Crossing Forest River by Dawn Felagund

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Fanwork Notes

This poem was written for the Round 5 creative challenge of the Hungarian Tolkien Society's Mailing Competition, for the following prompt:

After The Battle of the Five Armies, Mr Bilbo Baggins, Beorn and Gandalf took a “long and cheerless road” along the northern end of Mirkwood, where they had “many hardships and adventures”, as “the Wild was still the Wild, and there were many other things in it in those days besides goblins”. Can you imagine that? The Burglar, the Skin-Changer and the Wizard against the evils of the Wild? The Hobbits of the Shire could. They could imagine a lot of things they have never seen (as you will see in the next task, as well), and they fabricated an epic tale of this one. Reconstruct it! You can write concisely about many adventures or go into the details of one particular danger they had to overcome. You can choose the form and style as you wish: you can stick with the prose or follow one of the verse forms of The Hobbit or The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, or that of northern sagas, as you prefer. But do not forget: Hobbits “are fond of strange words, and of rhyming and metrical tricks”, and even in prose you can play a bit with words, rhymes, or alliterations. So, there should be some fun in the form.

The verse form used here is that used in the Middle English poem Pearl, which Tolkien translated. Coming from a period of English literature known as the Alliterative Revival, Pearl uses the metered, rhyming verse that will become more familiar with the development of Early Modern English, but it is still studded throughout with alliteration.

Pearl (and my poem) use iambic tetrameter and the rhyme scheme ABABABABBCBC, in addition to repetition of the final word. (I've modified that a bit here, as I do not have 101 stanzas to work with, so I've repeated the last word as the first in the next stanza.) In the style of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, I've also taken liberty to invent some words that Bilbo might find superior to his purposes than boring old Westron words!

Fanwork Information

Summary:

Bilbo recounts, in verse, the attempt of Gandalf, Beorn, and him to cross the Forest River after the Battle of Five Armies. Written for the Hungarian Tolkien Society's 2024 Mailing Competition.

Canon Source: Hobbit, Lord of the Rings

Major Characters: Beorn, Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf

Major Relationships:

Genre: Adventure, Humor, Poetry

Challenges:

Rating: General

Warnings:

Chapters: 1 Word Count: 220
Posted on 19 April 2024 Updated on 19 April 2024

This fanwork is complete.

Table of Contents

Crossing Forest River

Comments

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Oh! this is such a delight from start to end! I got happily twimbled with your words so much that I had to return to the beginning a second time for the pictures.

This is so very hobbitish, and now you mention it, I'm sure Jabberwocky would be a Shire favourite — one of the few I enjoyed and memorised as a child (along with Laura Elizabeth Richards' Eletelephony, and later, Xanadu, so that probably explains why I enjoyed your nonsense verse so much).

I just love your humour, and can vividly see the three unlikely companions, in a tired and grumpy moment (which all of them are quite spectacularly capable of at times!) arguing about the best way to cross, and finally being deposited in a soggled heap on the far shore, no doubt longing for the warmth and cheer of one of Thranduil's disappearing picnics (I have a suspicion though that the whale was added in the retelling to tease Bilbo.)

This is a great prompt and a lovely response to it! Thank you!

I very much enjoyed the Lewis Carroll words in this poem -- grumpsome, churltrum, boatsome, lithesome -- the sense of them slid into my mind before I could even pause to wonder what they were. They gave this poem a lot of movement, just like the river; well chosen for their choppy playfulness.

Very nicely done, an excellent river song.