Tolkien's Norse Connection (Parts 1 and 2): The Career

New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: The Norse Connection

Click here to read Part 3 for this entry. Click here to read Part 4.

Introduction: The Versatile Revivalist

So far in this series, I’ve tended to tackle either individual poets (C. S. Lewis, Amit Majmudar, etc.) or specific issues such as SF or fan verse. Now let’s sneak a peek at what happens by focusing on a specific alliterative tradition in the Modern Revival – namely, Old Norse.

So here’s a riddle for you. What do medieval Norse skalds – folks like Thjódólf of Hvinir or the legendary Bragi Boddason – have in common with medieval English poets wise in the ways of alliterative poetics? People like Cædmon, William Langland, and whoever the hell wrote Beowulf.

Not much, actually.

Got you with a trick question! So, yeah … this riddle’s somewhat like Bilbo asking Gollum what’s in his pockets. Although us moderns might study a wide range of medieval texts side by side – thank you, anthologies – in the Middle Ages, obviously, most people could not. For them, poetry was largely oral. But also … well, northern Europe is a big place, and there are few barriers more formidable than geography, language, and time. Although Latin might have been medieval Europe’s universal language, alliterative poetry belongs to the vernacular. So if one thing besides language separates modern revivalists from their medieval counterparts, it’s how we can access multiple medieval alliteration traditions with ease. Norse or English poet during the Middle Ages simply did not have that advantage.

Given this versatility, someone might naturally ask who our most versatile modern revivalist happens to be, the one poet who takes best advantage of the multiple traditions lying at our fingertips? Well, luckily, this question has a clear answer. I’m depressed to say, however, that it’s the least surprising and most obvious answer of all: the man himself, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

It’s true, though. Most revivalists tend to stick with their preferred tradition, like Poul Anderson with Norse forms, but the viability of impressionism muddies the waters considerably. As brilliant as Pound and Auden are, their innovations and creativity often take them out of any recognizable medieval tradition. Which is fine. But even among purists, folks like C. S. Lewis, Sandra Straubhaar, or Jere Fleck, they tend to concentrate their skills on mastering a single alliterative tradition.

But Tolkien? Mister Oxford was an alliterative jack-of-all-trades … and master of them all, too. Although Old English was his “base” meter, the one he gravitated toward most instinctively, he perfected not only the “scholarly” version of Old English but its more popular lay versions as well. The Fall of Arthur and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, for instance, each respectively imitates the metrical styles of Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon.

Similarly, Tolkien has delved into several varieties of Middle English alliterative meter. Nor does he neglect Norse forms, having written several rigorous texts in fornyrðislag, ljódaháttr, and the insanely difficult skaldic dróttkvætt.

Thus Tolkien is the ultimate model, the undisputed Lord of Alliterative Meters. The one person in whom technical skill and scholarly erudition have combined with sheer productivity to yield an astounding corpus of modern poetry in old, archaic alliterative traditions.

The recently published Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien (2024), moreover, positions us even better to appreciate his versality. In this three-volume set, edited brilliantly by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, we can now access dozens of previously unpublished texts, many of them alliterative, that show off Tolkien’s immense range.

For this four-part entry in “The New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf,” then, I’d like to concentrate on two fascinating texts never before seen in print. The first is “The Derelicts” (poem #119), and the second is “Black Heave the Billows” (poem #133). My discussion will, in addition to providing the action-packed discourse you’ve all come to expect, also prove definitively when Tolkien wrote these particular texts.

Or maybe semi-definitively. There’ll be some degree of definitiveness, at any rate.

To set up the argument, which may or may not rock Tolkien Studies to its very core (ahem), let’s first tackle the interesting parabola curve taken by Tolkien’s alliterative career … 

Tolkien’s Alliterative Anni Mirabiles 

Today, most readers of SFF have a bias for prose. That’s safe to say, right? As a young’en, I certainly did. Novels were where the action was. So for many contemporary readers, it might come as a surprise to learn just how much poetry dominated the literary world of Tolkien’s day.

