Lemminkainen Goeth to the Fords of Oxen

Poems by J.R.R. Tolkien
Lemminkainen Goeth to the Fords of Oxen
Poem Information
Other names	Lemmincaignen siþaþ tó Oxenaford, Lemminkainen Goeth to the Ford of Oxen
Written	Late October of 1911
Published	The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien
Subject(s)	Lemminkäinen

Lemminkainen Goeth to the Fords of Oxen, also known as Lemmincaignen siþaþ tó Oxenaford, is a parodic poem of a train journey written by J.R.R. Tolkien late in October of 1911.

Poem excerpt

Runo MDCCCCXI

Argument: Lemminkainen having to depart from Pohja goes again in search of the dragon PufK, who refuses to take him. Honka the roadhop however takes him on his back and puts him down on the banks of the Is-Is. He makes his way to the halls of Kol and there remains.

Lo! the lively Kaukomieli
Also known as Lemminkainen
(More familiarly as Kauko)
Got him from the lands of Pohja;
Forth did fare and hasten onwards
Through the gloomy mists of autumn
In the very bluest spirits,
Till he came to where is station'd
In the reek of serpents hundred,
In the noisome smoke of reptiles,
Looming dim and arching upwards
All the vast expanse and cavern'd
Lair of mighty dragon-farers.

Background

Around a month after writing the poem The New Lemminkainen as a parody of W.F. Kirby's translation of the Kalevala, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a sequel poem entitled Lemminkainen Goeth to the Fords of Oxen or Lemminkainen Goeth to the Ford of Oxen on the same manuscript page of his poetry notebook as the poem From Iffley. Tolkien described the poem in that manuscript as "a spurious interpolation of the Kálevalá rightly rejected by W.H. [sic, for W.F.] Kirby in his translation (A freshman from Birmingham school goes up to Oxford)" and dated it to late October of 1911. After the end of the poem, Tolkien wrote:

Having promis'd another production I felt I must send one. I do (with all apologies). You may consign it to the wagger-pagger-tagger (Oxonese [Oxford student slang] for waste paper basket) if you like. [signed] R.

In a list of poems marked "Ungefeged inne" that were probably "contemporary with" another list labeled "Attempts at Verse", Tolkien included Lemminkainen Goeth to the Fords of Oxen and named it Lemmincaignen siþaþ tó Oxenaford in Old English.

In September of 2024, the poem was published for the first time as entry 9 in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. In their commentary, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull suggest that Tolkien's note at the end was probably an address to "one of his friends from King Edward's School". In a note to Runo MDCCCCXI, Hammond and Scull explain that while these roman numerals imply that the poem is only "part of an enormously longer" work, it simply translates "to the date of composition, 1911". In a note to lines 54-6, Hammond and Scull point out that Tolkien used similar imagery in From Iffley, which was written around the same time as Lemminkainen Goeth to the Fords of Oxen. Tolkien would eventually use such imagery again in an unnamed epistolary poem that he would later write to Eric Valentine Gordon and Ida Lilian Gordon.

Inspiration

In their commentary in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, Hammond and Scull suggest that, since the poem is about "a journey to Oxford" and was written around when Tolkien "went up to university as a freshman", it is likely that Tolkien wrote Lemminkainen Goeth to the Fords of Oxen as an autobiographical parody of Tolkien's own journey, sacrificing "history for comedy". In a note to the Argument, Hammond and Scull pointed out that the names Pohja, Is-Is, and the halls of Kol are stand-ins for Birmingham (north of Oxford), the Isis (the part of the Thames running through Oxford), and "the college (kol-lege) halls of the University" respectively. While Hammond and Scull admitted they were unable "to explain the capital letter at the end" of PufK, they speculate that, without the "K", the name refers to Puffpuff, the train from The New Lemminkainen, the earlier Lemminkainen poem.