clearly a type C:

whose HEART KNOWS not

But Andoni scans it thus:

whose HEART knows NOT

My argument employs Lewis's rules for quantity and past precedents established by his other alliterative poems ... in particular, verses 67b and 120a of "The Planets," whose scansion Lewis provides himself. However, Andoni consulted a professional medievalist and philologist, and he swears this verse must be read as type B: "whose heart knows not." Apparently the theory is that Lewis is using rules common to Old English phonetics but not common to Modern English phonetics. For me, that's a bonkers thing to claim, but hey .... scholars disagree. It's what we do. 

As a sidenote, Andoni contacted the presses about his discovery, and there's been a few write-ups in the Daily Telegraph and the University of Leeds. For the latter, here's a link: "Uncovering a CS Lewis poem in Special Collections". It's a pretty smart thing for a scholar to do, though, and I'll tuck this strategy away for future use, if the situation ever arises!

As a final sidenote, Andoni shared with me an article recently published by Simon Horobin in The Review of English Studies: "'Never trust a Philologist': C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Place of Philology in English Studies." Here, Horobin reveals seven previously unknown poems by C. S. Lewis. They're all about his intense dislike of Henry Cecil Wylde, a philologist whose writing (and teaching style!) gave Lewis all kinds of fits as an undergraduate. Anyway, one of these poems is actually in Old English. Mainly, he took real OE phrases and modified them as necessary. As far as I know, this is the only poem in OE Lewis ever wrote, although he did write some prose letters in the language.