Tolkien and Alliterative Verse

A significant publication for anyone interested in Tolkien’s alliterative poetry or his views on Old English metre is Peter Grybauskas’s recent edition of Tolkien’s Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son and ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’. That’s quite a title, but it indicates the important contents of this volume, most of which have only been available in manuscript before this.

We’ll be commenting on other parts of this edition here in the weeks to come, but today I want to point out an important resource for researchers looking into Tolkien’s alliterative poetry, his essay on “The Tradition of Versification in Old English, with special reference to the Battle of Maldon and its alliteration.” I have spent many happy hours in the Bodleian Library at Oxford reading this lecture among Tolkien’s unpublished papers and quoting from it in some of my “Homecoming” articles, but I recognize how privileged I have been to be able to do that. Now the lecture is widely available in this edition, along with a short excerpt from another piece, “Alliteration on ‘G’ in The Battle of Maldon.”

Here is one lovely passage that caught my eye and that might whet your appetite to read more:

But a poem perishes even as it is being uttered. To live it must be preserved in memory and be after repeated. And men die quicker than pictures or monuments; and the time soon comes when the memory must pass into a different mind and the repetition to another mouth, or perish. And this whole prolongation of life, this ‘tradition’ can only normally be accomplished in and through the language, the ‘habitual’ element and the most changeable.

“Tradition of Versification,” page 97

The final version of “The Homecoming” that is part of this edition has been available in other publications, such as Tree and Leaf, but there is much more previously unpublished material in this volume. Stay tuned for more reviews of the contents here.

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J.R.R. Tolkien, Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son and ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’. Edited by Peter Grybauskas, HarperCollins, 2023. See the Tolkien Collector’s Guide for information on different editions.