Here we distinguish lines on a page by ‘l. xx’, such as ‘l. 11’, and lines in a poem by ‘line Xxx’, such as ‘line D76’ (with ‘line’ spelled out) or ‘line xxx’ when there is no distinct version. As far as space allowed, additions and corrections dated prior to 24 December 2024 have been incorporated in the 2025 second printing.
p. xx, l. 13 from bottom: For ‘Hodsgon’ read ‘Hodgson’.
p. xxii, first paragraph: We should have made it clear, also in relation to comments on p. xxiv, that Tolkien evidently discussed with Dora Owen his plan for the collection The Trumpets of Faërie. Indeed, on looking again at her letter of 2 February 1916, it could be that Tolkien sent her the entire selection he assembled for his book; she mentions only The Trumpets of Faërie, Princess Nî, A Song of Aryador, A Sea-Song of an Elder Day, The Shores of Faery, You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play, and Outside, but those were the works she especially liked and are within the ‘fairy’ genre. Her Book of Fairy Poetry may have seemed to Tolkien an alternative to a separate collection, which was far from certain, if she had been willing to accept several of his poems rather than only one. He sent his work to Sidgwick & Jackson only after Owen informed him that she would include only Goblin Feet.
p. xlvi, l. 8 from bottom: For ‘William’ read ‘Will’.
p. lxxiii, l. 21: Here and elsewhere (e.g. pp. 110, 111) we use The Minstrel Renounces the Song for the first part of the originally longer poem of which the second part is The Mermaid’s Flute. Strictly speaking, the title The Minstrel Renounces the Song first appeared as an addition to the version Tolkien wrote later, while at Leeds, but it is the earliest to be found in the extant manuscripts. Noting, however, that Tolkien includes ‘L[ay] of Earendel’ among the entries in poem list D (Appendix III), which we date to the end of 1915 or the beginning of 1916, and that this is distinct from The Mermaid's Flute, it may be that we should have preferred The Lay of Earendel for earlier versions instead of The Minstrel Renounces the Song.
p. lxxiii, l. 23: Add at end of entry for 17 March 1915: ‘He praises The Minstrel Renounces the Song [18].’
p. lxxiii, add entry:
27 March 1915 Referring to ‘the “Earendel” fragments’ and to the final lines of The Mermaid’s Flute [19], G.B. Smith cautions Tolkien that his verse has a tendency to become complicated and hard to understand.
p. lxxiv, l. 1: Add at end of entry for April 1915: ‘Sends poems to Christopher Wiseman.’
p. lxxiv, add entry:
25 April 1915 Christopher Wiseman praises poems he has received from Tolkien, liking especially Wood-Sunshine [4] and As Two Fair Trees [23].
p. lxxiv, l. 24: Add at end of entry for Mid- to late May 1915: ‘Professional typescripts of Evening (Completorium) [3] and A Faërie: Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon [24] also may have been made at this time.’
p. 5, line C12: For ‘the pale mists’ read ‘the mists’.
p. 7, line D17: For ‘bid thee ope’ read ‘bid thee ‘ope’ (adding a quotation mark).
p. 12: We suggest here that the title on the final manuscripts was changed from Evening to Completorium at some later date. If, however, we are correct that list D in Appendix III may be dated initially to 1915, then the appearance in that list of Completorium, thus, must indicate that that title existed by 1915, and therefore was contemporary at least with the final manuscript (May 1915).
p. 12, l. 3 from bottom: For ‘typescript’ read ‘professional typescript’.
p. 15, ll. 6–8 from bottom: Carpenter’s quotation is from text A.
p. 59, l. 3 after titling: By ‘Yet again’ we are referring not to Darkness on the Road, but back to From Iffley (poem no. 10).
p. 68, l. 14 from bottom: For ‘sunrifts’ read ‘sun-rifts’, with a hyphen. In fact, ‘sun-rifts’ appeared already in version D, line 36.
p. 80, line B5: For ‘day’ read ‘Day’.
p. 88, line A48: This final line should be indented.
p. 89, l. 11 from bottom: For ‘typescript’ read ‘professional typescript’.
p. 105, ll. 10–14 from bottom: On reconsideration, it now seems possible that this (certainly not professional) typescript was among those Tolkien submitted in 1915 to Sidgwick & Jackson for his proposed book The Trumpets of Faërie (see list D in Appendix III), in which case the fragment on the reverse of the second sheet was added later, typed on paper found to hand.
p. 107, add notes:
A14: The phrase ‘ringed stem’ (later ‘ringéd stem’) recalls the hringedstefna (‘ringed prow’) and wundenstefna (‘curved prow’) in Beowulf (compare poem 88, line A34 and associated note, and addenda below for pp. 622 and 634). Scholarly consensus suggests that ‘ringed’ is merely a synonym for ‘curved’, describing the shape of the front part of the boat, not an indication that metal rings were fitted to it. An historical example would be the elegantly curved (at both ends) Oseberg longship found preserved in a burial mound in Norway early in the 20th century.
