The result of browsing through The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond with the thoroughness, accuracy, and attention to detail we’ve come to know from their work. Reading the whole thing will be more than a casual project.
Number of volumes: 3.
That’s the same number of volumes as the Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis. Tolkien’s published letters are just one volume. So are C.S. Lewis’s collected poems. Something symmetrical about that.
Number of numbered entries: 195.
An entry, in this book, is generally a cluster of poems, showing Tolkien revising or entirely reworking earlier versions. Sometimes this revision could be quite elaborate. Bilbo’s Lay of Eärendil is a revision of “Errantry” so extensive that hardly a word of the original is left, only the meter and the narrative theme. Scull and Hammond put them in the same cluster.
Total number of poetic texts in the book: close to 700.
You may get a different number. I counted only poems printed as verse, in the main text not the notes. But I counted everything that could be considered a separate text, and whether it was printed in whole or in part.
Greatest number of texts in a cluster: probably 22.
That’s the number I count in cluster no. 40, “Kortirion among the Trees,” if I follow all the versions correctly. There’s 7 full texts and a number of partial revisions.
Scull and Hammond are assiduous about this research. Even the selection of poems from The Lord of the Rings traces each poem back to its most fragmentary origin. “Seven for the dwarf Lords in their halls of stone / Three for Mortal Men, born of flesh and bone …” no. Try again. “Nine for the Elves he made …” no. Try again.
Greatest number of different titles in one cluster: 6.
Cluster 48: A Dream of Coming Home, A Memory of July in England, July, Two Eves in Tavrobel, An Evening in Tavrobel, Once upon a Time. This clear citation of varying titles is something the collected poems of C.S. Lewis could have used.
Number of clusters giving only one text each: 45.
With some of these, no manuscript survives, and there’s only an obscure published text.
Number of clusters in which no poetic text in the cluster has ever been published before, even in part: 73.
That’s if I’ve counted correctly. It includes some things you might have heard of but never seen before, like “Glip,” the much-rumored precursor to Gollum, or that you might never have heard of before, like an almost incoherently angry alliterative expostulation against motorcycles.
In The Lays of Beleriand, Christopher Tolkien prints a note: “There exists a poem in rhyming couplets entitled The Children of Húrin … [but] I do not give it here.” That’s all you get, there: but it’s here, in the Collected Poems.
That number doesn’t count additional clusters where previous publications have been fragmentary or elusive, like the poetric translation of Beowulf, a few lines of which Tolkien included in an article in 1940, or “Doworst,” the first page of which was printed in an Australian fanzine in the 1970s. (Why an Australian fanzine? Scull and Hammond tell the story.)
Number of truly silly appendices: 1.
That’s Appendix V, Tolkien’s translation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” into Old English.
Ed.:No, maybe 3. The limericks and clerihews are pretty silly too, especially for readers to whom they are new, and the verse explanations of Latin adages are another distinctive Tolkienian pastime.
Number of truly moving and effective poems in here: I don’t yet know, but it’s a lot.
I’ve long had a special love for “The Nameless Land” (no. 74), which I know from Text C in The History of Middle-earth, but there’s many others, especially among the early, never-previously-published poems of Tolkien’s university and WW1 years.
