Goblin Feet

File:Goblin Feet.jpg

"Goblin Feet" in Fifty New Poems for Children

Goblin Feet is a poem written by J.R.R. Tolkien in April of 1915, around the same time that he wrote the poem You and Me / and the Cottage of Lost Play. In The Book of Lost Tales Part One, Christopher Tolkien quotes his father as saying, "I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever."

'Goblin Feet' was first published in Oxford Poetry 1915. The poem has later been reprinted in The Book of Fairy Poetry (1920), Fifty New Poems for Children (1922?), J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977), Mallorn issue 23 (1986), and in The Annotated Hobbit, p. 77 (revised and expanded edition: p. 113).

The poem

I am off down the road
Where the fairy lanterns glowed
And the little pretty flitter-mice are flying
A slender band of gray
It runs creepily away
And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.
The air is full of wings,
And of blundery beetle-things
That warn you with their whirring and their humming.
O! I hear the tiny horns
Of enchanged leprechauns
And the padded feet of many gnomes a-coming!
O! the lights! O! the gleams! O! the little twinkly sounds!
O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes!
O! the echo of their feet - of their happy little feet!
O! the swinging lamps in the starlit globes.

I must follow in their train
Down the crooked fairy lane
Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone.
And where silvery they sing
In a moving moonlit ring
All a twinkle with the jewels they have on.
They are fading round the turn
Where the glow worms palely burn
And the echo of their padding feet is dying!
O! it's knocking at my heart-

Let me go! let me start!
For the little magic hours are all a-flying.

O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colors in the dark!
O! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies!
O! the music of their feet - of their dancing goblin feet!
O! the magic! O! the sorrow when it dies.

External links

• "Goblin Feet, a poem by J.R.R. Tolkien", by Pieter Collier.