Songs for the Philologists

[Huinesoron]

Do you know what the rarest Tolkien book is? It's not any sort of first edition, or anything of that kind: it's Songs for the Philologists, a collection of poems (13 by Tolkien) that was apparently made without his permission, never distributed, and almost entirely lost in a fire. (I first learnt about it in the course of a Balfrog/Seth thread a couple of years back.)

Well, it turns out that a few years ago, someone with far too much time on their hands wrangled up a copy and turned it into a convenient PDF, which (in the course of trying to do something similar myself) I've just found.

Songs for the Philologists, 2007 edition

(Be aware that the PDF is apparently coded so that you can't copy and paste the contents, which is very clever and very annoying. )

One of the more... interesting Tolkien works (and one of the few in modern English) is Frenchmen Froth, which is, er... extremely snarky:

Though Education quack, quack, quack,
And force upon our weasands
The nostrums from its nonsense pack
In endless silly seasons
Though tyrant force behind our back
Shall thrust us without reason
To halls that light and leaning lack
Where teachers talk of treason,

This is my faith, I do maintain, until the stars shall fall, sir!
That fear and false report shall not make English fall, sir!

hS