The canny reader of Part One of this history of speculative poetry may have noticed several references to the speculative extending to a poetic tradition and cultural history far older than the novelistic one (modern novels not really appearing until the c.18, after all), and might be wondering just how far back it goes, whether a sense of the origins helps with defining its nature, and how much its nature may or may not have changed over time. If we allow ourselves to be first guided by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1938 identification of ‘prophecy’ within speculative poetry, then the English language tradition of the prophetic poet certainly goes back to the figure of Thomas the Rhymer described in the medieval poem of the Lincoln Thornton manuscript, compiled and copied by Robert Thornton between 1430 and 14401, a document which contains other important romance poems, including the ‘Alliterative Morte Arthure’.
Significantly, the character of Thomas the Rhymer is himself drawn from the true-life figure Sir Thomas de Ercildoun, 1220-982, also known as ‘True Thomas’, who reputedly could not lie and was credited with the writing of various prophetic verses concerning significant events in Scotland’s future, including the death of Alexander III of Scotland and the rule of James I3, to the extent that for several centuries his prophetic reputation exceeded that of all others, including the likes of Merlin4.
It is the character and tradition of Thomas which Tolkien explicitly discusses in his essay “On Fairy-stories” (1947), also specifically referencing Spenser’s The Fairie Queene epic poem of 1590, and draws upon to create the character of Tom Bombadil in 1954’s The Lord of the Rings (LOTR). In the Thornton poem, Thomas is captivated when he meets the Elf Queen by the ‘Eldone Tree’5, initially mistaking her for the queen of heaven, and she then carries him off to her realm, showing him the road to heaven in one direction, the road to hell in another and telling him he will not return to ‘Medill-erthe’ (l.160) for a twelvemonth; when it is time for him to return, the queen offers him the gift of ‘harpe or carpe’ (harper or prophetic poet) by which to remember her, he selects the latter and, at his further bidding, abides with him a while longer, telling him of ‘ferlys’ (marvels), and she relates to him prophecies concerning Scottish battles (Halidon Hill, Bannockburn and others) which actually came about after the poem was written.
Tolkien’s borrowing of the poetic Tom character, elves and the concept of ‘Middle-earth’ are clear. Tom Bombadil is one of the main purveyors of poems and songs in LOTR, and his words, like those of True Thomas, give him a near-magical lore/law or semi-divine truth-saying power, for they disempower those who would set themselves against him, unravel their enchantments, foil their schemes, and command/bind them to their better nature.
Consequently, Tom is able to rescue the hobbits from Old Man Willow, then to share with them a summoning rhyme so that he can later save them from the barrow-wight. We might glean from the above that Tolkien borrows from a past tradition to conjure or atmospherically evoke, as well as ground, the reader’s knowledge of pre-Christian myth, magic, races and stories. Central to that tradition, though, is the power and position of the wizard-like and prophetic poet: and we see that the fantasy genre tradition is just as backward- as it is forward-looking, exactly as with the science fiction genre tradition of Part One.
In calling upon such a tradition or established cultural frame of reference, Tolkien adeptly constructs a second-world for the reader in which (modern) disbelief is suspended. It is in a largely pre-literate world, where the literate have the power to divine, access and use the otherwise secret knowledge and magic represented within runes, spell-books and holy books. In such a world, with books so rare and valuable that it is hard to share or access them easily, knowledge-as-power also needs to be codified in such a way that it is easy to memorise, recall and speak aloud: hence the use of poetry via rhyme,
repetition, rhythm and metre, cadence and melody, verse-length and chorus to aid long-term memory, rote learning, recall, (crucially) performance to an audience, possible group-participation and easy sharing more widely post-performance. The earliest documented poems, therefore, derived from a predominantly pre-literate, ‘musical’ performance culture which sought to create and propagate a shared mythos, history and genealogy, cultural identity, set of beliefs, values and behaviours (laws), social structure, body of knowledge, and unified community across the generations, geographical distances and possibly different ethnic and racial groups6. In pre-literate societies, therefore, the keeper and performer of the songs, be they termed bard, skald, minstrel, rhapsode, scop or other would have had an essential function, sometimes near sacred, and/or elevated social position7. Indeed, without the bardic function, a pre-literate society potentially could not survive with its own sense of identity and community/communitas.
As a Professor of Anglo-Saxon who had researched the wider essential functions of speculative poetry in early Scandinavian societies, it was Tolkien who initiated a new appreciation of the poem Beowulf in his 1936 Sir Israel Gollancz Lecture titled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, delivered at Oxford University. Before Tolkien, and as described in his lecture, English academia had largely missed, misunderstood and/or dismissed both the quality and wider value of the poem, academia having failed to realise that the episodic form (along with the sort of poetic features described in my previous paragraph) was essential to its social performance and worth, and that the poem truly represented a speculative reformulation of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity, values, language and society, as it transitioned from a Norse religious practice and culture into a Christian one: ‘The lecture is understood as a (trans)formative work in modern studies of the poem (Niles 1998; Shippey 1998; Lerer 1998; Solopova 2009)’8. And just as LOTR explicitly drew upon the Thomas the Rhymer and Fairie Queen poems/worlds/myths, so The Hobbit (1937) drew upon Beowulf, borrowing the treasure-hoarding dragon, and having Bilbo make the mistake of stealing a ‘cup’ in exactly the manner of the slave in Beowulf who provoked the dragon’s ire.