Notably, when Tolkien and Lewis started their respective literary careers, each saw themselves foremost as a poet. And like his fellow Inkling, Tolkien composed verse all through his life. Most never saw print, naturally, but many were in rhymed trimeter, rhymed tetrameter, and so on. In other words, traditional syllable-counting meters, but Tolkien apparently held iambic pentameter in disdain. That is, he never composed blank verse or anything quite as “modern” as all that.

But Tolkien’s alliterative career seems to have operated in stages – a picture now clearer thanks to The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Unfortunately, most of Tolkien’s texts lack firm composition dates. Moreover, he often returned to and revised old drafts over time, so the waters of dating can look quite murky. Still, if you examine the overall corpus, a compelling story begins to emerge.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll ignore his translations, which muddy the waters even more, and focus only on original compositions. For instance, we’ll start with the two most obvious alliterative traditions from the Middle Ages:

(A) Old English. Tolkien’s first stage lasts from 1920-1925, mainly The Lay of the Children of Húrin (poem #67). His second stage follows 1933 and includes about fifteen additional texts, including those in The Lord of the Rings.

(B) Middle English. Tolkien only dipped into this tradition intermittently, but when he did, he always had an explicit medieval model in mind. We have three poems overall:

• “The Motor-cyclists” (poem #63; ?1919). Modeled on the 14^th-century Complaint Against the Black Smiths.
• “The Nameless Land” (poem #74; 1924). Modeled on Pearl, which survives in the same late 14^th-century manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
• “Doworst” (poem #139; ?1933). Modeled on Piers Plowman.

Interestingly, Tolkien scholars formerly believed the third poem, “Doworst,” completely lost except for nineteen lines, but after C. S. Lewis’s literary executor, Walter Hooper, passed away in 2020, a complete copy from his papers meandered over to the Bodleian Library. That text is reprinted in full by Scull and Hammond … and thank the Allegory of Goodness they did, too. Besides being the longest original poem by Tolkien in a Middle English meter, it’s utterly hilarious to anyone who teaches at a university.

But Tolkien had no qualms about crossing the North Sea, either. His four Old Norse texts span the following three forms.

•  fornyrðislag. Tolkien’s two New Lays (poem #131), both quite long, appear in this meter. The only exception are three stanzas in the one about Sigurd in ljódaháttr.

These New Lays first appeared in The Legend of Sigurd and Gúdrun (2009). Although the original manuscript lacks a date, Christopher Tolkien believes – perfectly reasonably, in my view – that they stem from 1932 through 1934.

• dróttkvætt. “The Derelicts” (poem #119). No known date of composition.
• ljódaháttr. “Black Heave the Billows” (poem #133). No known date for this one, either.

For people paying close attention, you might have noticed a six-year gap in Tolkien’s alliterative career. Between 1925 and 1931, we don’t have any firmly dated poem in an alliterative meter. What gives?

So glad you asked, because I got two explanations. Professionally, this interregnum coincides with Tolkien moving from the University of Leeds to the University of Oxford. That happened in summer 1925. Creatively, this transitional summer also coincides with Tolkien ditching The Lay of the Children of Húrin, an alliterative epic, and starting a brand new long poem called The Lay of Leithian.

For Leithian, he used octosyllabic rhyming couplets. Thus Tolkien had turned from the meter of Beowulf, the quintessential Old English poem, to a meter strongly associated with post-Conquest Anglo-Norman poets like Marie de France and the various anonymous authors of Breton lays.

In other words, after six years of foundering on an incomplete (and incompletable) epic poem, Tolkien had simply grown bored and frustrated with the alliterative meter. As a result, he decided to reinvent himself. A new medieval model was what he needed. And for six years after that, Leithian would absorb that vast majority of Tolkien’s poetic energy.

Unfortunately, a pattern slowly established itself for Tolkien. Leithian bloated to over 4,000 lines, and Tolkien once again found himself exhausted by his inability to edit himself or bring his stories down to manageable length. By September 1931, Tolkien once again abandoned a major epic poem.

In this post-Leithian aftermath, Tolkien tried a few more poems in his Anglo-Norman meter. Actually, he completed two of them, The Corrigian and Atrou and Itroun (#116), about a year earlier, but following Leithian he tried returning to his Húrin material (#130) only to abort this newly reimagined story after a scant 170 lines. His enthusiasm for that story, it seems, still had not returned. He needed a break from the legendarium.