B26: The brackets around ‘with’ may be an indication that Tolkien considered whether to delete the word.
p. 113, add note:
A33: The phrase ‘shell-copéd’ suggests that the gables are covered with shells as if they were under a cope (a cape belonging to a priest or bishop).
pp. 120–2: Patrick J. Lyon has suggested that Tolkien’s inspiration for Ferrum et Sanguis lay in the Advent Vespers sung at the time he wrote the poem, particularly the ‘O Antiphon’ for 21 December – ‘O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis’ (‘O Light of the East, splendour of light eternal, and sun of righteousness: come, and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death’) – rather than, or in addition to, the Tenebrae service we mention as a possibility. Lyon also suggests that the darkness of the poem is related to the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year (22 December in 1914), and that Tolkien was more broadly influenced by the Antiphons sung earlier in Vespers, one of which lay behind the Old English Crist which inspired The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star.
p. 146, add note:
A13: In regard to twirls, our best guess is that Tolkien is using the plural of a Warwickshire dialect word for ‘walk, ramble’, attested in Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary.
p. 147, add note:
A47: The phrase ‘laddery path’ appears to suggest the steepness of the path the Man in the Moon took to reach earth, as a tall ladder may be steep, after he trips on his ‘slanting stair’. This calls to mind, though it is probably a coincidence in regard to the poem, a well-known print by William Blake, published in 1793, entitled I Want! I Want! in which a child prepares to climb an exceedingly tall ladder set against a crescent moon.
p. 147, add note:
A76: Ensample is an archaic word for ‘a sample’, as indeed it became in version B.
p. 151, ll. 7–10: Our suggestion ‘that Tolkien changed the title [to The Two Riders] after Gilson and Smith were killed (in July and December 1916 respectively)’ is, we fear, nonsense. The title The Two Riders appears for this poem in list D of Appendix III, which we date to 1915 or early 1916, months before Gilson and Smith were killed. It seems evident – whatever its meaning may be – that Tolkien changed the title when submitting his poems to Sidgwick & Jackson early in 1916.
p. 166, line A7: For ‘On the’ read ‘Or in the’.
p. 166, line A15: For ‘fairy-sand’ read ‘fairy sand’.
p. 167, line A25: For ‘nor’ read ‘or’.
p. 167, line A53: For ‘garden’ read ‘golden’.
p. 174, l. 11 from bottom: The Oxford Copying Office typescript is identical to A in substance, but omits the comma at the end of line 5 and adds an exclamation point at the end of line 7.
p. 174, line B5: For ‘lawn,’ read ‘lawn.’ (comma corrected to a full stop).
p. 177, line A7: For ‘the’ read ‘their’.
p. 178, line B7: For ‘the’ read ‘their’.
p. 183, l. 4: For ‘lines 19–20’ read ‘lines 18–20’.
p. 211, line C29: For ‘What echoes’ read ‘O! what echoes’.
p. 212, line C48: For ‘and’ read ‘And’.
p. 219, ll. 16–17: In notes to his father’s poems, Christopher Tolkien read the title on the second manuscript with a comma, as The Swallow, and the Traveller on the Plains. We felt that the mark Christopher took to be a comma was too indistinct to be certainly a mark of punctuation, and omitted it. Nowhere else in Tolkien’s papers, as far as we have seen, did he write out the revised title, which we could have used for comparison, nor is there a typescript copy of the poem.
p. 238, line C9: For ‘a sunlit boat’ read ‘sunlit boat’.
p. 269, lines C106–107: The double quotation marks should be set as single quotation marks.
p. 341, l. 22: For ‘Scene 2’ read ‘Scene 1’.
p. 348, l. 5 from bottom: Twice, for ‘learned’ read ‘leaned’.
p. 356, l. 18: For ‘1988’ read ‘1969’.
p. 622, line A34: For ‘stern’ read ‘stem’.
p. 634, note A34: Line 1, for ‘stern’ read ‘stem’. Bosworth and Toller define hringed-stefna in these words, but stefna can also mean the stem (prow) of a ship, and scholarly consensus prefers ringed ‘curved’. If Beowulf's craft was like the Oseberg Viking longship, it was curved at both ends, stem and stern – but Tolkien wrote stem, which we misread. (Compare poem 18, line A14 and added note for p. 107 given above.)
pp. 649–51: In his essay ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Gawain’s Leave-Taking”: A Composite Translation of “Against My Will I Take My Leave” (Vernon MS 407v) and a Door to Further Criticism’ (2024) Andoni Cossio helpfully transcribes a note Tolkien added to his manuscript of Gawain’s Leave-Taking as reproduced in the 2020 de luxe edition, ‘This is a transl. simpl. [i.e. simply] of the first & last stanzas of a poem in Vernon MS CB. RL xivc p134’, and explains the concluding notation as ‘C[arleton] B[rown]. R[eligious] L[yrics] xiv c[entury] p134’, i.e. Carleton Brown’s transcription of the Vernon manuscript poem on p. 134 (in fact, pp. 134–6) of Brown’s Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, first published in 1924. Cossio argues that it is ‘slightly misleading’ to refer to Tolkien’s poem ‘only as a translation’, that his ‘edition and authorial intent depart from a regular translator’s approach to the task, turning his work at least into a hybrid piece in the middle ground between a translation and a literary creation’ (p. 3), by virtue of his relation of ‘Against My Will I Take My Leave’ with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
p. 662, l. 9 from bottom: For ‘William’ read ‘Will’.
