Errantry
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"Errantry" is a three-page poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, first published in The Oxford Magazine in 1933. It was included in revised and extended form in Tolkien's 1962 collection of short poems, The Adventu
The poem was inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major-General's Song". 1884 illustration
Song of Eärendil
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The Song of Eärendil is the longest poem in The Lord of the Rings. In the fiction, it is sung and composed by the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins in the Elvish sanctuary of Rivendell. It tells how the mariner Eä
Errantry
…fits the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's patter song, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General". It shares metre and rhyming patterns with the "Song of Eärendil", a poem entirely different in tone. The scholar Paul H. Kocher calls the pair "obviously designed for contrast". The Tolkien scholar Randel Helms calls…
The "Song of Eärendil" follows the Middle English poem Pearl (miniature from the Cotton Nero manuscript pictured) in its metrical and poetic intricacy.
Frodo listens to the Song of Eärendil "in highly Keatsian style". Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton, c. 1822
Eärendil's ship Vingilótë sails the sky and is made "of mithril and of elven-glass", much like the image of a spaceship. Cover of Amazing Stories, 1947