The Other Way 'Round - Page 8
© Michael Martinez
Homer worked with hexameter (six syllables per line), which doesn't occur in any of Tolkien's major poems (perhaps none of them). The octosyllabic form took root under Tolkien's hand and flourished in his stories; he transformed it in some of his poems, such as Bilbo's song of Earendil and Legolas' song of Nimrodel. "Earendil" used the very difficult trisyllabic assonance form (the last three syllables of every other line rhyme). "Nimrodel" was more standardized, rhyming in every other line. Gimli, on the other hand, retained the older octosyllabic couplets for his song about Moria in Durin's time. In The Lord of the Rings, therefore, Tolkien favored the Romance verse style, but he occasionally broke with the form and became experimental.
And as Tolkien well knew, experimentation was a hallmark of Greek poetry, which had so profound an effect on Western literature and lyric that we still describe our poetic forms in Greek terminology today. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Tolkien eschewed rigid adherence to Franco-English medieval poetic forms in all cases. In contrast to "Earendil" and "Nimrodel", Galadriel's "Namarie" seems to be composed in a ten-syllable blank verse (but some of the lines have eleven or twelve syllables -- Tolkien may have used a Welsh form, or perhaps a Finnish form, and I am unfamiliar with both). Tolkien therefore experimented liberally with the verse forms in The Lord of the Rings.
Each poem sheds a little light on Middle-earth's mythology. In true Greek fashion, Tolkien tells a story which is bound up with a name or word. For example, when the Fellowship comes to the river Nimrodel, Legolas tells his companions about the ancient Elf-maiden who gave her name to the river, and he sings the song about her ill-fated love for Amroth. The poetry is not simply window-dressing. It is part of a larger composite element, consisting of the name (Nimrodel) and the story (an Elf-maiden flees her land, is separated from her lover, and is ultimately lost), and the poem commemorating her story. Greek mythology follows the same pattern. Homer took the name of a city (Ilion, Ilium) and used it for the name of a poem which told part of the story of the destruction of that city. Troy passed into the canon of Greek myth which survives today through Homer's poem. In his time, and for many centuries afterward, the events in the "Iliad" were regarded as historical.
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