Tolkienists.org

I got to the computer in time for my 9 AM Zoom panel (11 or 12 for the other panelists) on Tolkien’s poems ​“Errantry” and Bilbo’s song of Eärendil and their startling similarity. My job was to describe the writing process by which one poem turned into the other, a description aided by the existence of 22 varying drafts, quoted in full or part in the posthumous books. Janet Brennan Croft in her contribution to the panel suggested that not only are they the same poem, they’re the same character, and ​“Errantry” is some sort of hallucination that Eärendil suffers during his first, frustrated attempt to pass the shadows that protect Valinor. I’m not sure I believe it, but it’s an interesting theory.…