[T 1][1] He needed surgery, a plaster cast, crutches and several weeks of recuperation in the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre and Bournemouth's Miramar Hotel before he was well enough to resume living independently.

[1] He sought the help of Margaret Joy Hill, a secretary whom his publisher, Allen & Unwin, had assigned to deal with his fan mail, and whom he and his wife had come to regard almost as a second daughter.

'"[3] Tolkien formalized his gift on 28 October 1971, sending Hill an annotated typescript of the poem and a covering letter: "Dear Joy, I have appended the following note to the copy of Bilbo's Last Song (at the Grey Havens) which I retain.

[T 2] It is a dramatic lyric that the hobbit Bilbo Baggins is supposed to have composed as he contemplated his approaching death – a nunc dimittis that could have been, but was not, incorporated into the final chapter of The Lord of the Rings.

[7] The context of Bilbo's making of the poem is that he, the hobbits Frodo and Sam and the elves Elrond and Galadriel have travelled to Mithlond, the Grey Havens, where they have been met by the elvish shipwright Círdan and the wizard Gandalf.

[7] Bilbo, Frodo, Elrond, Galadriel and Gandalf are preparing to board the elven ship that will carry them magically away from the mortal world of Middle-earth to the Undying Lands beyond the sunset.

[7] A progress report on the writing of the book that Tolkien sent to his son Christopher on 29 November 1944 shows that the coda of his story had taken shape in his mind long before it was published in 1955: "The final scene will be the passage of Bilbo and Elrond and Galadriel through the woods of the Shire on their way to the Grey Havens.

Scull and Hammond observe that Bilbo's Last Song is somewhat like Tennyson's Crossing the Bar (1889), a sixteen-line religious lyric (sharing some of Tolkien's poem's vocabulary) in which a sea voyage is a metaphor for a faithful death.

[T 10][12] Bilbo's Last Song first appeared at the end of 1973, translated into Dutch by Max Schuchart for a limited edition of two thousand numbered posters that the publisher Het Spectrum distributed as corporate New Year's gifts.

[7] In 1990, the poem was issued as a 32-page full colour hardcover picture-book illustrated with almost fifty of Baynes's paintings – the largest body of work that she created for any Tolkien project – by Unwin Hyman in the UK and by Houghton Mifflin in the US.

The recto pages present roundels narrating Bilbo's journey from retirement in Rivendell to his arrival at "fields and mountains ever blest": Bilbo is seen at his desk, looking out across the ravine of the Bruinen, talking to Elrond, mounting his horse, riding through the Shire, crossing Woody End, arriving at the Far Downs, meeting Círdan and Gandalf, hugging Sam, greeting Merry and Pippin, setting sail and nearing the Undying Lands.

Each roundel is framed by a unique pair of overarching trees, beneath, on and above which are a multitude of birds and beasts: a beaver, a fox, an otter, badgers, bats, frogs, hedgehogs, mice, rabbits, squirrels, stoats, toads, a blackbird, a crow, a dove, a gull, a magpie, a wader, a woodpecker, some owls and many others.

[T 11] Hutchinson's and Knopf's 2002 edition of the poem is broadly similar to Unwin Hyman's and Houghton Mifflin's earlier version, allocating each of Tolkien's couplets its own two-page spread and including most of Baynes's 1990 artwork.

Red Fox's large paperback edition of 2012 restores the material and design that Hutchinson and Knopf reject, but omits the endpaper painting that decorates its predecessors.

[23] Tom Shippey brackets Bilbo's Last Song with Tolkien's late, elegiac short story Smith of Wootton Major and with his valedictory address to the University of Oxford.

[25] He suggests that Tolkien would have been wiser to allow Bilbo's final poetic utterance to be the version of his song The Road Goes Ever On that he recites by the fireside in his room in Rivendell near the end of The Return of the King.