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April's Suite101 column: And now...for the rest of the poem

June 05, 2002 at 02:45:56

What was the key event which led to the publication of The Lord of the Rings? Was it really the publication of The Hobbit, or should we look to something else entirely? The answer may be as surprising as any revelation in the history of Tolkien's world.

It could be said that, but for an obscure thirteenth century manuscript, The Lord of the Rings might never have seen publication. Most people who have expressed something more than a passing fancy sooner or later hear that Tolkien actually pulled The Lord of the Rings from consideration by its eventual published, George Allen & Unwin, and submitted the work instead to Milton Waldman at Collins. But what may not be such common knowledge is the fact that Tolkien was enticed back into the George Allen & Unwin camp because of a poem he had written years before, which in turn made use of the word sigaldry.

And sigaldry, it turns out, was a word Tolkien had gleaned from a 1200's era manuscript. I have no idea of what manuscript it was, nor even what language the word comes from. It is a lost and forgotten word, except for the fact that Tolkien used it in a relatively minor poem which had a profound impact upon modern literature.

Tolkien composed the poem in either the late 1920s or the early 1930s and he submitted it to the informal literary group known as The Inklings. In a letter to Rayner Unwin, Tolkien speculated that the poem had taken on a life of its own from that very circle of friends, rather than from The Oxford Magazine, which published a version of the work on November 9, 1933. The poem must have been so striking to at least one member of its initial audience that he committed it to memory and then passed on the poem to someone else.

Tolkien forgot about the poem as he turned his attention to other projects. He wrote The Hobbit, Mr. Bliss, and a few other things. Of course, he continued to develop The Silmarillion and eventually went on to write The Lord of the Rings. But when Tolkien became impatient with George Allen & Unwin, who balked at publishing so huge a book in the early 1950s (a time when there was a paper shortage, and hence when book publishing was less profitable), he turned to Milton Waldman at Collins.

Now, Collins is still around today, as is George Allen & Unwin. They are both part of the conglomerate HarperCollins. So, even though Tolkien returned to the fold in 1952, Collins eventually won out by merging with Harper and then buying out George Allen & Unwin. And though the history of the publishers Tolkien dealt with may not seem to have anything to do with this one interesting poem, it does, in fact, have everything to do with that poem.

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