Could Gollum Be Singing a Sonnet?: The Poetic Project of The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings is, in many ways, a manifesto: an argument for the value of old things. J.R.R. Tolkien, in his Middle-earth writings, is making a claim for the worth of old myths and legends, re-forged into new and exciting forms (Shippey, Road 181–82; Kraus 146; Chance and Siewers 2; Nagy 30). Old values, too, are recuperated and resurrected in the books—honor, valor, friendship, loyalty, tradition; though they are interwoven with a post-WWI awareness that other values—mercy, humility, pacifism, ordinariness—are equally important. Tolkien's endeavor, in large part, was to show that themes, values, and stories which had fallen out of fashion were still exciting and worthwhile. In this article, I will argue that Tolkien's recuperative and regenerative project extended to his poetry as well. Far from being mere "insertions"¹ into the real story, the poetry of The Lord of the Rings makes a claim about the value of older poetic forms, as well as their content and subject-matter. The poems and songs in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings demonstrate the worth of out-of-date, nontrendy, de-valued poetic forms—medieval and traditional forms which may no longer glitter, but which are still gold (Russom 53; Shippey, "Indexing" 238).

Tolkien deliberately eschewed the lyric or autobiographical poetry in vogue in his day; instead, his verses contribute to character and racial development. As he himself wrote to his son, "the verses in The L.R. are all dramatic: they do not express the poor old professor's soul-searchings, but are fitted in style and contents to the characters in the story that sing or recite them, and to the situations in it" (Letters 396).² They have traditionally been received as such (see Stroda, Kelly, Drout, Phelpstead, "With Chunks," Forest-Hill "Poetic Form"). For example, Tolkien's choice to include a loose translation of "The Wanderer" in The Lord of the Rings as the poem most representative of Rohan is entirely appropriate, since he modeled much of Rohan's language and society on the Anglo-Saxons (Shippey, Author 96–97; Flieger 528–29; Tinkler 164–69; Amendt-Raduege 119–20). Thus all of the poetry of the Rohirrim is in Old English-style alliterative verse (Lee and Solopova 195; Meyer 180; Phelpstead, "Auden" 444).³ Likewise, just as it is appropriate for the Rohirrim to use Old English alliterative styles, so it is appropriate for the goblins of The Hobbit to sing thoroughly onomatopoeic songs, filled with harsh plosive consonants, in spondaic dimeter.⁴ The hobbits and dwarves sing primarily in common meter or long meter, while wiser, more complex characters such as Galadriel, Treebeard, and Tom Bombadil use hexameter or octameter. Yet Tolkien's use of poetic form goes beyond mere characterization or appropriateness. As Tom Shippey says, "Tolkien's idea of poetry mirrored his ideas on language; in neither did he think sound should be divorced from sense" (Road 196). Tolkien uses various forms to convey meaning and emotion in his poems, and he deploys this variety of poetic form to fashion an implicit argument for the redemption of traditional English forms and the reclamation of the seriousness of poetic styles now perceived as childish or comedic.

In terms of form, Tolkien was a virtuoso poet: the verses in The Lord of the Rings demonstrate his mastery of an astonishing variety and range of poetic structures. They also show extreme care with and attention to rhyme, rhythm, and overall sound.⁵ The majority of the poems of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are in common or ballad meter (lines of iambic tetrameter alternating with lines of iambic trimeter) or long meter (iambic tetrameter), but there are poems in hexameter, heptameter, octameter, amphibrachic dimeter, dactylic trimeter, Old English alliterative meter, and free verse;⁶ the rhyme schemes range from abab to couplets to more complex forms, including a sestet (Aragorn's song of Gondor). Significantly, the only verse form Tolkien doesn't use is the form that...