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And Now, For the Rest of the Poem - Page 3

© Michael Martinez

Swann had first come across the poem in 1949, years before Rayner Unwin heard of it. "I had been given this poem by a friend," Swann wrote in the foreword to The Road Goes Ever On. "He had found it...in a school magazine". Swann did not know who the author was, because the friend's copy of the poem was marked "Anon.". Swann, too, mentions the extensive oral tradition of the poem (as described to him by Tolkien). People continued to pass it around, often without attribution, and with many variations. And, it seems, the poem is still being passed around today, by people who perhaps have no knowledge of where it first came from, or what it's relationship is to the most popular book of the twentieth century. It would seem a shame to tell them what they have found, for we would snap an oral tradition which Tolkien himself seemed a bit in awe of. So, if you find a copy of the poem without proper title or attribution, say nothing. Though this might seem an egregious breech of the respect we pay a great author, think of it as he did: living proof of his theory about oral traditions (or at least their very early stages). To see the bird take wing is special, but to watch it in mid-flight, as it soars above, completely unaware of the observer -- that is miraculous. This poem is not special simply because it has achieved something nearly impossible in an age of copyright laws and world-spanning publication empires; it's special because it gave Rayner Unwin an opportunity to approach Tolkien, with whom his company still had a publisher-author relationship, and to ask politely what had become of The Lord of the Rings and that other work, The Silmarillion. In time, Tolkien found the words with which to reply to Unwin's inquiry, and though his letter dealt mostly with the unique oral tradition he had accidentally spawned, it was a response to a momentous overture. Tolkien could have been spiteful or simply too embarassed by his failure to find an alternative publisher for The Lord of the Rings, which he had quite angrily withdrawn from George Allen & Unwin a couple of years previously. Instead, Unwin tactfully engaged Tolkien in a bit of verbal courting which threw down barriers and opened doors which had been long closed. This obscure little poem, by the way, was influenced by one of the Silmarillion stories, as it light-heartedly retold the adventures of one of Tolkien's less tragic heroes.

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