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C.W. Stubbs and J.R.R. Tolkien

— David Llewellyn Dodds

14 August 2021 | Beyond Bree, August, 2021, 4.01

In a post at her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, this past January, entitled Earendel at Epiphany,” Dr. Eleanor Parker refers back to another post of nearly a decade earlier, Candlemas and The Carol of King Cnut,” putting the poem named in the title richly in a fuller context. That poem is by Charles William Stubbs (1845−1912), “‘Ad Natalem Domini’ (The Carol of King Canute),” and his starting point is an adaptive translation of what Dr. Parker calls one of the earliest songs in Middle English”.

Those surviving four lines of Middle English song are familiar to readers of JRR Tolkien’s The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.” He quotes them in full at the end of the first section, where he points out that the rhyming lines” near the end of his little verse drama which follows are an echo” of this medieval song.…

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date recorded 📅2021-08-14
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