So he puttered around with a few more brief poems in octosyllabic couplets – “Monday Morning” (#122), “The Last of the Old Gods” (#126), “The Prophecy of the Sibyl” (#132) – but, ultimately, nothing seemed to stick.

So I’m arguing the time had arrived in 1932 for another metrical reinvention. Octosyllabic couplets were passe. Yet where to go? Well, after the Old English and Anglo-Norman meters, the next obvious candidate would have been Chaucerian pentameter, the last major meter in English from the Middle Ages. But as I mentioned, that never happened. Tolkien was well content to study The Canterbury Tales, but he declined to write anything resembling it.

That left metrical traditions outside the British Isles, so in 1932 Tolkien crossed the Baltic Sea and decided to go Viking.

A new question thus appears before us. Namely, what specifically drove Tolkien in 1932 (or so) to take his post-Leithian poetry away from metrical traditions associated with the British Isles? Sure, boredom with octosyllabic couplets got him started, but why medieval Norse literature in particular?

Well, for one thing, I’m sure Tolkien noticed the oddness of using an Anglo-Norman meter for something like “The Prophecy of the Sibyl,” a poem whose Old Norse subject was taken straight from Völuspá. So that would have jarred Tolkien’s scholarly sense of appropriate metrical form.

E.O.G. Turville-Petre

Second factor – though this one is purely speculative. At the same time that Tolkien abandoned Leithian, he also accepted a new B.Litt student highly interested in Old Norse languages and literature. In due time, this young fella – E. O. G. Turville-Petre – would become one of his generation’s foremost authorities on Icelandic sagas, and in a curious twist of fate, he’d even supervise the B.Litt thesis of Tolkien’s own son Christopher.

So through the early 1930s, while Tolkien never stopped lecturing on Old English and Old Norse subjects, supervising the precocious Turville-Petre might have re-triggered his creativity into an Old Norse direction. Say what one will about Tolkien’s lecturing style – Kinsley Amis certainly did – but nobody can deny that Tolkien was a professor for whom teaching and scholarship went hand-in-hand. If nothing else, the New Lays are the creative expression of a scholarly problem that had long occupied him.

My third factor? Clive Staples Lewis.

So, I’ve written before about Lewis’s slow education into alliterative verse. Long story short, the key factor was the Coalbiters, a study group founded by Tolkien in 1926 for studying and translating Old Norse texts. Over the next few years, both men became friendly, but their relationship took a turn in December 1929 when Tolkien lent Lewis his manuscript for The Lay of Leithian. This romance utterly enchanted Lewis. Notably, though, this time also coincided with Lewis himself trying his hand at the alliterative meter. Less than nine months after reading Leithian (and just over a year after doing his first surviving alliterative poem), Lewis finished the fair copy version of a 742-line narrative romance in Old English style called The Nameless Isle.

I think it’s a safe assumption that Lewis would have shared The Nameless Isle with Tolkien at some point. And while Tolkien would have surely admired Lewis’s skill with the meter, he might also have remembered his own long-abandoned Húrin …  and felt a sense, not only of inspiration, but also creative rivalry. (I’ve written before, too, about how low-key scholarly rivalry led directly to Tolkien’s essay “On Translating Tolkien.”)

In any event, all Tolkien’s greatest – and longest – alliterative poems hail from 1932 through 1934, at least according to our best scholarly estimations. These poems are The Fall of Arthur, Doworst, and both New Lays (The New Lay of the Völsungs, The New Lay of Gudrún). Tolkien even finished the latter three poems – an utter rarity for him. And given that Lewis wrote every single one of his alliterative poems during this period as well, including a few just recently discovered, I’ve dubbed this period their alliterative anni mirabiles.

Honestly, during the early 1930s, the Inklings were just plain rocking the Modern Revival. Which brings me back to “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows,” those two pesky Norse poems by Tolkien without a composition date.

If you look at The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien, Scull and Hammond date these texts c. 1930 and c. 1932 respectively – and actually, that’s pretty close. For my own estimation, I put “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows” within the 1932–1933 time frame. However, I’m less enthusiastic about the subject-matter approach to dating used by Scull and Hammond. To see how the argumentative drama unfolds, however, you’ll have to tune in next week.