Wayne and Christina


Addenda and Corrigenda to
The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024)

Edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond

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’. For pointing out errors or points of interest post-publication, we are grateful to ‘CaptAwsm’, ‘Éarendel’, ‘elliottlash’, John Garth, Carl Hostetter, ‘Ibid 11962’, ‘lorehouse’, Erik Mueller-Harder, ‘onthetrail’, ‘Philomythos’, Arden Smith, ‘tolkiensecretfire’, and ‘Zionius’.

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, note 35: The line number 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, note D60–61: The note number should read ‘55–56’, and the reference in the final line of the note should 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. 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 judged 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. 1277–1278: 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 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, l. 2 from bottom: Add reference for p. 527.

p. 1482, col. 1, l. 11: For ‘HMS Pinafore’ read ‘The Pirates of Penzance’.

p. 1498, col. 1, l. 2: Add reference for p. 1404.

p. 1501, col. 2, l. 23: Add reference for p. 427.

Supplemental Bibliography:

Garth, John. ‘Full of Sound and Faërie’. Times Literary Supplement, 13 September 2024. review of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Hoffman, Joe. ‘Tolkien Wrote Limericks?!’ Idiosophy (blog), 26 September 2024.

Larsen, Kristine. ‘“The World Withers and the Wind Rises”: Apocalyptic Language in “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” and “The Fall of Arthur”’. essay. Journal of Tolkien Research 18, no. 2 (2024), article 9.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Peoples of Middle-earth (vol. 12 of The History of Middle-earth). Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 1996.

Tolkiensecretfire. ‘An Evening Reflection’. Thoughts on Tolkien (blog), 5 October 2024.

[ go to home page ]
[ go to addenda and corrigenda page ]

Copyright © 2024 by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond
This page was last updated on 10 November 2024
Design by NimbleFingers