The collected poetry of JRR Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, is to be published in a three-volume edition by Harper Collins. Tolkien is said to have aspired to be a poet initially, and although his readers are aware that he wrote poetry, from verses in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, its extent was not so well known.

The earliest work is dated to 1910, when Tolkien was 18. More poems would follow during his years at Oxford, some of them said to be elaborate and eccentric. Others that he composed during the first world war, in which he served in France, tend to be concerned not with trenches and battle, but with life, loss, faith, and friendship, his longing for England and the wife he left behind.

The Collected Poems of JRR Tolkien contains almost 200 works across the three volumes, including more than 60 that have never before been seen.

According to the Observer, his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, had wanted his father’s poetic talent to be better known and, before his own death in 2020, worked on the project with two leading Tolkien experts, Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond.

Hammond told the Observer that there are “remarkably good” unpublished poems in the collection. During the first world war, Tolkien had been a signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers when he was posted to France and saw action on the Somme. In late 1916, he was invalided home with trench fever, which almost certainly saved his life as his battalion was all but annihilated.

Each poem has an entry showing its development through various drafts, sometimes over decades.

In the introduction, the editors write: “Because his most commercially successful writings, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, have had so many readers, and because they include between them nearly one 100 poems (depending on how one counts), Tolkien’s skill as a poet ought to be already well known.

“Many who enjoy his stories of Middle-earth pass over their poems very quickly or avoid them altogether, either in haste to get on with the prose narrative or because they dislike poetry in general, or think they do. It is their loss, for they are missing elements integral to the stories which help to drive their plots and contribute to character and mood.”