Tha Eadigan Saelidan: The Happy Mariners

Poems by J.R.R. Tolkien
Tha Eadigan Saelidan: The Happy Mariners
Poem Information
Other names	The Happy Mariners, Þá Éadiȝan Sǽlidan
Written	24 July 1915
Revised	9 September 1915, Around 1940
Published	The Stapeldon Magazine, A Northern Venture, The Book of Lost Tales Part Two, The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien
Subject(s)	Sleeper, Tower of Pearl

Tha Eadigan Saelidan: The Happy Mariners is the title of a poem written by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1915 about the "the song of the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl" on the Twilit Isles.

First stanza

I know a window in a Western tower
that opens on celestial seas,
from wells of dark behind the stars
there ever blows a keen unearthly breeze.
It is a white tower builded on the Twilit Isles,
and springing from their everlasting shade
it glimmers like a house of lonely pearl,
where lights forlorn take harbour ere they fade.

Background

Sometime after 6 January of 1914, but not long before 11 July of 1915, Tolkien wrote "seven isolated lines" within his sketch-book, The Book of Ishness, which may be the earliest preliminary workings of the poem.

On 24 July of 1915, Tolkien wrote the first version of the poem at Barnt Green "on the back of an unsent letter" from 11 July, but rewrote the poem later that year on 9 September. Tolkien rewrote the poem four more times before it was published in June of 1920 as The Happy Mariners on pages 69-70 of The Stapeldon Magazine. Following this, Tolkien made a slightly altered version which he published in 1923 as Tha Eadigan Saelidan: The Happy Mariners on pages 282-3 of A Northern Venture. In the 1940s, Tolkien made another version of the poem and made alterations to this version at a later date. The last two versions were reprinted by Christopher Tolkien in The Book of Lost Tales Part Two with Douglas A. Anderson's help.