pp. 729–30:The line number ‘45’ of version C should appear on the preceding line (i.e. it is on line 86), and the succeeding line numbers should be adjusted, by fives.
p. 739, l. 11: For ‘C98’ read ‘C99’.
p. 739, l. 12: For ‘C105’ read ‘C106’.
pp. 890–949:Paul J. Smith has commented (‘French Connections in Middle-earth: The Medieval Legacy’, 2016) on ‘an interesting example of a concentration of technical French’ in Eärendel Was a Mariner, that is, a concentration of French loanwords, such as panoply, habergeon, scabbard, and chalcedony.
p. 940, line N35: For ‘west to east’ read ‘West to East’.
p. 941, line N92: For ‘mountain’ read ‘Mountain’.
p. 942, line N116: For ‘island star’ read ‘island-star’.
p. 1033, ll. 1–11: For ‘G120’ read ‘H120’, and relocate note to follow H35.
pp. 1365–6: It has become evident that limerick B is not an original rhyme by Tolkien in Nevbosh, but a translation or adaptation in Nevbosh of an existing rhyme in English. A limerick very similar to the English version given in Biography by Humphrey Carpenter appeared in A Nonsense Anthology, collected by Carolyn Wells (1902):
There once was a man who said, ‘How
Shall I manage to carry my cow?
For if I should ask it
To get in my basket,
’T would make such a terrible row.
Wells credits the poem to ‘Anonymous’ but gives no other information. Tolkien may have read it in Wells’s book, though certainly it appeared in at least one other source, Wells’s, to which she gives no clue. In our book we refer to the English version as if it were translated by Carpenter from Nevbosh, but he himself does not claim to have done so, and it now seems possible that he simply found the English text among Tolkien’s papers with the rhyme in Nevbosh. See further, Oronzo Cilli’s discussion in ‘Tolkien and Nevbosh: A Tale of Limericks, Nonsense, and Literary Echoes’ (2025).
p. 1380, ll. 10–11 from bottom: There is a discrepancy between our statement here, dating list D to ‘probably at the end of 1915 or the start of 1916’, and a comment in our introduction (p. xxiii) that ‘Tolkien probably compiled the list in late summer 1915’ and revised it early in 1916. The latter is most likely correct, but we forgot that we had written it when, at the eleventh hour, we addressed Appendix III.
p. 1384, l. 24: ‘Whale’ is a reference to the original version of Fastitocalon.
p. 1413, l. 8: For ‘barred obstructed 43, 190’ read ‘obstruct 40, 43, 190’.
p. 1413, add gloss: ‘basalt dark volcanic rock 30’.
p. 1414, add gloss: ‘broider embroider, adorn 4, 24, 32, 42, 53’
p. 1415, l. 13: Delete ‘chasméd’.
p. 1416, add gloss: ‘columnar shaped like a column or pillar 18, 34’.
p. 1416, add gloss: ‘coped covered as if with a cape 19’.
p. 1416, add gloss: ‘curdle congeal 21; curl 32’.
p. 1417, add gloss: ‘ensample a sample 24’.
p. 1418, add gloss: ‘eventide evening 4’.
p. 1420, add gloss: ‘gorgeous very pleasant 40’.
p. 1420, add gloss: ‘gulf engulf 42’.
p. 1422, add gloss: ‘laddery with the use of a ladder 24’.
p. 1426, l. 5: Delete ‘orbéd’.
p. 1426, add gloss: ‘pallid, pallidly pale 6, 19, 20, 24, 40, 50’.
p. 1426, add gloss: ‘pinafore woman’s sleeveless overgarment 32’.
p. 1428, add gloss: ‘rime frost 40’.
p. 1428, add gloss: ‘salaam expression of respectful compliments 22 ’.
p. 1430, add gloss: ‘slack coal dust or small pieces of coal 139’.
p. 1430, add gloss: ‘slumbrous sleepy, tranquil 40, 54, 95’.
p. 1430, l. 17 from bottom: For ‘casual rural woman’s dress 141’ read ‘loose overgarment 32; casual rural woman’s dress 48, 141’.
p. 1432, l. 13: Add reference ‘25’ to the second definition of thin.
p. 1433, add gloss: ‘twirl walk, ramble 24’.
p. 1435, l. 6: Add at end: ‘; in a curving or twisting course 24, 28, 34, 40, 44, 52, 54, 66’.
p. 1436: Among insects mentioned in the poems, we should have noted ‘honey-fly’ for the honeybee, and ‘glow-worm’ as a form of beetle.
p. 1455, l. 19: For ‘1988’ read ‘1969’.
p. 1467, l. 5 from bottom: For ‘William’ read ‘William (Will)’.
p. 1494, col. 2, l. 30: For ‘William’ read ‘Will’.
