Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

 

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1. Introduction 
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a name that apparently needs no further introduction. 
He is the fa ous E glish riter, father of fa tas , the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of 
the Rings. That would probably be the fastest answer of millions of people around the world 
and they would be, of course, right. If you asked more about him, some of these people 
would say that he was also a learned man, an important professor and a philologist. All of 
that is correct as well. But there is one more occupation that fits perfectly to this man. Even 
though he is very rarely seen in this light, I would also call him as a famous and important 
poet or more precisely, one of the greatest English poets of the 20
th
century. It is the main 
aim of this paper to discuss and support this rather strong statement. It will be done in three 
separate chapters, results of which will be analyzed and summed up in the Conclusion. The 
first hapter deals ith Tolkie ´s tra slations of poetry because it is not possible to translate 
good poetry unless you are a good poet. As he was a professor of Old English, the most 
important of his translations logically are those from Old English into Modern English like Sir 
Gawain and The Green Knight, Pearl or Sir Orfeo. The second chapter focuses on works that 
are half inspired and half original 
– these are mainly poems based on Arthurian legends (The 
Fall of Arthur) and Northern sagas (The New Song of Sigurd and Gudrun) where Tolkien 
basically chooses and combines some topics or versions of the same story and creates his 
own version, always with some new additions. The third chapter introduces poems that are 
Tolkie s origi als – most of them were written as a part of his fantasy books. These are 
short songs, riddles or poems from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but there are also a 
few poems (or longer versions) that were published separately, under the name The 
Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

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These three chapters 
pro e Tolkie ´s fle i ilit a d a ilit to o e his o ideas 
and variations as well as to preserve the original and get as close as possible to it, in case of 
translations. Tolkien was a perfectionist in his own way. Many of his works survived in 
different versions or variations that he kept changing and improving. But some were written 
only in brief and unrevised form and never rewritten again, as is the case of Sir Orfeo, and 
some even remained unfinished as The Fall of Arthur of which only four cantos and a half 
were finished. This happened due to his lack of time, excess of writing and teaching and his 
personality - his friend, C. S. Lewis, once described him as "that great but dilatory and 
unmethodical man" (Carpenter 177). 
An inspiration for choosing this particular topic came from the fact that two books of 
Tolkie ´s poetr ere pu lished i re e t ears.
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Both of them are dealt with in the second 
chapter and in some way they might be considered as his best and the most inspiring 
because by writing them, Tolkien can now be compared to all of the other authors who 
made variations of these two mythical units. Main secondary sources for the work are 
basically of two kinds. Firstly, they are the introductions, forewords, letters, essays and 
recorded lectures done by J. R. R. Tolkien himself. They usually appear together with 
particular poem or story, but there is also one book that consists only from academic works 
– Of Monsters and Critics and other essays. Secondly, there are essays and forewords written 
by his son Christopher who is an editor of his works and who prepares his unpublished books 
to be ready for publishing. The third source is a biography by Humphrey Carpenter in order 
to get somewhat distanced approach to the Tolkien family. 
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The New Song of Sigurd and Gudrun in 2009 and The Fall of Arthur in 2013. The second one is extremely new 
which implies that it has not been dealt with on the academic grounds with great detail yet and which basically 
makes this paper one of the first in which it is analyzed. 

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