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And Now, For the Rest of the Poem - Page 4

© Michael Martinez

And he went on to rewrite it for The Lord of the Rings, where it serves to lull the reader into a very gentle sleepy state of mind, quite similar to Frodo's own when he hears a soft voice chanting the story of the ancient mariner. As it turned out, George Allen & Unwin found the paper shortage wasn't all that bad, and Tolkien discovered he had a readership for portions of his work he never thought would appeal to the general public. As a favor to his beloved aunt Jane Neave, he published a collection of poems in 1962 as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil just a few months before she passed away. One of those poems was the one which had so taken Donald Swann's fancy in 1949: "Errantry". "Errantry" not only revived a lost word from the 12th century, it revived Tolkien's hopes of seeing The Lord of the Rings (and eventually even The Silmarillion) published. He never expected his negotiations with publishers to bounce off the innocent inquiries of people who were fascinated with a poem which could be described as one of the longest limmericks ever composed. "Errantry" retells the story of Earendil the Mariner, and it is sometimes called "The Mariner", and undoubtedly many other things. And despite a few mis-spellings here and there, it has survived on its own even without being included in no less than three colllections of Tolkien's shorter works (that I know of). "Errantry", in fact, is the only poem Tolkien ever wrote which was published at least four times (five if you count Bilbo's song in Rivendell, as that work is identified by Christopher Tolkien and others as a derivative of "Errantry"). The silly mariner who marries a butterfly and challenges Elven knights has demonstrated a literary and poetic strength that few other characters of song and poem from the twentieth century revealed. He is, perhaps, one of Tolkien's most memorable characters, if only because the poem is so hard to pronounce and uses obscure words like "chalcedony", "habergeon", and "sigaldry". Of course, it doesn't end (or really even begin) there. "Sigaldry" appears in at least one other Tolkien work, a poem of extraordinary length and high calibre. "Lay of Leithian" is considered by many people (including this writer) to be the finest work of literature composed by J.R.R. Tolkien. Its connection with "Errantry" is not merely the shared use of archaic words. Both poems were born in a period when Tolkien really had no hope of seeing his work published. It was all intended for his own pleasure, and that of his friends and family.

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