For the first time ever, around 250 of J.R.R. Tolkien’s poems are going to be published together in The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien. The three volumes will be published together by HarperCollins on 12 September 2024.
The three volumes – edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond – will cover from 1910 to 1967 and feature nearly 250 poems, of which over 70 have never been published before. The three volumes will run to 1620 pages in total, and the editors have confirmed that “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“.
In a blogpost, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull say they first discussed this project in 2016 before Christopher Tolkien gave his green light to their approach in 2019. Speaking about the project they said: “It has been an honour to prepare, at Christopher Tolkien’s invitation, these volumes of his father’s poems, putting into print many previously unpublished works and ensuring that Tolkien’s talent for poetry becomes more widely known. Charged at first to review only his early poems, we soon saw the benefits of examining his entire poetic opus across six decades, vast though it is with hundreds of printed and manuscript sources, and of showing its evolution with comments in the manner of Christopher’s magisterial History of Middle-earth series. Not long before his death, we were able to send Christopher a trial portion of the book, which he praised as ‘remarkable and immensely desirable’.”
Chris Smith, Publishing Director, said: “Poetry runs like a vein of mithril through all the books that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote. He delighted in language and storytelling, and the almost 200 poems contained in this collection reveal him at his creative best in verse. Within this new three-volume set, there are worlds in miniature to be discovered and revelled in, populated with unforgettable characters and settings both familiar and full of wonder.”
From the publisher
World first publication of the collected poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, spanning almost seven decades of the author’s life and presented in an elegant three-volume hardback boxed set.
J.R.R. Tolkien aspired to be a poet in the first instance, and poetry was part of his creative life no less than his prose, his languages, and his art. Although Tolkien’s readers are aware that he wrote poetry, if only from verses in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, its extent is not well known, and its qualities are underappreciated. Within his larger works of fiction, poems help to establish character and place as well as further the story; as individual works, they delight with words and rhyme. They express his love of nature and the seasons, of landscape and music, and of words. They convey his humour and his sense of wonder.
The earliest work in this collection, written for his beloved, is dated to 1910, when Tolkien was eighteen. More poems would follow during his years at Oxford, some of them very elaborate and eccentric. Those he composed during the First World War, in which he served in France, tend to be concerned not with trenches and battle, but with life, loss, faith, and friendship, his longing for England, and the wife he left behind. Beginning in 1914, elements of his legendarium, ‘The Silmarillion’, began to appear, and the ‘Matter of Middle-earth’ would inspire much of Tolkien’s verse for the rest of his life.
Within The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien almost 250 works are presented across three volumes, including more than 70 that have never before been seen. The poems are deftly woven together with commentary and notes by world-renowned Tolkien scholars Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, placing them in the context of Tolkien’s life and literary accomplishments and creating a poetical biography that is a unique and revealing celebration of J.R.R. Tolkien.
The book can be pre-ordered from HarperCollins and Amazon UK and Amazon US.
