Award-winning world first publication of the collected poems of J.R.R. Tolkien spanning almost
seven decades of the author's life and presented in an elegant three-volume hardback boxed set.
Winner of the 2025 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inkling Studies J.R.R. Tolkien aspired to be
a poet in the first instance and poetry was part of his creative life no less than his prose
his languages and his art. Although Tolkien's readers are aware that he wrote poetry if only
from verses in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings its extent is not well known and its
qualities are underappreciated. Within his larger works of fiction poems help to establish
character and place as well as further the story as individual works they delight with words
and rhyme. They express his love of nature and the seasons of landscape and music and of
words. They convey his humour and his sense of wonder. The earliest work in this collection
written for his beloved is dated to 1910 when Tolkien was eighteen. More poems would follow
during his years at Oxford some of them very elaborate and eccentric. Those he composed during
the First World War in which he served in France tend to be concerned not with trenches and
battle but with life loss faith and friendship his longing for England and the wife he
left behind. Beginning in 1914 elements of his legendarium 'The Silmarillion' began to
appear and the 'Matter of Middle-earth' would inspire much of Tolkien's verse for the rest of
his life. Within The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien almost 250 works are presented across
three volumes including more than 70 that have never before been seen. The poems are deftly
woven together with commentary and notes by world-renowned Tolkien scholars Christina Scull &
Wayne G. Hammond placing them in the context of Tolkien's life and literary accomplishments
and creating a poetical biography that is a unique and revealing celebration of J.R.R. Tolkien.