p. 1497, col. 1, entry for Thomson, James: For ‘308’ read ‘307, 308’.
p. 137, l. 12: Allan Turner comments that to someone like himself who once lived close to the banks of the river Nene, the name is pronounced with a long vowel; in Ekwall’s English River-Names, this is reflected in earlier spellings such as Neen and Neene. Pronunciation of Nene varies, however (as also recorded by Ekwall), and for Tolkien it had (or he chose to use) a short vowel, rhyming with men. With version C, Nen is replaced in the rhyme with fen.
p. 147, l. 19 from bottom: For ‘south’ read ‘south-east’.
p. 449: In regard to Light as Leaf on Lind (etc.), John R. Holmes has commented that a century before the fourteenth-century quotations we provide, the linden already had a romantic connotation in the German Minnesänger or troubadour tradition, notably the poem ‘Under der Linden’ by Walther von der Vogelweide. This begins, in translation (Representative German Poems, Ballad and Lyrical (1885), ed. Karl Knortz, p. 7):
Under the linden,
On the meadow,
Where our bed arrangèd was,
There now you may find e’en
In the shadow
Broken flowers and crushèd grass.
Near the woods, down in the vale,
Tandaradi!
Sweetly sang the nightingale.
p. 571, ll. 13–14 from bottom: Allan Turner has suggested that our translation of the second part of the chorus would more accurately read ‘never after the death of a friend was there greater weeping’.
p. 573, line B1: As suggested to us by Allan Turner, for ‘Before I was a boy’ read ‘Long ago when I was a youth’.
p. 662, l. 13: For ‘[Tolkien’s]’ read ‘[the critic’s]’.
p. xlviii, l. 8 from bottom: For ‘heptameter six’ read ‘heptameter seven’.
p. 45, l. 15 from bottom: For ‘umlaut’ read ‘diaeresis’.
p. 99, l. 1: For ‘goddess’ read ‘god’.
p. 279, l. 3 from bottom: For ‘umlaut’ read ‘diaeresis’.
p. 1050, l. 13: For ‘Old English’ read ‘Middle English’. The quotation here is from the Arundel MS 292 in the British Library.
p. 1359: Our friend Constantin has suggested to us that ‘At Last the Time Has Come,’ He Said also has echoes of the Baker in Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark.
p. ii, l. 11 from bottom: For ‘Rings’ read ‘Ring’.
p. xxxvi, l. 12: The poem in Quenya is no. 182.
p. 5, line B14: For ‘morn’ read ‘skies’.
p. 7, note B13: For ‘The ghostly dawning day’ read ‘The glimmering ghost of day’.
p. 7, note B14: Change this note to read: ‘At the end of this line Tolkien first wrote ‘morn’, then corrected it probably at once to ‘skies’.’
p. 7, notes C5, C12, and C13: Add to the start of each of these notes ‘In the following typescript’.
p. 11: On his blog Thoughts on Tolkien ‘tolkiensecretfire’ suggests that the end of version A of Evening ‘implies the offering up of future suffering to the Divine Providence: “the morrow’s ill we leave | Unto God; for day is past,” recalling also Matthew 6:34, “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”’ Also, ‘other phrases in the poem are perhaps oblique references to the Canticle of Simeon’, the Nunc Dimittis, drawn from Luke 2:29–32.
p. 18, note for A13: For ‘an obsolete form of gone’ read ‘a dialectal English form of the verb go’. Some readers have suggested that gan is to be related not to Old English ‘go’ but to OE ginnan ‘begin’, thus ‘gan’ = ‘began’, or else should be understood to mean ‘did’, as Middle English gan is sometimes translated. It seems to us that Tolkien is conveying a sense of going or proceeding, in reference to the setting sun – that the Sirens are summoning ‘Dim Dread and Shapeless Fear’ while this action is occurring, not merely when it begins. The situation is clearer, maybe, in the second version, where in addition to more direct phrasing Tolkien used familiar would (indicating an active event) rather than uncommon gan.
p. 26, l. 21: The note number ‘35’ should read ‘25’, and the note relocated following that for line 8.
p. 54, line A5: For ‘That strange city by the river’ read ‘All the city by the fording’.
p. 63, line C2: In his review of the Collected Poems (Times Literary Supplement, 13 September 2024), John Garth suggests a possible relationship between the imagery of this line and the Sister Songs of Francis Thompson, ‘where mermaids are “the organ-stops of being’s harmony”’.
p. 76, ll. 4–5 from bottom: The first sentence of note F1 refers to Tolkien marking the later typescript; this perhaps is not clear as our note is written.
p. 76, final line: For ‘version E’ read ‘version F’.
p. 77, l. 1: The phrase ‘reedy whispers’ should be identified as found in F4.
p. 77, l. 4: That is, Tolkien first typed ‘shells’ then struck through the final ‘s’. We should have noted also that in the next line of the typescript, Tolkien first typed ‘spells’ then emended it to singular ‘spell’.
p. 114, l. 5 after titling: For ‘partly illegible’ read ‘partly legible’.
