Poetic Sources for Tolkien's Poems

[Andorinha]

Not sure where to dump this topic, so I'll let the editors/ managers move it if they find a more suitable location.

Trying to address here the question of which poems may have influenced JRRT as he composed his own verses.

[Andorinha]

I recently found the delightful, but admonitory poem "Goblin Market," by Christina Rossetti. She was associated with the same Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that Wm. Morris belonged to. JRRT read many of the works produced by this "Brotherhood," so I'm certain he must have read "Goblin Market," and now I'm thinking I can see some similarities between Christina's poem and certain features of Tolkien's. Any one else find any similarities?

"Goblin Feet" www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1053910

"Goblin Market" www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/gobmarket.html

[fanuidhol]

Andorinha, the link you provided for "Goblin Feet" did not provide us with the entire poem. Happily for me, the link below not only gives us the entire poem -- but likely sources, too!

www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/working_with_english/Fimi_31_05_06.pdf

I was quite disturbed by "Goblin Market". I have a faint recollection of either reading it or a summary of sorts.
Fan

[Andorinha]

Thanks for the link wth the complete poem, Fan! The essay is quite good, if a bit incomplete, lol, was hoping for a direct tie-in with "Goblin Market."

Rossetti's poem was remarkably "advanced" for the Victorian period, and, yes, I think "disturbing" is a good descriptive. It had, for me, some of the same threat I felt in JRRT's "Sea Bell," both are reminders that human contact with the parallel realms of faerie can be perilous indeed.

From 1820s on England became flushed with new, exotic, terrible drugs -- and Rossetti's poem has that addiction-terror element to it, like Samuel Coolridge, or Sherlock Holmes working their ways through the nightmare of recovery...

JRRT's WW I experience gave him a tangental taste of the dislocations of drug alterred thinking, and of course there were many tens of thousands who came out of the hospitals fully hooked on opiates. Whether these experieces, first and second hand, were available to JRRT as early as 1915 when he wrote "Goblin Feet," I cannot say. But even in 1915, this poem has a frenzied quality to it, a compulsion to run from the normal world in search of the weird, the faerie, the fay. Though, I do not find the appreciation of the peril quite as distinctly drawn in "Goblin Feet" as it is in his later "Sea Bell," or in Rossetti's "Goblin Market."

[Fangorn]

“Goblin Feet”

I am off down the road
Where the fairy lanterns glowed
And the little pretty flittermice are flying:
A slender band of grey
It runs creepily away
And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.
The air is full of wings,
And of blundering beetle-things
That warn you with their whirring and their humming

O! I hear the tiny horns
Of enchanted leprechauns
And the padding feet of many gnomes a-coming!
O! the lights: O! the gleams: O! the little tinkly sounds:
O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes:
O! the echo of their feet – of their little happy feet:
O! their swinging lamps in little starlit globes.
I must follow in their train
Down the crooked fairy lane
Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone,
And where silverly they sing
In a moving moonlit ring
All a-twinkle with the jewels they have on.
They are fading round the turn
Where the glow-worms palely burn
And the echo of their padding feet is dying!
O! it's knocking at my heart –
Let me go! O! let me start!
For the little magic hours are all a-flying.
O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colours in the dark!
O! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies!
O! the music of their feet – of their dancing goblin feet!
O! the magic O! the sorrow when it dies. (Tolkien 1915: 64-5)

[Andorinha]

While JRRT's poem is less grim, less dangerous (to my interpretation) than the warnings of "Goblin Market," I am seeing (rightly/ wrongly) a strong resemblance in the drug-addiction like use of "compulsion" in both poems. "I must follow in their train..." stands out in this regard. Where there are dire consequences to "following" the Goblin compulsions in Rossetti's poem, I do not see any such terrible result in Tolkien's offering, (unless one adds the perilous matter of the "Sea Bell" to it) but there is still, I feel, a compulsive attitude in the narrator's almost frantic need to chase along after the "goblin/ faries."