page_title: Poetry in The Lord of the Rings
section_title: Supplementing narrative
hierarchical_section_title: Poetry in The Lord of the Rings / Embedded poetry / Supplementing narrative
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece of Life and Death of Jason by William Morris, published by Kelmscott Press, 1895
context_page_description: The poetry in The Lord of the Rings consists of the poems and songs written by J. R. R. Tolkien, interspersed with the prose of his book on his fantasy world of Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings. The book contains over 60 pieces of verse of many kinds; some poems related to the book were published separately. Seven of Tolkien's songs, all but one from The Lord of the Rings, were made into a song-cycle, The Road Goes Ever On, set to music by Donald Swann. All the poems in The Lord of the Rings were set to music and published on CDs by The Tolkien Ensemble.
  The verse is of many kinds, including for wandering, marching to war, drinking, and having a bath; narrating ancient myths, riddles, prophecies, and magical incantations; of praise and lament. Some of these forms were found in Old English poetry. Tolkien stated that all his poems and songs were dramatic in function, not seeking to express the poet's emotions, but throwing light on the characters, such as Bilbo Baggins, Sam Gamgee, and Aragorn, who sing or recite them.
context_section_description: The narrative of The Lord of the Rings is supplemented throughout by verse, in the form of over 60 poems and songs. Thomas Kullmann, a scholar of English literature, notes that this was unconventional for 20th century novels. The verses include songs of many genres: for wandering, marching to war, drinking, and having a bath; narrating ancient myths, riddles, prophecies, and magical incantations; of praise and lament (elegy). Kullman states that some, such as riddles, charms, elegies, and narrating heroic actions are found in Old English poetry.
  Michael Drout, a Tolkien scholar and encyclopedist, wrote that most of his students admitted to skipping the poems when reading The Lord of the Rings, something that Tolkien was aware of.
  Tolkien stated that his verse differed from conventional modern poetry which aimed to express the poet's emotions: "the verses in [The Lord of the Rings] 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". The Tolkien scholar Andrew Higgins wrote that Drout had made a "compelling case" for studying it. The poetry was, Drout wrote, essential for the fiction to work aesthetically and thematically; it added information not given in the prose; and it brought out characters and their backgrounds. Another Tolkien scholar, Allan Turner, suggested that Tolkien may have learnt the method of embedding multiple types of verse into a text from William Morris's The Life and Death of Jason, possibly, Turner suggests, the model for Tolkien's projected Tale of Earendel.
  Brian Rosebury, a scholar of humanities, writes that the distinctive thing about Tolkien's verse is its "individuation of poetic styles to suit the expressive needs of a given character or narrative moment", giving as examples of its diversity the "bleak incantation" of the Barrow-Wight; Gollum's "comic-funereal rhythm" in The cold hard lands / They bites our hands; the Marching Song of the Ents; the celebratory psalm of the Eagles; the hymns of the Elves; the chants of the Dwarves; the "song-speech" of Tom Bombadil; and the Hobbits' diverse songs, "variously comic and ruminative and joyful".
caption: Tolkien may have taken the method of embedding poems in a text from William Morris's 1895 Life and Death of Jason (frontispiece shown).[4]
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