Central themes of lost comrades and lost direction are most clearly articulated or distilled in the poems and songs of LOTR, approximately half of them (paeans) concerning and recalling once-glorious fallen heroes (e.g. ‘The Fall of Gil-galad’, ‘Three Rings for the Elven Kings under the Sky’) and the other half involving journeying (e.g. ‘Hey! Now! Come Hoy Now! Whither Do You Wander?, ‘A Walking Song’), an overlap between the groupings evident in the songs and poems which speak of lost questing heroes and their wandering spirits (e.g. ‘Song of Beren and Luthien’, ‘The Road Goes Ever on’). There is, then, perhaps a greater coherence across Tolkien’s poems and songs when they are considered together rather than individually. Once more, this is due to the essential world-building (building of cultural capital, weaving of social fabric and creation of identity) of speculative poetry in a pre-literate society. Needless to say, it is not a tradition which starts with Tolkien, for he builds upon, and uses within LOTR, the song-based dynamic and actual legends of the Arthurian era9, Norse mythology10 and the Homeric world11. Nor is the dynamic entirely retrospective or backward-looking, for via song the fallen heroes of past golden ages, Tolkien’s own wartime experience and LOTR are all remembered, honoured, prayed for and helped to ascend to an eternal present or future among the gods. Speculatively, those heroes do not end: for when the living, whose bloodlines, communities and cultures only continue due to the sacrifice of those before them, sing their battle-hymns, toast the fallen and perform the poetic edda (Norse sagas), the fallen heroes live on (in genealogy, the memory and the afterlife), and the same will be true of the living when their bloodlines, communities and cultures continue to perform the poems and honour-songs of the fallen.
It is here that we might further or more fully appreciate the forward-looking aspect of the speculative tradition in poetry, so that we do not misunderstand Tolkien as being solely backward-looking in his consideration, regard, allusion or reference. The speculative poet understands the essential nature of both song and the bardic function when it comes to past and current community identity and the socio-cultural fabric, that song very often explicitly referring to itself, its associated functions and the importance of (its continued) performance as theme(s); yet the speculative poet also understands that the song should provide a prophetic vision (sometimes warning) about what will result in the future from our present. To be clear, it is not all poetry that does this. Speculative poetry has a socially sacred origin and ongoing role, plus one of divination concerning the future. When it comes to LOTR, there is an overall ‘visual structure’ to the description that is morally consistent and symbolic: Greene (1996) identifies and details Tolkien’s work as sharing in the visually iconographic stylistics of Dante, Spenser and Milton before him, and then discusses Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation, whereby the speculative writer has the sacred and visionary potentiality of a (rather than ‘the’) creator;
Tolkien’s ontological and literary theory of sub-creation articulates most completely Tolkien’s belief that man’s creative impulse derives from his having been made in the image and likeness of the Creator. Further, he stated that true sub-creation, as opposed to realistic representation, involves the making of things that do not occur in God’s creation [… ] Clearly Tolkien held his fiction to be of a higher kind than the realistic fiction that dominated his generation; to some degree he was rebuking writers for their obsession with realism. He felt that he was contributing to the effoliation of Creation by making things that were possible to God but not actually made by him (Tolkien, 1981, pp.188-189). By logical association, if inclination and ability to create are given by an omniscient and omnipotent God, then whatever proceeds from that faculty proceeds from God. In this context, Tolkien’s attitude to his writings as independent of himself supports the assumption that he saw them as in some way inspired by God.12
Even as it may hark back to the past, then, speculative poetry should also be progressive. In LOTR, Tolkien critiques the World Wars and the acquisitive drivers behind them, and instead offers a ‘Fellowship’ of shared values across races and nations as our prospective salvation, and potentially a direction that might lead us into the paradisal Undying Lands. Where Tolkien, like Spenser before him, fails to be as progressive on gender roles (with not one female character as part of the real-time drama in The Hobbit, and the ‘fairy wife’ blood of Bilbo’s mother – Belladonna Took, named after the poison? – used to explain some of his more wayward behaviours), Christina Rossetti’s speculative narrative poem ‘Goblin Market’ (1862) provides us with female characters (beset by addictively ruinous male goblins of the past and present) who have the agency and positive sense of self (sexual, social and otherwise) to win through to a happy ending. And then the grandame of speculative fiction, Margaret Atwood, who published poetry long before her novels, explains for us how, in particular ways, speculative poetry even exceeds the overly linear past-present-future dynamic of novels and movies ‘because the Western mind is very hooked on causality and linear sequence’:
[Atwood] Eternity is the time setting of a lyric. Novels are about time and poetry is about eternity. Ha Ha . . . It doesn’t work all the time but it’s a good thing to drop into the conversation. But I think it’s probably true; it’s certainly true about lyric poetry that what you wait for is the moment of breaking free of time. That’s what I wait for.