p. 143, line D76: For ‘and he tapped’ read ‘and tapped’.
p. 165, l. 6, first word of note B13: For ‘Tinkling’ read ‘Tinkly’.
p. 197, l, 6: For ‘C24’ read ‘C25’.
pp. 225–7: We chose not to pursue the comparison, but in reading the fragments of Empty Chapel we associated them, by their mood, with Arthurian poetry and Pre-Raphaelite art.
pp. 252–3: The line number ‘45’ of version A should appear on the following line (i.e. it is on line 44), and the succeeding line numbers should be adjusted, by fives.
p. 295, l. 4 after titling: For ‘5–9’ read ‘5–8’.
p. 296, l. 3 from bottom: For ‘5–9’ read ‘5–8’.
p. 386: The line number ‘60’ should read ‘55’.
p. 390, l. 6: For ‘D60–61’ read ‘D55–56’.
p. 390, l. 9: For ‘l. 60’ read ‘l. 55’.
p. 399, l. 14 after titling: For ‘near which’ read ‘near to which’.
p. 427, add note for A13, 16: In regard to hooves and rooves as used in The Cat and the Fiddle, Tolkien wrote in an abandoned draft of Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings: ‘I always had a love of the plurals that did not go according to the simplest rule: loaves, and elves, and wolves, and leaves; and wreaths and houses (which I should have liked better spelt wreathes and houzes); and I persist in hooves and rooves according to ancient authority’ (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996), pp. 24–5). His comment there was related to his preferred spelling dwarves rather than dwarfs, which he called a ‘childhood habit’.
p. 472, l. 11 after titling: For ‘2020’ read ‘1920’.
p. 527: In The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide we wrote – and in writing the Collected Poems forgot that we wrote – that the first of the ‘enigmas’ ‘was written no later than 26 June 1922, when Tolkien sent a copy to Henry Bradley for his amusement. The version in A Northern Venture has only slight differences, mainly in punctuation’ (Reader’s Guide, p. 344). Notably, in addition to the use of ‘th’ for Anglo-Saxon eth and thorn, several words conjoined in the 1922 manuscript are printed with hyphens, such as ‘glæs-hluttor’ in line 3 (i.e. rather than ‘glæshluttor’), ‘scienost’ is written ‘scynost’ in line 7, and the final word in line 10 is followed by a full stop, not an exclamation mark.
Tolkien sent the text to Bradley on a postcard from Leeds, in which he modestly allows that his Old English may be ‘dubious’. There he gave the poem the title Enigma Saxonicum Nuper ‘Inventum’ (‘Saxon Riddle Newly “Discovered”’), winking at his ‘discovery’ by putting the final word in quotation marks. The manuscript postcard was published, very small but legible, in a leaflet issued in conjunction with the 1999 exhibition ‘The Oxford Inklings’ at the Museum of Oxford. We did in fact lack manuscript copies of both ‘enigmas’ in the main body of papers sent us at the start of the Poems project, but overlooked the 1922 text in our Tolkien correspondence file.
The date at the head of p. 527, ‘?1923’, would still apply to the second ‘enigma’, and the placement of these two poems in the order of our book is still not inapt.
p. 527, Old English line 5: For ‘glaes-hluttor’ read ‘glæs-hluttor’. The first reading is a direct transcription from A Northern Venture, but probably should be emended to the æ ligature to conform with all other instances with ‘ae’. The printer may have overlooked ‘glaes-’ or did not have enough of the æ sort, which from the mis-alignment of the instances present appears to have been dropped in from a different font.
p. 527, Old English line 10: For ‘sine’ read ‘sinc’.
p. 530, l. 5 after titling: For ‘his original riddles’ read ‘one of his original riddles’.
p. 541, line C12: For ‘woodlands’ read ‘woodland’.
p. 541, line C25: For ‘A wandering fire with’ read ‘That wandering fire hath’.
p. 542, line C54: For ‘Of’ read ‘The’.
p. 551: Tolkien used the lines in Old English also in a ‘preamble’ associated with the Quenta Silmarillion; see The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 203.
p. 598, l. 23: For ‘20–1))’ read ‘20–1)’.
pp. 769–73: Christopher Tolkien dimly recalled, in a letter to John D. Rateliff, that his father may have used a form of recitative – a type of music between speaking and singing – when reading Far over the Misty Mountains Cold to his sons. See Rateliff, The History of The Hobbit, p. 66.
p. 857: On later re-reading the start of Monday Morning – ‘The sun was early shining bright, | but not of course for my delight’ – thoughts arose of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Walrus and the Carpenter’: ‘The sun was shining on the sea, | Shining with all his might’. Not that Tolkien need have had the same thoughts when he wrote his poem.
p. 902, l. 27: For ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’ read ‘The Pirates of Penzance’.
pp. 971–2: Kristine Larsen reminds us, in her ‘“The World Withers and the Wind Rises”: Apocalyptic Language in “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” and “The Fall of Arthur”’ (2024), that Tolkien suggested to the BBC that the lines for the Dirige late in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son might be replaced by lines from the medieval Latin poem ‘Dies Irae’ (‘Day of Wrath’).
