How to write poetry like Tolkien

A guide to composing alliterative verse

Dagr (1874), Peter Nicolai Arbo

I wrote recently about how to get started reading Old English poetry in Modern English translation, which is a great way to get familiar with a beautiful literary tradition without having to learn a whole new (old) language.

And it works well: while some things are always lost in translation, the similarities in structure between Old English and Modern English mean that less is lost than you might expect. The characteristics of Old English poetry — the rhythm, the kennings, and the alliteration — are all easy to pull off in Modern English.

Many translators of Old English into Modern English take advantage of this similarity and attempt to preserve aspects of the Old English in their Modern English versions.

Most commonly, this is done with alliteration: Heaney’s translation of Beowulf includes lots of alliteration, for example. However, most of the time, the alliteration in these translations is ornamental, added where possible to give a sense of Old English-ness to the translation.

One man, however, knew exactly how to do it like an Anglo-Saxon would have: J. R. R. Tolkien.

He understood that alliteration in Old English poetry is not merely ornamental, but structural: it holds the line together and is deployed according to very strict rules. And someone who understands these rules can recapture exactly what makes Old English poetry work, even in Modern English.

Tolkien took full advantage of the power of Old English-style alliterative verse in Lord of the Rings. For example, take Théoden’s War Cry:

Arise now, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Dire deeds awake, dark is it eastward.
Let horse be bridled, horn be sounded!
Forth Eorlingas!

These lines are constructed exactly according to the rules of Old English alliterative verse! The poem The Long List of the Ents, which Treebeard told to Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, is also textbook Old English alliterative verse. It begins like this:

Learn now the lore of Living Creatures!
First name the four, the free peoples:
Eldest of all, the elf-children;
Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses;
Ent the earthborn, old as mountains;
Man the mortal, master of horses:

As the name suggests, it goes on for quite a while after that. But you can get a sense of the style from just the first few lines.

This style of poem has an incredible sense of momentum, propelled by the beat of the line and the repetition of consonants. But all of this magic arises from the combination of a few simple rules, which you can learn in a single sitting. I’ll prove it: let’s learn them right now.

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Structure of the line

What I’ve been referring to loosely as “Old English-style poetry” is more properly called Old English alliterative verse. I’m going to keep calling it “Old English poetry” or “Old English verse” for short.

Alliterative verse is not unique to Old English, though: a similar style of poetry exists in Old Norse and other old Germanic languages. And, although we’ll be working in Modern English, all of these rules originally applied in Old English.

By the way, the rules which underlie the structure of a poem are its metre. So what we’re learning to do here is to master the metre of Old English poetry.

Let’s begin!

The first thing to understand about Old English poetry is that it’s composed of individual lines which have no relationship to each other. It’s not like rhyming verse, where different lines have to match up in their endings. For example, there’s nothing in Old English poetry like the rhyming couplet:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
(from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18)

Instead, lines in Old English verse are all independent, which means you can focus on the construction of each line one at a time without worrying about its effect on the lines before or after.

The Old English poetic line is composed of two half-lines¹ separated by a pause in the middle. This pause is called the caesura. It often corresponds to punctuation like a comma or a period, which is a graphic mark of a pause made when speaking.

[EDIT: In the original email, I’d printed the caesurae with three spaces. That didn’t display correctly on all devices, so I’ve changed the article to print them explicitly with ‘||’.]

Sometimes the caesura is marked by a long space in the middle of the line, but it’s often just left for the reader to intuit. Let’s reprint Théoden’s War Cry with caesurae marked explicitly with ‘||’:

Arise now, arise, || Riders of Theoden!²
Dire deeds awake, || dark is it eastward.
Let horse be bridled, || horn be sounded!
Forth Eorlingas!

As you can see, the fourth line is incomplete. It’s only got the first half-line and ends at the caesura. This is atypical but is used here for effect.

But focus on the other three: you can see the caesura occurs in each line where a comma is placed. This is because the caesura should line up with a natural pause when speaking.

The first line from The Long List of the Ents has no punctuation, but if I print the caesura explicitly as ‘||’, you can still see that the caesura comes at a kind of break-point:

Learn now the lore || of Living Creatures!

It wouldn’t do to put of in the first half-line, because of Living Creatures is a phrase with its own internal coherence.

This structure gives the line a kind of balance: there’s a full phrase or more on either side of the caesura, without too much entanglement between the two halves.

In other words, you could say each half-line in isolation. This strong separation between the two halves of the line runs the risk that the line might not exactly cohere.

But this is where alliteration comes in to save the day.

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Alliteration

Alliteration is the force that binds the line together. It’s often casually defined as the repetition of sounds at the beginning of words. For example, in the line Dire deeds awake, dark is it eastward., we see alliteration of the d sound at the beginning of dire, deeds, and dark.

