Tolkien's poetry
I walked by the sea, and there came to me,
as a star-beam on the wet sand,
a white shell like a sea-bell;
trembling it lay in my wet hand...
Then I saw a boat silently float
On the night-tide, empty and grey...
It bore me away, wetted with spray,
wrapped in a mist, wound in a sleep,
to a forgotten strand in a strange land.
In the twilight beyond the deep
I heard a sea-bell swing in the swell,...— from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, 1962
Tolkien's poetry is extremely varied, including both the poems and songs of Middle-earth, and other verses written throughout his life. J. R. R. Tolkien embedded over 60 poems in the text of The Lord of the Rings; there are others in The Hobbit and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; and many more in his Middle-earth legendarium and other manuscripts which remained unpublished in his lifetime, some of book length. Some 240 poems, depending on how they are counted, are in his Collected Poems, but that total excludes many of the poems embedded in his novels. Some are translations; others imitate different styles of medieval verse, including the elegiac, while others again are humorous or nonsensical. He stated that the poems embedded in his novels all had a dramatic purpose, supporting the narrative. The poems are variously in modern English, Old English, Gothic, and Tolkien's constructed languages, especially his Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin.
Tolkien's poetry has long been overlooked, and almost never emulated by other fantasy writers. Readers often skip over the poems in The Lord of the Rings, thinking them an unwelcome distraction. Since the 1990s, Tolkien's poetry has received increased scholarly attention. Analysis shows that it is both varied and of high technical skill, making use of different metres and rarely used poetic devices to achieve its effects. All the poems in The Lord of the Rings have been set to music by The Tolkien Ensemble.