In ‘Legend’ poems, Tolkien the storyteller

Tolkien hung out with other medievalists in Oxford pubs, where they drank ale, smoked pipes, and made up stories by firelight. While most authors of the early 20th century were busy smashing Victorian conventions and reassembling the pieces into irony-laden modernism, Tolkien was penning stories and poems about domineering dragons and world-weary wizards.

Since he was more inclined to tinker rather than finish many of his projects, reams of uncompleted drafts remain, like treasures to unearth. Gradually, his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, has been deciding which are worthy of publication. So it comes as no surprise that the son has discovered another of his father’s old works.

Written in the early 1930s, some years before “The Hobbit’’ and “Rings,’’ “The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún’’ almost vanished. The elder Tolkien lamented in a 1967 letter to W.H. Auden that he wanted to “lay my hands on it (I hope it isn’t lost), a thing I did many years ago’’; it appears he never revised the poems since those early days. Christopher, now 84, edited the manuscript.

The two poems that make up “The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún’’ are Tolkien’s version of the Old Norse Völsung and Nibelung legends, an attempt to unify and organize the material dealing with Sigurd, Brynhild, Gunnar, and other characters, using the same source materials that Richard Wagner drew upon for his opera series “The Ring.’’

Tolkien’s task was to fit modern English to the Old Norse meter: eight-line stanzas, each short line only four to six syllables and containing two to three stresses each. The poems were an exercise, he said, in “trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry.’’ He also wanted to capture the essence of Old Norse poetry, with its “demonic energy and force,’’ the lines chiseled to seize a situation and strike a blow.