The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien: Three-Volume Box Set
By J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond.
William Morrow, 2024.
Hardcover, 1728 pages, $125.
Reviewed by Michael Lucchese.
J.R.R. Tolkien surely ranks among the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. But on the surface, his writing seems very different from the experimental style that defined so much of that period’s literature. There is something deeply conservative about the orderly, sometimes near-biblical prose of The Lord of the Rings which is lacking in the more experimental work of authors such as William Faulkner or T.S. Eliot.
A new three-volume collection of Tolkien’s poetry, edited by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, proves nonetheless that there was something experimental about his writing—and perhaps even postmodern. Even if Tolkien did not understand his literary enterprise as distinctively modernist, many of the techniques he deployed—the creation of a secondary world, for instance, or his invented languages, and above all the metatextual integration of poetry and prose—nonetheless bear a resemblance to the experiments in letters conducted by his more avant-garde peers. Furthermore, his choice of subjects reveals similarities with the other great writers of his time, concerning everything from the cataclysm of war to the pain of spiritual alienation.
Postmodernism is more often associated with black-turtlenecked intellectuals smoking cigarettes in Parisian cafés than tweedy Oxford dons puffing on pipes. But Gerald Russello, the late editor of The University Bookman, drew a connection between conservatism and postmodernism, especially in the thought of Russell Kirk, this publication’s founder and another of the twentieth century’s great Christian writers. He argued that Kirk’s emphasis on imagination and sentiment constituted a rejection of modern rationalism. In his book The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, Russello wrote:
Sentiment assumes a larger importance in Kirk’s work because of his assertion that the coming (post)modern age will be an Age of Sentiments, superseding the old, modern, liberal Age of Discussion. The Age of Sentiments will be more concerned with the power of image on the heart, rather than that of logical discourse on the mind. Kirk thought that rhetoric—the creation of image through language—was a critical art for conservatism to perfect. And according to Kirk, rhetoric is only effective at creating those images if it pays careful heed to the sentiments of both the speaker and the audience.
This is exactly the kind of conservative postmodernism Tolkien mastered. His works, from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to The Silmarillion and his more unfinished tales, are almost perfectly designed to capture the hearts of his readers. Bilbo infiltrating the dragon Smaug’s lair, or Samwise and Frodo trudging through Mordor on their quest to destroy the Ring, or the elf Glofindel single-handedly challenging a balrog of Morgoth are all images created through language that animate the sentiments and enliven the moral imagination. In fact, I would argue that no twentieth century author was better at “the creation of image through language” than the Professor.
As Scull and Hammond point out in their introduction to The Collected Poems, part of the way Tolkien accomplishes this effect is by inviting readers into a wider world through poetry. As the editors put it, the poems in the Middle-earth tales are “elements integral to the stories which help to drive their plots and contribute to character and mood.” Even if this invented world is a setting for fantastic legends of dragons and elves and hobbits, it feels like a real place because narrative and poetry give it deep roots.
The Collected Poems includes many of the verses from Tolkien’s novels, but one which appears here for the first time, “The Lonely Isle,” illustrates exactly how he was able to breathe this sense of reality into his creations. The original draft he wrote in 1916 links an early version of his developing Legendarium to the sentiments of homesickness and nostalgia he felt as he was sailing away from England on his way to fight in the trenches of World War I. “The Lonely Isle” merges the real England he was leaving with one of elven lands he invented, Tol Eressëa. The narrator looks back on the island and muses:
When in the silence fairies with a wistful heart
Dance to soft airs their harps and viols weave
Over great wastes and to my gloom apart
There echoes through the golden elms at eve
From a high inland tower a pealing bell
Ringing for ever in thy citadel.
O Lonely sparkling isle, farewell!
Following the footsteps of Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher in The History of Middle-earth, Scull and Hammond seek to reconstruct the writing process behind each poem. They intersperse different versions of a given text with commentary on its variants and notes on sources. Although some of this apparatus may not interest a casual reader, it nonetheless provides immense insight into Tolkien as both a writer and a man.
One of the delightful poems that provide a window into the Professor’s personality is “The Motor-cyclists,” which closes the first volume of the collection. Like Dr. Kirk who sometimes referred to automobiles as “mechanical Jacobins,” Tolkien was never entirely comfortable with the technology imposed by modernity. In this poem, he gives voice to his distaste for motorcycles in particular:
O Filth-spattered fools with your foul fumes
riding on a racket of rackety iron,
dead drunk with dust, driven by desire
of insensate speed you spew your stink
from nowhere to nowhere through nothing worth seeing
One is put instantly in mind of Treebeard’s famous description of the traitorous wizard Saruman in The Two Towers: “He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for living things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” Tolkien, akin to later postmodern thinkers, was particularly attentive to the ways that the power of modern technology corrupts human beings and reduces “users” to the level of “godforsaken ghouls or gorgons.” In this way, Tolkien uses poetry and literature to stock what Edmund Burke called “the wardrobe of the moral imagination.”
Other poems, such as the haunting “Empty Chapel,” capture a painful sense of religious loss that also comes across in many of Tolkien’s letters. Modernity is, fundamentally, a disenchanting force, but Tolkien hoped that poetry could provide a sort of imaginative spark that could move readers beyond boredom and despair. Written in 1915 as England marched to war, “Empty Chapel” is a kind of humble plea to return to an earlier piety:
O ye most mighty men of the island of the north
War is in your nostrils and courage in your heart
Though stunted in dark places
Ye have nigh forgotten God
The faith in your midmost
In the chapel in the wood
A silent empty chapel
This is the heart of Tolkien’s postmodern moral vision. Like T.S. Eliot, he knew that simply returning to old traditions fragmented by modernity and filling the pews of empty chapels would not revive English greatness. Like William Faulkner, he understood that the act of remembering God and restoring faith had to be deeply personal. Unlike caricatures from his detractors, Tolkien did not believe medieval or pre-modern arrangements could be revived from the top down. Rather, his poetry reveals his fundamental belief that the individual Christian must cultivate virtues within his or her own heart above all.
The crowning poem of the collection, though, is “For W.H.A.” Written in 1967 as a tribute to his former student and fellow poet W.H. Auden, it is a beautiful statement about the nature of friendship and the writer’s vocation. Tolkien modeled this poem—and many of his others—on Old English conventions, keeping alive the traditions of his native land while imbuing them with immense personal significance. He imagines readers far in the future encountering his friend’s poetry and experiencing true wonder:
Auden some call him,
And so among men may he be remembered ever,
where as they sit by themselves for solace of heart
the word-lovers, wise and skillful,
revive the vanished voices of makers.
Scull and Hammond have themselves done an incredible service to “the word-lovers” by preserving Tolkien’s poetry. Beautifully bound in a hardcover set with a gorgeous slipcover, The Collected Poems is an essential addition to every Tolkien scholar or aficionado’s shelf. But above all, its existence is a reminder that a truly humane postmodernism needs something of the Professor’s genius for subcreation.
Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.
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