Tolkien’s Collected Poems Update

Our thanks to all who have written to us with congratulations and set a new record for views of this blog. News of the Collected Poems has caused not a little excitement. It has also led to not a few questions, chief among which has been: What will the book include? Will it have the complete Lay of the Fall of Gondolin? Will it have Tolkien’s verse translation of Beowulf? Will it have his rumoured bestiary poems about the Fox and the Unicorn? And especially (if very curiously), will it have The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf, which so far has been published only in German translation?

We regret that we can say only so much about the contents at this time, beyond what we already have – it’s up to our publisher, and to the Tolkien Estate, to decide how much publicity to release, what, and when. But we can say that almost any poem a potential reader can name is likely to be present in the book, except for most of those in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as we earlier made clear. The Bookseller magazine unfortunately took liberties with HarperCollins’ press release, declaring the Collected Poems to be ‘the first time all the author’s poems will appear in one volume’: it won’t be quite complete, nor will it will be only one volume.

There will be an American edition, from William Morrow, which should be identical to the copies issued by HarperCollins U.K. except for the imprint. This has been announced for 17 September, five days later than the U.K. release on 12 September, with the list price $125. We’ve seen some complaints that the U.K. list price of £90 is steep, but that is for three thick volumes (and a box), after all, and before any bookseller’s discount. Another forthcoming book related to Tolkien we’ve seen advertised is priced at only a little less than the Collected Poems at list, yet has only about a quarter of the length; for that, one might legitimately grouse.

Speaking of length, we finished our work on the book only today and sent it off to HarperCollins to go to press. There was just a little kerfuffle at the eleventh hour, when we learned of strict limits on volume length due to the way the book is to be printed, but we were able to meet these without much trouble. We’ve neatly ended up with three volumes of 540 pages each, or 1620 pages in all. Volume 1 will have 92 pages of preliminaries – an introduction and a brief chronology of Tolkien’s poetry – followed by the first 448 pages of the poems proper. Volume 2 then will have the first 12 pages of the preliminaries repeated (so that the complete table of contents is in each volume), followed by another 528 pages of poems, and volume 3 will have the same preliminaries again, the final 434 pages of poems and appendices, and a glossary, bibliography, and index to the three volumes which are continuously paginated.

In the past week or so we’ve read through the text again and made the odd tweak. One could tweak endlessly, but the time has come to hand it over, take a rest (sort of: there are shrubs to prune), and move on to other Tolkien matters, not least the addenda and corrigenda to our other books we’ve been gathering for two or three years and will be reporting here.