Home » Reading & Literature » J.R.R. Tolkien » And Now, For the Rest of the Poem - Page 2

And Now, For the Rest of the Poem - Page 2

© Michael Martinez

Tolkien may have forgotten about it, but the oral audience did not. They passed it on, literary don to student or friend, friend to friend, relative to relative. In time, the poem came to Rayner Unwin's attention, and he wrote to Tolkien to ask about the poem. Allen & Unwin, apparently, wanted to publish some of Tolkien's poetry. They were by this time doing quite well with the second edition of The Hobbit and had also published Farmer Giles of Ham. Tolkien was turning out some money for the firm, so naturally they were motivated to engage in a little fence-mending. Tolkien, for his part, had only recently to that time been contacted by "a lady unknown to me making a similar enquiry" about the very same poem. He told Unwin that his correspondent confessed "that a friend had recently written out for her from memory some verses that had so taken her fancy that she was determined to discover their origin. He had picked them up from his son-in-law who had learned them in Washington D.C. (!): but nothing was known about their source save a vague idea that they were connected with English universities...." Well, obviously, the lady found the source of her mysterious verses in J.R.R. Tolkien, who happily acknowledged having written them. "I must say I was interested in becoming 'folk-lore'," he told Unwin. "Also, it was intriguing to get an oral version -- which bore out my views on oral tradition (at any rate in early stages): sc. that the 'hard words' are well preserved, and the more common words altered, but the metre is often disturbed." Tolkien's metre may have been more disturbing than disturbed. He described it as "depending on trisyllabic assonances or near-assonances, which is so difficult that except in this one example I have never been able to use it again -- it just blew out in a single impulse)." Well, Humphrey Carpenter, editor of the Letters, couldn't let that statement go unchallenged. Tolkien did, it seems, use the "trisyllabic assonances or near-assonances" again. And he used them in...The Lord of the Rings. Carpenter also tells us about Tolkien's use of the word sigaldry, and its source from a 13th century manuscript, in an end-note to the Rayner Unwin letter. The anecdote itself is traced to a letter Tolkien wrote to Donald Swann in 1966. Swann, you may recall, composed the music for The Road Goes Ever On, which was first published in 1967.

The copyright of the article And Now, For the Rest of the Poem - Page 2 in J.R.R. Tolkien is owned by Michael Martinez. Permission to republish And Now, For the Rest of the Poem - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.