p. 986, ll. 3–4: The Völuspá is the first poem in the Codex Regius and in most printed editions, but is placed later in some.
p. 1002, l. 4 after titling: For ‘Völuspa’ read ‘Völuspá’.
p. 1054, l. 15 from bottom: When we wrote that the calligraphic manuscript Tolkien gave to R.W. Chambers is in ‘a medieval style’, we meant that its script, format, and decoration give it the appearance of early manuscripts. We neglected to say, however, that Tolkien also made selective use of medieval letterforms – the ‘long s’ (an alternate form of the minuscule, ‘lower case’, letter) and the yogh (ȝ) for gh – as well as other early conventions, such as y for th (standing in for the Anglo-Saxon thorn, þ), as in ye (written as y with e above) for ‘the’, i for j (iudge, iesting for judge, jesting), u for v (neuer, paued for never, paved), and the macron above a vowel in place of a consonant (ūkīd for unkind). In our transcription we modernized these features for ease of reading.
p. 1055, ll. 4–5: Although the original Chambers–Husbands–Brown manuscript of Doworst is still not located, a photocopy of it surfaced, after our book had gone to press, which has been made available to us by the Tolkien Estate.
p. 1055, l. 6 from bottom: For ‘closely echo’ read, more precisely, ‘parallel’.
p. 1056, ll. 22–3: Having now been able to compare the complete Chambers–Husbands–Brown manuscript with the Hooper manuscript, we can say that the former (text A) is, for the most part, identical with the latter (text B). It has different divisions of stanzas, it contains markedly fewer commas, hyphens, and exclamation marks, and in many places it has different punctuation, such as dashes for brackets (parentheses), and occasionally capital letters where B does not. It also has a few notably different readings, given here by line number relative to B, and with our italics to emphasize variants:
6: with bow big & broad as a butterfly’s wings
28: so I crept to a corner & cowered in the shadows
45: those unhappy behind then hissed through their teeth
51: than appears on your papers, as I puzzle them out
53: there is no haste here nor hurry, you are wholly at ease —
77: give dates if you dare, that your doom be more light
91: was their bishop, & books he brought in his boat
102: without word he then waggled a wavering hand
113: Look out when he laugheth! As like then as not
116: and he shook all in silence with [some omitted] secret delight
123: Then the prisoner was pleased & plucking up heart
127: and he pottered with poetry for profit in age
128: they found him a fellowship when failing in years
152: But I marvelled how that master then mightily spake
154: each cutting & clear, & some cruel at the point
155: till the boy at the board [there omitted] blenched at the thrust
174: but [a omitted] light seemed to dawn at length on his darkness
181: and the publicity agents that blear all our eyes
195: and drove him to the doors with dint of their boots
196: & he shrieked as the shut, that I shivered in my shoes
200: What became of those clerks, I cared not to ask!
214: that dons may have dignity and their dooms mercy
217: The world withered away as winter approached
218: [Then seed-time ensued, season of labour i.e. complete line omitted]
225: Neither countryman nor clerk has all corn for his swink
It is not possible to be certain if text A was written before B, or vice versa. Text B is a fair copy, subsequent to drafts now lost or at least not located. Text A, the Chambers–Husbands–Brown manuscript, is also a fair copy, possibly of the Hooper manuscript or perhaps of whatever preceded B. At least some of the differences between the two manuscripts probably occurred while Tolkien was writing the decorated manuscript A, amending as he went and judging how much, or little, space he had available to fill. Other differences may have been due simply to Tolkien having second thoughts. The two manuscripts are, at least, roughly of the same period, while the typescript (C) was made only after Tolkien had time to reconsider some of his choices, such as the use of the name ‘Atkins’.
The Hooper manuscript, as we have called it, almost certainly was made by Tolkien for C.S. Lewis, and later acquired by Walter Hooper when he was an executor of Lewis’s estate. Lewis was Tolkien’s friend and fellow examiner in the events behind Doworst, and likely to be amused by the poetic treatment. One wonders if Tolkien made copies as well for Wrenn and Brett-Smith, who were no less his friends and colleagues.
p. 1056, line B5: For ‘there was knotted’ read ‘was there knotted’.
p. 1057, line B16: For ‘pave’ read ‘paved’.
p. 1057, line B36: For ‘sat down’ read ‘sat him down’.
p. 1058, line B58: For ‘at last’ read ‘at the last’.
p. 1059, line B95: For ‘name’ read ‘noun’.
p. 1060: In our transcription we overlooked a line which follows B146 (‘as a tonsure . . .’) and completes the sentence: ‘ungentle was his jowl and jutting his jaw.’ This reading also appears in text A, and is revised in text C (line 97). Inserting the missing line in text B alters the line numbering from line 149 to the end, and requires revision of note references for B within this range on p. 1072.
p. 1061, line B200 (i.e. B201): For ‘dared not ask’ read ‘cared not [to] ask’.
p. 1065, l. 3 from bottom: For ‘Johon’ read ‘Iohon’.
