One piece of Tolkien lore that last year’s expanded edition of The Letters of J R R Tolkien made abundantly clear  was quite how highly the author regarded himself as a poet. In 1916, aged twenty-four, he wrote to his fiancée Edith Bratt urging the merits of a bundle of poems dispatched to the firm of Sidgwick & Jackson: ‘Do pray about it darling – it means a lot to me.’ The collection, entitled ‘The Trumpets of Fairie’, was turned down. A quarter of a century later, he could be found representing himself to his eldest son as a man whose career had been tragically blown off course: ‘I was, of course, a poet (and might have been a recognised one, but for you chaps … and the chains of Christian matrimony).’

Once The Lord of the Rings was in print, the tocsin sounded even louder. In a letter sent to his publisher, Allen & Unwin, shortly after the appearance of The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954, he complained that not one reviewer had mentioned that the book contains poetry. As for the kind of poet that Tolkien imagined himself to be, he was at pains to emphasise his distance from the average Romantic solipsist: ‘I think I am best at the kind of thing seen in the present book – verses arising from the emotions of a story, and written to represent the feelings of other “characters” than myself.’ Despite a fair amount of hustling, a discrete volume of his verse, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) had to wait until his seventy-first year.

If not quite sharing Tolkien’s high opinion of himself, Christina Scull and Wayne G Hammond,  impresarios of this doorstop-sized The Collected Poems of J R R Tolkien, are keen to suggest that what we have here is, by and large, highly arresting stuff. ‘There is much in his poetry