calimac

It may seem hard to believe at this point that there's a whole area of Tolkien's creative writing that's been virtually untouched by publication, but there is. This is the work he did, mostly in the late 1920s and early 1930s, retelling some of the great existing Northern myths. There's the translations of Beowulf (an incomplete one in alliterative verse, and a complete but unpolished one in prose) that caused a brief news flurry a few years ago; there's a reportedly intriguing little short story on the story behind Beowulf that almost saw publication in his lifetime, but the magazine folded; there's another incomplete alliterative poem on The Fall of Arthur, quoted briefly in Humphrey Carpenter's biography.

And then there's what's to be published in May as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, Tolkien's contribution to a famous heroic epic told and retold in the Eddas, the Völsunga Saga, and the Nibelungenlied, and best known as retold further by Richard Wagner in his Ring cycle of operas. I say "contribution to" the story because the details are not clear. We know of two long completed poems - which together would make a full but not over-large book - in the eight-line alliterative verse stanzas of the Eddas. Tolkien gave them titles in Old Norse and was perfectly capable of writing the whole poem in that language as well, but if they're what's being published, presumably they're in English. The translated titles are "The New Lay of the Völsungs" and "The New Lay of Gudrún", which should give an idea of the subjects if you know the stories from elsewhere, and along with a suggestion that Tolkien's inspiration was to fill a gap in the surviving text of the Poetic Edda, that's about all we know.

The publishers say that "we are confident that Tolkien fans will be fascinated by it," but given the rather puzzled general reaction to The Children of Húrin a couple years ago - though that was Middle-earth material, in prose, and published in a form intended to be user-friendly - I suspect the fascinated Tolkien fans in question will be mostly a hermetic few such as myself. But we'll find out, and I'll report on it when I see it.