p. 1095, line E101: For ‘as morn’ read ‘at morn’.
p. 1177: We see, belatedly, that Verlyn Flieger earlier compared When Winter First Begins to Bite to ‘When icicles hang by the wall’, stating in ‘Poems by Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings’ (2006) that Tolkien’s verse ‘inevitably recalls’ Shakespeare’s song (p. 526).
p. 1203, line B16: For ‘Námarie’ read ‘Námarië’.
pp. 1230–4: It is curious that in earlier drafts of The Lord of the Rings Tolkien wrote of the Stone of Erech as one of the Seeing-stones or palantíri, but at the same time, in the rhyming prophecy, as a landmark at which the men of the Mountains would blow their horns. Later, Tolkien wrote of ‘a black stone, according to legend brought from Númenor, set up to mark the meeting place of Isildur and Anárion with the last king of the dark men of the Mountains’, separate from a palantír at Erech ‘buried in a vault’ (The War of the Ring, p. 397), before finally omitting the latter.
p. 1275, line D1: For ‘seas’ read ‘sea’.
p. 1276, line D40: For ‘feet’ read ’roots’.
pp. 1277–8: The line numbers from ‘75’ should proceed instead, by fives, from ‘70’, also taking into account that the line presently numbered ‘75’ is in fact line 71.
p. 1277, line D91 (i.e. line D87): For ‘fled’ read ‘rose’.
p. 1278, line D123 (i.e. line D119): For ‘the world’ read ‘this world’.
p. 1281, note D107–108: The note number should read ‘D103–104’.
p. 1296, line A2: For ‘aluvallie’ read ‘aluvalle’.
p. 1296, line A8: For ‘’ekkene’ read ‘ekkene’. The mark before the word is now considered, by Carl Hostetter and Arden Smith, who have reviewed the manuscript, to be a stray mark on the paper rather than an indication of an elided vowel.
p. 1297, line A12: For ‘Eldar’ read ‘Eldalie’.
p. 1297, line A14: For ‘to trees’ read ‘the trees’.
p. 1297, lines A15–16: In correspondence with us, Carl Hostetter suggests that Tolkien’s intent was to produce in A16 ‘know all but love’, a reading ‘(somewhat) supported in the interpolated Elvish, which developed as: i alar mele ‘who do-not love [aorist sg.]’ > i méle alar ista ‘who love [noun] do-not know [aorist sg.]’’. This may be so, in which case ‘know[n]’ is incorrect, but our transcription must stand as Tolkien did not delete ‘have’ at the end of A15 or ‘not’ in A16.
Carl also suggests that the final words of A16 might read ‘who break to [?possess]’, and that they continue in the manuscript ‘and destroy to [?command ?conceal]’. These too, he argues, are supported by Tolkien’s Elvish jottings, which include saka, sahta (or sakk-?), from the root SKAT ‘break asunder’, sakkante ‘rent’, etc.; askalar, askaltar, cf. root SKAL ‘cover, veil, cloak, conceal’; and herutande, cf. heru ‘lord’, thus ?heruta, (verb) ‘lord, rule, command’. Like the end of A16, this portion of manuscript is difficult to read, but we are inclined to accept Carl's suggestion, with which Arden Smith concurs, but with ‘command’ in A16 more likely in our view than ‘conceal’. In any case, we overlooked the additional line of English text among the Elvish, thus the manuscript is not incomplete as we state following text A.
p. 1297, l. 10: Delete ‘in pencil’. The manuscript is written in fact in light blue ballpoint pen (biro).
p. 1297, line B1: For ‘Anduini’ read ‘Anduine’. Carl Hostetter has suggested that a mark above the final e in the manuscript is a slip of Tolkien’s pen, though possibly an indicator of secondary stress. To our eyes, it appears to be deliberately made, in the form of a grave accent (thus ‘Anduinè’), but we cannot be certain of this, and Arden Smith has argued against it, also in private correspondence. The name is given in B1 in the printed Collected Poems as ‘Anduini’ because the final character appeared to be an i, taking the mark above the line to be the dot of the letter; in Quenya, however, ‘Anduini’ would be plural.
p. 1297, line B4: For ‘yásier’ read ‘yárier’. The third letter of this word is not certain, but we are willing to accept the second form based on clearly written ‘yárier’ in A4.
p. 1297, lines B11–12: Carl Hostetter wonders if the final phrase of the poem in fact reads ‘who to possess things break them and seek lordship in destruction’, and holds that in any case ‘hate the green’ in line 10 is not correct, relative to the text in Quenya. We find it difficult to see some of these suggested words in the manuscript of B, however, and stand by our reading (while admitting a degree of uncertainty). In versions A and B, it is not clear if Tolkien first wrote in Quenya and then in English (or vice versa), or if he developed his thoughts independently while writing in each language, until he reached the final written text in C.
p. 1298, line C4: For ‘yásier’ read ‘yárier’. The third letter of this word is not certain, but we are willing to accept the second form based on ‘yárier’ in A4.
p. 1298, l. 24 from bottom: For ‘said’ read ‘wrote’. (Our thanks to Carl Hostetter for pointing out this distinction.) This text is from Tolkien’s written speech. As delivered orally on the occasion, it was in a similar but abbreviated form, notably without the words in Dutch: ‘I look east, and west; and I look north, and south; and I do not see a Sauron. But I see very many descendants of Saruman. And I think we Hobbits, now, we have no magic weapons against them. And yet, dear gentle-hobbits, may I conclude by giving you this toast: To the Hobbits, and may they outlast all the Wizards!’
