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 publisher, 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.
Tolkien may have forgotten about it, but the oral audience did not. They passed it on, literary don to student or friend, friend to friend, relative to relative. In time, the poem came to Rayner Unwin’s attention, and he wrote to Tolkien to ask about the poem. Allen & Unwin, apparently, wanted to publish some of Tolkien’s poetry. They were by this time doing quite well with the second edition of The Hobbit and had also published Farmer Giles of Ham. Tolkien was turning out some money for the firm, so naturally they were motivated to engage in a little fence-mending.
Tolkien, for his part, had only recently to that time been contacted by “a lady unknown to me making a similar enquiry” about the very same poem. He told Unwin that his correspondent confessed “that a friend had recently written out for her from memory some verses that had so taken her fancy that she was determined to discover their origin. He had picked them up from his son-in-law who had learned them in Washington D.C. (!): but nothing was known about their source save a vague idea that they were connected with English universities….”
Well, obviously, the lady found the source of her mysterious verses in J.R.R. Tolkien, who happily acknowledged having written them. “I must say I was interested in becoming ‘folk-lore’,” he told Unwin. “Also, it was intriguing to get an oral version — which bore out my views on oral tradition (at any rate in early stages): sc. that the ‘hard words’ are well preserved, and the more common words altered, but the metre is often disturbed.”
Tolkien’s metre may have been more disturbing than disturbed. He described it as “depending on trisyllabic assonances or near-assonances, which is so difficult that except in this one example I have never been able to use it again — it just blew out in a single impulse).”
Well, Humphrey Carpenter, editor of the Letters, couldn’t let that statement go unchallenged. Tolkien did, it seems, use the “trisyllabic assonances or near-assonances” again. And he used them in…The Lord of the Rings.
Carpenter also tells us about Tolkien’s use of the word sigaldry, and its source from a 13th century manuscript, in an end-note to the Rayner Unwin letter. The anecdote itself is traced to a letter Tolkien wrote to Donald Swann in 1966. Swann, you may recall, composed the music for The Road Goes Ever On, which was first published in 1967.
Swann had first come across the poem in 1949, years before Rayner Unwin heard of it. “I had been given this poem by a friend,” Swann wrote in the foreword to The Road Goes Ever On. “He had found it…in a school magazine”. Swann did not know who the author was, because the friend’s copy of the poem was marked “Anon.”.
Swann, too, mentions the extensive oral tradition of the poem (as described to him by Tolkien). People continued to pass it around, often without attribution, and with many variations. And, it seems, the poem is still being passed around today, by people who perhaps have no knowledge of where it first came from, or what it’s relationship is to the most popular book of the twentieth century.
It would seem a shame to tell them what they have found, for we would snap an oral tradition which Tolkien himself seemed a bit in awe of. So, if you find a copy of the poem without proper title or attribution, say nothing. Though this might seem an egregious breech of the respect we pay a great author, think of it as he did: living proof of his theory about oral traditions (or at least their very early stages). To see the bird take wing is special, but to watch it in mid-flight, as it soars above, completely unaware of the observer — that is miraculous.
This poem is not special simply because it has achieved something nearly impossible in an age of copyright laws and world-spanning publication empires; it’s special because it gave Rayner Unwin an opportunity to approach Tolkien, with whom his company still had a publisher-author relationship, and to ask politely what had become of The Lord of the Rings and that other work, The Silmarillion.
In time, Tolkien found the words with which to reply to Unwin’s inquiry, and though his letter dealt mostly with the unique oral tradition he had accidentally spawned, it was a response to a momentous overture. Tolkien could have been spiteful or simply too embarassed by his failure to find an alternative publisher for The Lord of the Rings, which he had quite angrily withdrawn from George Allen & Unwin a couple of years previously.
Instead, Unwin tactfully engaged Tolkien in a bit of verbal courting which threw down barriers and opened doors which had been long closed. This obscure little poem, by the way, was influenced by one of the Silmarillion stories, as it light-heartedly retold the adventures of one of Tolkien’s less tragic heroes.
