THE COLLECTED POEMS OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN Fully Revealed

 

While this was announced initially a few months ago, when I post about Tolkien books, I prefer to do it with all (or as much as possible) info. Since that today the product image was released, now I'll post about it!

Arriving in September, is a 3-book boxed set of poems by Tolkien. Before I relay the info about this release below, I wanted to point something out: if we look at a larger version of the image of this post (I shrink my images down so they'll fit within the confines of the blog template) we can see what of the books has on their spines, which offers insight to the contents. We have: Book 1: 1910-1919, Book 2: 1919-1931, and Book 3: 1931-1967. 

The ISBN is 9780008628826

Here follows the press release, and then the official description:

• Press Release
  
  COLLECTED POEMS OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN TO BE PUBLISHED FOR FIRST TIME
  
  London, Tuesday 12 March
  
  HarperCollins has announced it is to publish The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, in September 2024.
  
  Poetry was the first way in which Tolkien expressed himself creatively and through it the seeds of his literary ambition would be sown. Out of one of his earliest poems, The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star, begun in 1914, would appear the character, Eärendil, and from him would spring the world of ‘the Silmarillion’, and then The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, each of whose stories are enriched with poems both humorous and haunting, magical and moving.
  
  The world-renowned Tolkien scholars, Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, provide the stories behind, and analysis of, each poem, as well as revealing the extraordinary amount of work that Tolkien devoted to every one, creating a landmark new publication which confirms that J.R.R. Tolkien was as fine a poet as he was a writer.
  
  Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond say: ‘It has been an honour to prepare, at Christopher Tolkien’s invitation, these volumes of his father’s poems, putting into print many previously unpublished works and ensuring that Tolkien’s talent for poetry becomes more widely known. Charged at first to review only his early poems, we soon saw the benefits of examining his entire poetic opus across six decades, vast though it is with hundreds of printed and manuscript sources, and of showing its evolution with comments in the manner of Christopher’s magisterial History of Middle-earth series. Not long before his death, we were able to send Christopher a trial portion of the book, which he praised as “remarkable and immensely desirable”.’
  
  Chris Smith, Publishing Director, says: ‘Poetry runs like a vein of mithril through all the books that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote. He delighted in language and storytelling, and the almost 200 poems contained in this collection reveal him at his creative best in verse. Within this new three-volume set, there are worlds in miniature to be discovered and revelled in, populated with unforgettable characters and settings both familiar and full of wonder.’
  
  The Hobbit was first published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in 1954–5. Each has since gone on to become a beloved classic of literature, and an international bestseller in more than 70 languages, collectively selling more than 150,000,000 copies worldwide. Published in 1977, 40 years after The Hobbit first introduced the world to Tolkien’s Middle-earth, The Silmarillion sold more than one million copies in its first year of publication and has gone on to be translated into almost 40 languages. It was the first of seventeen Middle-earth books produced by J.R.R. Tolkien’s son, Christopher, who was his father’s literary executor and who died in 2020, aged 95, after a lifetime dedicated to curating his father’s work for publication.
  
  Issued by: Philippa Cotton, Publicity Director
  
  Notes to Editors:
  
  J.R.R. TOLKIEN was born on 3rd January 1892. After serving in the First World War, he embarked upon a distinguished academic career and was recognized as one of the finest philologists in the world. He is best known as the creator of Middle-earth and author of the classic and extraordinary works of fiction, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. His books have been translated into more than 70 languages and have sold many millions of copies worldwide. He died on 2nd September 1973 at the age of 81.
  
  ABOUT HARPERCOLLINS
  
  HarperCollins Publishers is the second largest consumer book publisher in the world, with operations in 17 countries. With 200 years of history and more than 120 branded imprints around the world, HarperCollins publishes approximately 10,000 new books every year in 16 languages, and has a print and digital catalog of more than 200,000 titles. Writing across dozens of genres, HarperCollins authors include winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Newbery and Caldecott Medals and the Man Booker Prize. HarperCollins, headquartered in New York, is a subsidiary of News Corp (Nasdaq: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) and can be visited online at corporate.HC.com
  

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. 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 200 works are presented across three volumes, including more than 60 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.

It looks pretty interesting! I'd love to see the table of contents to see how each book is laid out, which types of poems there are...you know, the finer points of a new Tolkien release. I look forward to Amazon's 'look inside' / 'read a sample' function, as well as the various YouTube videos. 

While this is considered a major Tolkien release, I personally never felt its 'absence' so to speak. What I mean is, when Beren and Luthien came out (which is a compilation, I'd like to point out) we had 2/3 'Great Tales.' To me, The Fall of Gondolin was considered 'missing', as it was the last of the three. The announcement and publication date is definitely very exciting news, though if this didn't exist, I'd personally feel that my Tolkien Library would feel complete. Of course, when there's unpublished content that people know exists.....that's a whole manner. In reading The History of Middle-earth series, I've come to realize that just because something exists doesn't exactly mean that it's fit for publication. 

I'm looking forward to learning more about this, closer to (and including) its publication date. 

One last thing: this will also exist as an eBook. Most times, a 'new' Tolkien book also has an eBook release. That's not always the case (say a new edition of The Hobbit) but for first-publications, there's typically an eBook. I should add that eBook editions exist for the Author-Illustrated editions of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. As with the 2017 Hammond & Scull boxed set, Chronology + Reader's Guide, I don't expect a paperback editions of this set to exist.