[Parution VO] The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien - Scull & Hammond

[Bergelmir]

C'est vraiment une excellente nouvelle !
Cela faisait un certain temps que c'était dans les tuyaux et c'est vraiment génial de voir que le projet s'est finalement bien concrétisé.

Quelques détails importants supplémentaires à propos du décompte des poèmes ont été postés sur TCG et je vous les cite ici.
(Cela devrait te plaire, Elendil  )

The Amazon description, which we didn't see before it was posted, seems to be based on our initial report to Christopher in December 2016, or on the one we wrote for Estate and publisher in May 2020, in particular its statement about "almost 200 works" and "more than 60 that have never before been seen". We had guessed, way back when, that Tolkien wrote between 250 and 300 poems altogether, without knowing how many one would, or could, include in a collection, and that "some 60" poems among the scans we received were unpublished. We knew, however, of other unpublished poems not in that group of scans, which we had seen at the Bodleian, and later we learned of still more.

We say in our blog post that the Collected Poems will include "at least 240 discrete poems". This does, as we also say, depend on one's definition. Some of the poems morph in their evolution so much that one could either count a work as a single entity in a variety of forms, or as a variety of separate poems that are closely related. Hence our vagueness about the number: we didn't want to overhype it.

There's a similar issue with counting which poems have been published and which haven't. The best we can say is that among the poems we include, 77 have not been published before in any form, or only a few lines from them have appeared, e.g. in Carpenter's biography. But that is to leave out alternate, unpublished forms of some poems included in The History of Middle-earth, an extreme example of which is the sequence The Grimness of the Sea > The Tides > Sea Chant of an Elder Day > Sea-Song of an Elder Day > The Horns of Ulmo > The Horns of Ylmir. Christopher Tolkien included only the latter of these in full in The Shaping of Middle-earth, with notes on and snippets from some earlier versions, and by the time one reaches the text at the end of the evolution, only about one-half of one line of The Grimness of the Sea has survived! At any rate, there will be a lot that's new.

Wayne & Christina