We have only now noticed that Humphrey Carpenter gives in his Biography, pp. 225–6, what is said to be the conclusion of the speech. In fact, his quotation combines part of a sentence from earlier in the text (‘that it is now exactly twenty years . . .’) with an abbreviated portion of the concluding words as Tolkien wrote them. In his reconstruction of the ‘Hobbit Maaltijd’, René van Rossenberg thanks Christopher Tolkien for searching his father’s papers for the Rotterdam speech, before concluding that it must be lost; we know now that it has survived, but it also must have been available to Carpenter while writing the Biography.
p. 1325, line G89: For ‘old shadows’ read ‘own shadows’.
p. 1361: We have now seen a copy of the corrected typescript Tolkien sent to Shenandoah, and related correspondence (Washington and Lee University Special Collections and Archives). He was invited to make a contribution to the journal in Auden’s honour probably in August 1966. On 26 August he informed the editor that he could not meet a deadline of 15 December, and was granted an extension. Despite the press of other work, he was able to produce his poem for Auden by 12 January 1967. As typed, it bears no title; at the end, Tolkien wrote ‘for W.H.A.’ as a dedication, which the editor took to be an appropriate title and wrote it at the head of the text.
p. 1362, line 37: For ‘whose’ read ‘who’.
p. 1366, text C: On 26 September 2024, Joe Hoffman noted in his blog Idiosophy (‘Tolkien Wrote Limericks?!’) that ‘There was an old monk of Algeria’, etc. seemed familiar. A Google search led to the 10 July 1902 issue of Life (the earlier, general interest and humour incarnation of that title, before it became a photo-news magazine) in which a very similar limerick was mentioned as ascribed to the (then recently deceased) American writer and humourist Frank R. Stockton:
There was an old monk of Siberia
Whose life it grew drearier and drearier
Till he broke from his cell
With a hell of a yell
And eloped with the Mother Superior.
The poem, said the Evening Sun (possibly the New York City newspaper, from which Life quoted), ‘had its origin at Trinity College, Dublin, and has been well known in university circles here and abroad for generations. The Stockton version [i.e. the one ascribed to him in other publications] is simply an adaptation for the drawing-room’ (p. 40). Joe Hoffman comments that Tolkien’s version ‘seems more of a bowdlerization than a composition’.
The similarity of the two texts does seem to indicate that Tolkien adapted an existing limerick, and did not invent a new poem of his own. In his text he omits profanity and, rather than elope with a nun, the ‘old monk’ devours a priest as an extreme consequence of the fasting introduced in line 2. Other printings of the ‘monk of Siberia’ version, as in some twentieth-century limerick collections, have minor variations one to the other, such as ‘——’ for ‘hell’ and ‘Lady Superior’ for ‘Mother Superior’.
Did Tolkien read the ‘monk of Siberia’ version in Life, or some other magazine? In print, the poem is usually considered to be of American origin, and Life was an American publication, though also sold in Britain. If the Evening Sun is correct – that it came originally from Dublin and was ‘well known in university circles’ – then Tolkien might have come across it at Oxford after matriculating there in 1911. He wrote (undated) limericks C and D in the sketchbook he called The Book of Ishness, probably around 1912, to judge by the location of the leaf relative to datable work. By that year, Algeria had been in the news due to a rise in nationalism, resisted by its ruling nation, France, which could have prompted a change in line 1 from ‘Siberia’. But if Tolkien did adapt the well-known limerick, we still do not know the text with which he began.
We have found no evidence that limerick D, ‘An irascible party of Cofton’, etc., is not original to Tolkien.
p. 1404, l. 15: For ‘he notes’ read ‘Christopher Tolkien notes’.
pp. 1404–5: In regard to Tolkien’s familiarity with ‘Jabberwocky’, we should also note his comment in his 1936 British Academy lecture, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics:
But it is plainly only in the consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view or conviction an be reached or steadily held. For it is of their [critics’] nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another. Noble animals, whose burbling is on occasion good to hear; but though their eyes of flame may sometimes prove searchlights, their range is short. [The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 9]
p. 1419, l. 26: For ‘gan, ’gan gone 5, 7, 88’ read ‘gan go 5, 88; ’gan began 7’.
p. 1476, col. 1, entry for Bradley, Henry: Add reference for p. 527.
p. 1482, col. 1, l. 11: For ‘HMS Pinafore’ read ‘The Pirates of Penzance’.
p. 1498, col. 1, entry for Tolkien, Christopher, l. 2: Add reference for p. 1404.
p. 1501, col. 2, entry for Yorkshire Poetry: Add reference for p. 427.
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