Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

4. 
Tolkien´s Original Works 
The core of Tolkien´s work is connected with his own fantastic Middle-earth 
mythology. There are two books, The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings, that are both in 
prose but include a lot of poems, short or long. And then there are another two. The 
Adventures of Tom Bombadil is a collection of poems that appeared in those previously 
mentioned books with some of them prolonged and some completely new. The Lays of 
Beleriand, the fourth book, consists of two long poems only. But there are also works that 
have 
nothing to do with Tolkien´s mythology. The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun is a medieval-
like poem about one unhappy pair, Mythopoeia is some kind of term definition in poetry and 
Songs for the Philologist is a collection for teaching purposes written by Tolkien and E. V. 
Gordon, a Canadian philologist. 
With The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings, it is the special idea that is the most 
interesting. The idea 
that poetry is an inseparable part of life. It seems like in Tolkien´s world 
everybody can write and recite some kind of poetry 
– hobbits, men, elves, dwarves and even 
orcs. They do so in various forms 
– songs, poems or riddles, and on all possible occasions. 
Tolkien´s strong point is to highlight and accelerate occasion by best fitting piece of poetry. 
He does so in English but also in a few invented languages that fit into the atmosphere even 
more. Here follows two examples. The first one is a riddle. It is spoken in complete dark, 
underground, when people would hardly think of rhyming. But for Tolkien, even here lives 
poetry:
What has roots as nobody sees, 
Is taller than trees, 
Up, up it goes, 
And yet never grows? (The Hobbit 87) 

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The second example is a fragment from the main poem of the story. It is written in one of 
Tolkien´s own languages. Tolkien invented languages already as a child and together with his 
cousin Mary they created so called Nevbosh in which they were able to compose short poems 
(Carpenter 39). This is much more elaborate, "the 
Black Speech” of the evil side. 
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, 
Ash nazg thrakat
ulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. 
Translated, the words mean: 
One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, 
One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them (The Lord of the Rings 254). 
When read aloud, the onomatopoeic aspect of it is revealed fully 
– it really sounds like the 
harsh and dangerous voices of some evil creatures. The repetition then represents their 
primitive and animal-like character. In The Hobbit only, there is more than 20 pieces of poetry 
and The Lord of the Rings is at least three times longer. That makes this example only a tiny 
crumb from the bread that Tolkien baked. 
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil consists of sixteen poems. Some of them speak of 
Middle-earth directly, some are only written by some characters that live there, as is written in 
notes and commentary. The collection was published when "in 1961 his [Tolkien's] aunt Jane 
Neave, then eighty-nine, wrote to ask him 
‘if you wouldn‘t get out a small book with Tom 
Bombadil at the heart of it, the sort of size of book that we old ones can afford to buy for 
Christmas presents’" (Carpenter 216). There is no alliterative verse, only rhyming couplets. 
The Lays of Beleriand is the third book from the series The History of Middle-earth 
that was edited and published by 
Tolkien´s son Christopher. There are two long and 

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unfinished poems - 
The Lay of the Children of Húrin and The Lay of Leithian. The story of 
the first one was later retold completely by Christopher Tolkien and published in one book as 
The Children of Húrin
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. 
The faith of Túrin and Niënor, the children of Húrin, is maybe the 
saddest work that Tolkien ever wrote (probably during his stay in a hospital, while recovering 
from his illness - the result of the World War One) (Carpenter 91). It is dark and sorrowful, 
slowly progressing to its tragic end like some Antique tragedy. It is more than 4 thousand 
lines long, written in alliterative verse. The Lay of Leithian, on the other hand, is written in 
rhyming couplets and it has an altogether different background. It is a story about a couple 
who in spite of all dangers gets and remains together. They are called Beren and Luthien and 
their names are also written on the gravestone of Tolkien and his wife. So, there is something 
autobiographical about them. Humphrey Carpenter offers an explanation:
Her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes bright, and she could sing - and dance. 
She sang and danced for him in the wood, and from this came the story that was to be 
the centre of The Silmarillion: the tale of the mortal man Beren who loves the 
immortal elven-
maid Luthien Tinúviel, whom he first sees dancing among 
hemlock in a wood (91). 
The two long Lays are followed by three short alliterative poems that Tolkien 
abandoned very soon - The Flight of the Noldoli, The Lay of Earendel and The Lay of the Fall 
of Gondolin. 
The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun has much in common with the poems in The Lays of 
Beleriand, but it must be dealt with separately because it has nothing to do with the world of 
Middle-earth. The earliest manuscript is dated September 1930 (Carpenter 150). It is 508 lines 
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Christopher put together all of the versions his father wrote, some parts only copied, some rewrote. 

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long, rhyming and alliterative, and it follows a tradition of the genre which is called the 
Breton lay
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. It is a story of a childless couple who wants their child so desperately that the 
man asks a witch for help. She agrees and the children are born, but she wants his body and 
love as a reward, which he refuses. She kills him and the lady dies too, out of grief, leaving 
only the children alive with an insecure future. 
As a scholar, Tolkien invented some new terms that helped him to express his ideas. 
One of them is eucatastrophe, which is an opposite for catastrophe. Mythopoeia is another 
term and to explain this term, Tolkien chooses a poem as the vehicle. It is 150 lines long and 
it advocates myths and myth making.
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The term itself then means a narrative genre, in which 
the author creates his own world with original mythology 
– that is typical for longer fantasy 
series and sagas and the model for it is, of course, Tolkien´s Middle-earth. 
The last piece of poetry is also connected with Tolkien´s teachings. Songs for the 
Philologists is a collection of poems, which he wrote together with his friend, younger 
colleague from Leeds and Oxford, E. V. Gordon. There are 30 songs altogether and 13 of 
them are written by Tolkien. Some are in Modern English, Old Norse and some in Old 
English and they all follow a tradition 
– the melody or the topic is related to some older one. 
Sadly, Songs for the Philologists were published for teaching purposes only inside the 
university and they are very rarely accessible, which is a pity, because they seem like one of 
the most interesting experiment with Tolkien´s contribution. 
To 
make this last chapter complete, there is a short note about shorter Tolkien´s poems 
and fragments that he wrote but never properly published. They are similar to poems that 
almost everybody writes - when one is a child, under the momentary influence of some muse 
or good poetry or when one is in highly emotional state. Some of these can be found in 
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breton_lay 
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To be more precise J. R. R. T. addressed this poem particularly to his good friend, C. S. Lewis (Carpenter 133). 

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Carpenter's biography of Tolkien (Carpenter 49, 68, 71, 74 and 99) and in each of them it is 
possible to find some foreshadowing of his later greater pieces of literature.