Poetry in The Lord of the Rings

The verse is of many kinds, including for wandering, marching to war, drinking, and having a bath; narrating ancient myths, riddles, prophecies, and magical incantations; of praise and lament (elegy).

Tolkien stated that all his poems and songs were dramatic in function, not seeking to express the poet's emotions, but throwing light on the characters, such as Bilbo Baggins, Sam Gamgee, and Aragorn, who sing or recite them.

[2] Scholarly analysis of Tolkien's verse shows that it is both varied and of high technical skill, making use of different metres and rarely-used poetic devices to achieve its effects.

The narrative of The Lord of the Rings is supplemented throughout by verse, in the form of over 60 poems and songs: perhaps as many as 75 if variations and Tom Bombadil's sung speeches are included.

[5] The verses include songs of many genres: for wandering, marching to war, drinking, and having a bath; narrating ancient myths, riddles, prophecies, and magical incantations; of praise and lament (elegy).

[4] Verlyn Flieger states that two of the poems near the start of the novel encapsulate the story: the Rhyme of the Rings, used in the epigraph and in "The Shadow of the Past", and equally important, the walking song "The Road Goes Ever On", which occurs repeatedly with variations, and indeed was present in an earlier form in The Hobbit.

"[T 2]Brian Rosebury, a scholar of humanities, writes that the distinctive thing about Tolkien's verse is its "individuation of poetic styles to suit the expressive needs of a given character or narrative moment",[9] giving as examples of its diversity the "bleak incantation" of the Barrow-Wight; Gollum's "comic-funereal rhythm" in The cold hard lands / They bites our hands; the Marching Song of the Ents; the celebratory psalm of the Eagles; the hymns of the Elves; the chants of the Dwarves; the "song-speech" of Tom Bombadil; and the Hobbits' diverse songs, "variously comic and ruminative and joyful".

[10] Sandra Ballif Straubhaar, a scholar of Germanic studies, writes that the narrative of The Lord of The Rings is composed of both prose and poetry, "intended and constructed to flow complementarily as an integrated whole.

"[T 3] Straubhaar writes that although the reader does not know why Gilraen should suddenly switch to speaking in verse, one can feel the tension as she adopts "high speech, .. formalized patterns, .. what Icelanders even today call bundidh mál, "bound language.

[1] The poetry of the Shire serves, in Shippey's view, to relate the here-and-now action of the story to "mythic timelessness", as in Bilbo's Old Walking Song, "The Road goes ever on and on / Down from the door where it began.

Lynn Forest-Hill, a medievalist, explores what Tolkien called "nonsense" and "a long string of nonsense-words (or so they seemed)", namely Tom Bombadil's constant metrical chattering, in the style of "Hey dol!

[13] Rebecca Ankeny, a scholar of English, states that Tom Bombadil's nonsense indicates that he is benign, but also irrelevant as he could not be trusted to keep the Ring safe: he'd simply forget it.

[14] One aspect, Forest-Hill notes, is Tom Bombadil's ability to control his world with song (recalling the hero Väinämöinen in the Finnish epic, the Kalevala[15]), however apparently nonsensical.

The Tolkien scholar David Dettmann writes that Tom Bombadil's guests also find that song and speech run together in his house; they realize they are all "singing merrily, as if it was easier and more natural than talking".

Ankeny writes that the change in the hobbits' abilities with verse, starting with silly rhymes and moving to Bilbo's "translations of ancient epics", signals their moral and political growth.

The 2276 lines of the unfinished "Lay of the Children of Hurin"[T 7] present in Christopher Tolkien's words a "sustained embodiment of his abiding love of the resonance and richness of sound that might be achieved in the ancient English metre".

[20] When the hobbits have reached the safe and ancient house of Elrond Half-Elven in Rivendell, Tolkien uses a poem and a language, in Shippey's words, "in an extremely peculiar, idiosyncratic and daring way, which takes no account at all of predictable reader-reaction":[21][T 10] A Elbereth Gilthoniel

Readers, then, were not expected to know the song's literal meaning, but they were meant to make something of it: as Shippey says, it is clearly something from an unfamiliar language, and it announces that "there is more to Middle-earth than can immediately be communicated".

[21] Shippey suggests that readers do take something important from a song in another language, namely the feeling or style that it conveys, even if "it escapes a cerebral focus".

Ankeny states that the many poems in the text of Lord of the Rings, through their contexts and content "create a complex system of signs that add to the basic narrative in various ways".

[4] In the early 1990s, the scholar of English Melanie Rawls wrote that while some critics found Tolkien's poetry, in The Lord of the Rings and more generally, "well-crafted and beautiful", others thought it "excruciatingly bad.

Less commonly he uses other metres, including the irregular strophic rhyme of "Troll sat alone on his seat of stone", the iambic dimeter of "We come"/"To Isengard", or the ballad stanza of "An Elven-maid there was of old".

"[26] Zimmer gave as an example the fact that the whole of Tom Bombadil's dialogue, not only the parts set out as verse, are in a metre "built on amphibrachs and amphimacers, two of the most obscure and seldom-seen tools in the poet's workshop."

Tolkien emphasizes the rhythm in the song "Under the Mountain dark and tall" by the repeated use of the same syntactic construction; this would, they wrote, be seen as monotonous in a poem, but in a song it gives the effect of reciting and singing, in this case as Thorin Oakenshield's Dwarves prepare for battle in their mountain hall:[27] At other times, to suit the context of events like the death of King Théoden, Tolkien wrote what he called "the strictest form of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse".

That poem makes use of an attempt at immortality and a "fantastically complex metrical scheme" with many poetic mechanisms, including alliteration as well as rhyme; for example, it begins "Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye / To clanly clos in golde so clere".

[28] Shippey observes that the tradition of such complex verse had died out before the time of Shakespeare and Milton, to their and their readers' loss, and that "Tolkien obviously hoped in one way to recreate it," just as he sought to create a substitute for the lost English mythology.

[29] Shippey identifies five mechanisms Tolkien used in the poem to convey an "elvish" feeling of "rich and continuous uncertainty, a pattern forever being glimpsed but never quite grasped", its goals "romanticism, multitudinousness, imperfect comprehension .. achieved stylistically much more than semantically."

They can be seen in the first stanza of the long poem, only some of the instances being highlighted:[29] Seven of Tolkien's songs (all but one, "Errantry", from The Lord of the Rings) were made into a song-cycle, The Road Goes Ever On, set to music by Donald Swann in 1967.

[35][36] "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" is not sung in The Prancing Pony,[37] but in the extended edition of Jackson's 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the Dwarf Bofur sings it at Elrond's feast in Rivendell.

We have heard // of Oric the hunter, Guthlach the great-thewed, // and other goodmen Following far, // fellowship vengeful, Over the heath, // into the underground, Running their road // through a rugged portal.