[Interviewer] I was just trying to think about the difference between reading novels and reading poems. When you read a novel, you’re holding in your mind plot sequence and characters. When you read a lyric poem, transformation is possible because there are different things held in the mind.
[Atwood] Yes, you can do those transformations in novels but only from time to time. If the whole novel were like that it would be unreadable. But even in a poem you have to lead up to those jumps, and in a novel you certainly do.13
Despite the multitudinous length of the dramatis personae list of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire(1996-present), not to mention the complexity of inter-relationship, family-trees and changing house alliances, the poems and songs within it are as simple, ‘eternal’ and evocative as those of Tolkien’s LOTR. It turns out that this is no coincidence, as Martin has experienced/glimpsed insights similar to both those of Tolkien and Atwood when it comes to poetry, if we consider the quote from his website below14. Just as Atwood sees ‘lyric’ poetry as being about the non-linear and the eternal/timeless, Martin sees the best fantasy as being comprised of or involving the non-linear ‘language of dreams’ and ‘songs the sirens sang’; he has spoken quite freely of the influence upon his own writing of both Robert Frost’s 1920 poem “Fire and Ice” and A.E. Houseman’s 1898 epic poem “A Shropshire Lad”.
The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real … for a moment at least … that long magic moment before we wake. […]
We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to middle Earth.
To end this part of our history, I would wish to highlight to the reader that apparently there are aspects of fantasy poetry that are quite distinct compared to those of science fiction poetry, albeit that the aspects of each type of poetry might be considered near analogues of each other, meaning both types of poetry might still be bracketed under the term ‘speculative poetry’. (Indeed, the blind bard Rhysling in Heinlein’s sci-fi short story and Tom Bombadil in Tolkien’s fantasy epic might be argued to have a similar, celebrated role within their respective societies.) Suffice it to say, for me, fantasy poetry involves a majority of the following (at least 3 out of 5!):
1. the magical, dreamlike and/or mythological (as power, creature or god)
2. the progressive and/or transformative
3. the prophetic, visionary and/or eternal
4. a world that is an ancient past or ‘second-world’ to our own, or one that co-exists with our own but often remains hidden
5. some sense of a lost and/or found hero.
Amen.
A J Dalton
London, UK, August 2025
Notes
1. Whetter, Kevin Sean, book, Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance, Farnham: Ashgate, 2008.
2. Tedder, Henry Richard, book entry, "Erceldoune, Thomas of", Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1889.
3. Child, Francis James, ed., book, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume 1 (of 5), 2014, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44969.
4. Murray, James Augustus Henry and Thomas, eds., book, The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune: Printed from Five Manuscripts with Illustrations from the Prophetic Literature of the 15th and 16th Centuries, facs. repr. [der Ausg. London:] Trübner, 1875, Felinfach: Llanerch, 1991.
5. Laing, David, and John Small, eds., book, Select Remains of the Ancient Popular and Romance Poetry of Scotland, Nachdruck der Ausgabe von 1885, Norderstedt Hansebooks GmbH 2017, 2017.
6. Nadeau, Spencer E., thesis, The Sound of Middle-earth: Music and Song among Races in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, 2022, https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:3875/datastream/PDF/file.pdf.
7. West, Martin L., book, Indo-European Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
8. Dalton, A. J., book chapter, ‘What is so fabulous about Smaug?’, in Not the Fellowship of the Rings: Dragons Welcome!, edited by Francesca Barbini, 154-67,Edinburgh: Academia Lunare, Luna Press Published, 2022.
9. Finn, Richard J., article, ‘Arthur and Aragorn: Arthurian Influence in “The Lord of the Rings”’, Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society, no.43, 23-26, 2005,https://www.jstor.org/stable/45320521.
10. Kuusela, Tommy, article, ‘In Search of a National Epic: The Use of Old Norse Myths in Tolkien’s Vision of Middle-Earth’, Approaching Religion 4, no.1, 25-36, May 2014, https://doi.org/10.30664/ar.67534.
11. Spirito, Guglielmo, article, "The Legends of the Trojan War in JRR Tolkien", Hither Shore, no.6, 182-200, 2009.
12. Greene, Deirdre, article, ‘Higher Argument: Tolkien and the Tradition of Vision, Epic and Prophecy’, Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society, no.33, 45–52, 1995,https://www.jstor.org/stable/45320412.
13. Martin, George R.R., essay, ‘On Fantasy’, George RR Martin, 1996, https://georgerrmartin.com/about-george/on-writing-essays/on-fantasy-by-george-r-r-martin/.
Prophetic poets! Remarkable and informative. Thank you A. J. Dalton!