Tolkien’s Collected Poems

HarperCollins having announced today that The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien will be published this September, we’re able to speak publicly about our next book for the first time since an edition of Tolkien’s verse was suggested to us in HarperCollins’ offices in April 2016. The Tolkien Estate were eager to bring more of Tolkien’s unpublished poems into print, and Christopher Tolkien hoped that his father’s talent for poetry could become more widely known. We were sympathetic to both aims, and no strangers to Tolkien’s poems through our earlier work.

Our immediate task was to review scans of poems and suggest to Christopher the best way to present them. It took months to organize and read these, more than a thousand pages of varying difficulty, from almost illegible draft manuscripts in soft pencil to professional typescripts. And at the same time, we were obliged to work on a new edition of our J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, which had been commissioned at that same April 2016 meeting; this occupied us until June the following year.

In the beginning, Christopher had no thought of publishing his father’s entire vast, complex poetic opus. Instead, he focused on what he called the ‘early poems’, which we interpreted as those composed mostly before the 1930s. Many of those were, indeed, not yet published, some not even recorded in our Chronology. But we saw that there were also unpublished poems of note from later decades, as well as some which had been published but were now hard to find, and we knew that not a little of Tolkien’s earlier poetry had evolved into later verse, for example in his 1962 Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Surely, no one can appreciate Tolkien as a poet fully without considering all of these works together.

Discussions with Christopher about the book occurred at intervals; he himself was busy, preparing The Fall of Gondolin. At length, we proposed that it would be a lost opportunity not to collect as many of his father’s poems as possible, regardless of their date of composition, language, or circumstance, and to model such a collection after Christopher’s History of Middle-earth, combining original texts with editorial notes and commentary. For Tolkien’s longer poems already published as separate books, such as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and The Fall of Arthur, or in composite works such as The Lays of Beleriand, we suggested that brief, representative extracts be included, in order to show in full Tolkien’s development as a poet and verse forms he did not use elsewhere; and in the same way, we would draw also from his translations of Old and Middle English poems, such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In March 2019, in what would be the final message he sent to us, Christopher approved our concept and trial entries.

After Christopher’s death in January 2020, we needed to make our proposal to the Tolkien Estate trustees (Christopher had retired as a trustee in 2017, but remained his father’s literary executor), and to HarperCollins. This was complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic, but in the end all was agreed, and we were formally commissioned as editors. We completed a draft text in June 2023 (while also preparing the index to the new edition of Tolkien’s Letters). Since then, we have been revising, with advice from Chris Smith at HarperCollins, and have also incorporated poetry by Tolkien found at the eleventh hour in the archive of the C.S. Lewis scholar Walter Hooper.

A number of factors, namely economies of production, ruled out a Complete Poems by Tolkien. Nevertheless, the Collected Poems will include most of the verses Tolkien is known to have written, and for most of these, multiple versions which show their evolution. There are at least 240 discrete poems, depending on how one distinguishes titles and versions, presented in 195 entries and five appendices. When possible, we have used manuscripts and typescripts in the Bodleian Library, at Marquette University, and at the University of Leeds. We have chosen not to include all of the one hundred or so poems contained in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but have made a representative selection – surely, no one who reads the Collected Poems will not already have at least one copy of Tolkien’s two most popular works. His longer poems, as we have said, will be presented as excerpts. The book will also include a long introduction to Tolkien as a poet, a brief chronology of his poetry, and a glossary of archaic, unusual, or unfamiliar words he used in his verse.

HarperCollins have announced the Collected Poems as a three-volume boxed set. The Amazon UK description gives its extent as 1,368 pages, which is close to the number in our typescript; in fact, the printed text will run to more than 1,500 pages. There are currently no plans for a de luxe edition, but we’re aiming for an elegant trade release. We have not yet heard about a U.S. edition.