And he went on to rewrite it for The Lord of the Rings, where it serves to lull the reader into a very gentle sleepy state of mind, quite similar to Frodo’s own when he hears a soft voice chanting the story of the ancient mariner.
As it turned out, George Allen & Unwin found the paper shortage wasn’t all that bad, and Tolkien discovered he had a readership for portions of his work he never thought would appeal to the general public. As a favor to his beloved aunt Jane Neave, he published a collection of poems in 1962 as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil just a few months before she passed away. One of those poems was the one which had so taken Donald Swann’s fancy in 1949: “Errantry”.
“Errantry” not only revived a lost word from the 12th century, it revived Tolkien’s hopes of seeing The Lord of the Rings (and eventually even The Silmarillion) published. He never expected his negotiations with publishers to bounce off the innocent inquiries of people who were fascinated with a poem which could be described as one of the longest limmericks ever composed.
“Errantry” retells the story of Earendil the Mariner, and it is sometimes called “The Mariner”, and undoubtedly many other things. And despite a few mis-spellings here and there, it has survived on its own even without being included in no less than three colllections of Tolkien’s shorter works (that I know of). “Errantry”, in fact, is the only poem Tolkien ever wrote which was published at least four times (five if you count Bilbo’s song in Rivendell, as that work is identified by Christopher Tolkien and others as a derivative of “Errantry”).
The silly mariner who marries a butterfly and challenges Elven knights has demonstrated a literary and poetic strength that few other characters of song and poem from the twentieth century revealed. He is, perhaps, one of Tolkien’s most memorable characters, if only because the poem is so hard to pronounce and uses obscure words like “chalcedony”, “habergeon”, and “sigaldry”.
Of course, it doesn’t end (or really even begin) there. “Sigaldry” appears in at least one other Tolkien work, a poem of extraordinary length and high calibre. “Lay of Leithian” is considered by many people (including this writer) to be the finest work of literature composed by J.R.R. Tolkien. Its connection with “Errantry” is not merely the shared use of archaic words. Both poems were born in a period when Tolkien really had no hope of seeing his work published. It was all intended for his own pleasure, and that of his friends and family.
But “Errantry” is so powerful, and “Lay of Leithian” so compelling, that they were destined for a greatness which, if the critics of the twentieth century had known of them in the 1930s, would have humbled the mightiest of opinions. One can only imagine the piffles and poffs which would have been uttered over useless attempts to fabricate a past which never was.
But the poetry proved to be greater than both Tolkien’s despair and the critics’ objections. “Errantry” forged paths Tolkien never dreamed he would follow, and inevitably “Lay of Leithian” followed behind it, for “Lay of Leithian” touched The Lord of the Rings, too. The Lord of the Rings offers glimpses of both stories, and draws them both into itself, enriching the world of Middle-earth and expanding its depth with details which pre-existed its own story. That never would have happened if Tolkien had not shared his tri-syllabic ingenuity with a few friends one evening many years before.
And now, as the legendary commentator Paul Harvey might say, you know the rest of the poem….
This article was originally published on April 25, 2002.
FOLLOWUP published on June 9, 2002:
Subject: Thanks to all for looking up ‘sigaldry’
A number of people who have access to books I don’t have determined that Tolkien’s word “sigaldry” comes from the 13th century poem “King Alisaunder”, which is a fanciful retelling of the life of Alexander the Great.That poem, it seems, may have had another influence on Tolkien. It is the source for “dwerew”, which Tolkien modernized as “dwarrow”, his preferred “modern” English form for “dwarf”.
I’m making some inquiries about whether this poem has been researched by the Tolkien scholarly community. It may well be worth looking into for a future essay here.
FURTHER FOLLOWUP: Dr. Jane Chance among others confirmed to me that the poem had received due attention from Tolkien scholars.
See also:
- Is There a Source for the Tale of the Two Trees?
- Were Battles in Lord of the Rings Inspired by Any Historical Events?
