HarperCollins The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Hardback, J. R. R. Tolkien, Edited by Verlyn Flieger
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Price: £16.99
Brand: HarperCollins
Description: Unavailable for more than 70 years, this early but important work is published for the first time with Tolkien's 'Corrigan' poems and other supporting material, including a prefatory note by Christopher Tolkien. HarperCollins The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Hardback, J. R. R. Tolkien, Edited by Verlyn Flieger - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Harper Collins
Product ID: 9780008202132
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Dimensions: 149x228mm
Keywords: celtic,tragedy,magic,fairy,faries,breton,poem,poetry,corrigan,love,chivalry
ISBN: 9780008202132
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Author: Zak Barlow
Rating: 5
Review: Beautiful Breton Lay. Lots of great extra content and insights to be found in the footnotes, addenda and other materials (+poems) too. Well worth a read if you’re interested in some of the non-Legendarium works of J. R. R. Tolkien
Author: Modern Viking
Rating: 2
Review: In 1945, The Welsh Review published a 506-line poem, ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’, by J.R.R. Tolkien. A&I, as I will call it for the rest of this review, tells the story of Aotrou, a childless Breton lord who visits a witch in order to cure his wife Itroun’s infertility, with tragic consequences. It was Tolkien’s attempt to write a poem in English inspired by Villemarqué's nineteenth-century anthology of Breton folk songs, Barzaz-Breiz, which Tolkien owned and which clearly had a significant impact on him. This new edition of A&I comprises a 19-page reprint of the poem as it first appeared in The Welsh Review, two earlier unpublished poems, both entitled 'The Corrigan' -- corrigan (or ‘gorrigan’ in the original Breton) being more or less translatable as 'female fairy, elf' -- plus related fragments, drafts and typescripts, along with the usual Introduction, notes and commentaries, mainly by editor Verlyn Flieger. So far so good. The questions are, is A&I a poem worth reprinting, and is this new edition a model of scholarship? The answer to both questions, sadly, is no. As far as the poems go, while there is no question that Tolkien was an exquisite prose stylist, his poetry often leaves much to be desired, and nowhere is this probably more apparent than in A&I, a piece of quasi-juvenilia that cannot seem to make up its mind about whether its lines should consist of eight or nine syllables. The effect is off-putting when the poem is read silently and jarring when read aloud -- many of the lines simply do not scan. Counting syllables is child’s play and child’s play is how A&I comes across, even though Tolkien was almost 40 around the time he wrote it in 1930. This is not to say that it contains nothing of merit -- Aotrou’s dreams about the children he does not have are genuinely poignant, for example -- but to try to read the poem and take it in is an effort with little reward, and, taken as a whole, A&I can only be seen as a poetic failure. Much the same can be said of the two 'Corrigan' poems, both of which are mere pastiches of two Breton folk songs, 'Aotrou Nann hag ar gorrigan' (Lord Nann and the gorrigan), and 'Ar bugel laec’hiet' (The changeling). As I wrote when reviewingThe Story of Kullervo by Tolkien, J. R. R. (August 27, 2015) Hardcover , reading a modern author trying to imitate an old text strikes me as rather pointless -- both of the songs mentioned above are easily available through Google Books in Villemarqué’s bilingual Breton-French "Barzaz-Breiz", while 'Lord Nann and the gorrigan' can be found in Tom Taylor’s English "Ballads and Songs of Brittany". Tolkien improves on neither. Which leads me on to the uncomfortable subject of Flieger’s scholarly apparatus, which contains a number of lamentable errors, the most obvious of which is the blatantly erroneous transcription of both the Breton and French texts of 'Lord Nann and the gorrigan' (e.g. pp. 97 & 101) -- simple proofreading would have remedied this -- as well as Flieger’s bizarre and misleading insistence that the Breton word 'bugel' (in the aforementioned 'Ar bugel laec’hiet') means 'terrifying' or 'goblin, imp' (p. 31) when in fact it simply means 'child'. None of this is to say that this edition is of no value to Tolkien scholars and/or enthusiasts -- I did find a few gems for the irrevocably addicted, such as the revelatory fact that the word 'hobbit' had already been recorded in English as early as 1891 or 1892 (p. 29), and that Brocéliande, the legendary French forest, is the origin of the Middle-earth place name Beleriand. It is surprising then that Flieger makes no subsequent mention of the Breton folk song 'The clerk of Rohan', also to be found in Barzaz-Breiz. Lest the reader of this review misunderstand me, Tolkien is my favourite author, and I most definitely do count myself as a Tolkien completist. This does not mean however, that I am prepared to gush uncritically over yet another cash-in spewed forth by the Tolkien Estate.