But in Old English verse, it’s a bit more subtle than just matching the beginnings of words. In fact, it’s not about the beginning of words at all. Alliteration is actually about the repetition of sounds at the beginning of stressed syllables.

Now, in Old and Modern English, the two definitions often line up, because many words have their stress (or their accent) on the first syllable. Note: from now on, I’ll be marking stressed syllables with an acute accent (é) where necessary.

For example, dark, dúngeon, déstiny, and déafeningly all have their stress on the first syllable, so they can all alliterate with each other. But adápt, and condúctor would also alliterate with dark since the stressed syllable in each word begins with a d.

Conversely, debáte and detéctive would not alliterate with dark, because, even though they begin with the d sound, their stressed syllables are not at the beginning of the word. Instead, debáte would alliterate with big and detéctive would alliterate with tough.

You can see how this works in the first line of Théoden’s War Cry, where arise alliterates with riders:

Aríse now, aríse, Ríders of Théoden!

Also, keep in mind that alliteration is about sound, not spelling. So, cat would alliterate with king but not city. City would alliterate with seek.

Let’s revisit The Long List of the Ents and identify the alliteration on each line:

Learn now the lore. of Living Creatures!
First name the four, the free peoples:
Eldest of all, the elf-children;
Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses;
Ent the earthborn, old as mountains;
Man the mortal, master of horses:

But what about lines 3 and 5? The words I’ve marked as alliterating don’t all begin with the same sound: how can ent alliterate with old?

To understand how they alliterate, we need to know another rule about Old English alliteration: vowels all alliterate with each other. This is why elf and eldest can alliterate with all on line 3, and ent can alliterate with earthborn and old in line 5.

The existence of alliteration acts as a gravitational force binding the two halves of the strongly divided poetic line and preventing them from twirling off into total independence.

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Stress

Look again now at the excerpt from The Long List of the Ents, specifically at where the alliterations are placed.

Learn now the lore of Living Creatures!
First name the four, the free peoples:
Eldest of all, the elf-children;
Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses;
Ent the earthborn, old as mountains;
Man the mortal, master of horses:

Tolkien is consistent about where he alliterates: he puts two alliterations in the first half-line and one in the second half-line. What’s more, the alliteration in the second half-line is near the beginning.

This is not an accident, and it brings us naturally to our next topic: stress.

If you count the number of stressed syllables in each line of Tolkien’s Old-English style poems,³ you’ll arrive at the same number: four, with two in each half-line.

Aríse now, aríse, Ríders of Théoden! (=4)

Léarn now the lóre of Líving Créatures! (=4)

This is another rule of Old English metre. Each line is composed of two half-lines. Each half-line is composed of two stressed syllables. The technical term for the stressed syllables in each line is lifts. So each half-line has two lifts. No more, no less.

Note that we didn’t assign any stress to the little words like now, the, and of when we counted the lifts above. This is because these words, even though they can be stressed in certain contexts, are typically not stressed within the context of the poetic line.

These words, which are typically prepositions, articles, pronouns, and some short adverbs, get demoted to let the beefier nouns, adjectives, and (some) verbs take centre stage.⁴

Just as lift is a special name for the stressed syllables in the poetic line, there’s also a special name for the unstressed syllables, which is a dip. So Old English lines are composed of lifts and dips, corresponding to stressed and unstressed syllables.

And just as a half-line must have two lifts, it must also have two dips.

Half-lines can also contain more dips (dark are his houses has three dips), but they can never contain fewer. That means every half-line must contain at least four syllables.

So now we can rephrase the rule of alliteration: alliteration is when two lifts begin with the same sound.

And we can add a further stipulation, which Tolkien’s very precise placement of alliteration hints at: there must be alliteration between a lift in the first half-line and a lift in the second-half line, but the fourth lift never alliterates.

In Tolkien’s poems, the first two lifts alliterate with the third, but in Old English poetry in general, the second lift doesn’t always participate in the alliteration.⁵

This is the biggest difference between poems which use alliteration as an ornament and poems written in true Old English alliterative verse: the fourth lift can never alliterate with the other three. This rule provides a final asymmetry between the two halves of the line.

You now know all the basic principles of constructing properly Tolkienian verse: line structure, alliteration, lifts and dips. You might think we’re done. But no, we’re just getting started.

Because, despite all of that complexity, these principles interact to create just five basic patterns for half-lines.

And we’re going to learn them by composing a short Old English-style poem together. And, to make things truly interesting, our poem will be a translation of the first lines of the Iliad into Old-English style verse.

Let the games begin!