Bilbo's Last Song (at the Grey Havens) is a poem by J. R. R. Tolkien, written as a pendant to his fantasy The Lord of the Rings. It was first published in a Dutch translation in 1973, subsequently appearing in English on posters in 1974 and as a picture-book in 1990. It was illustrated by Pauline Baynes, and set to music by Donald Swann and Stephen Oliver. The poem's copyright was owned by Tolkien's secretary, to whom he gave it in gratitude for her work for him.
Gift to Joy Hill
In 1968, aged seventy-six, Tolkien decided to retire from his house at 76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford to a bungalow at 19 Lakeside Road, Poole, near Bournemouth. On 17 June, while preparing for his relocation, he fell downstairs and badly injured his leg. He needed surgery, a plaster cast, crutches and several weeks of recuperation in the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre and Bournemouth's Miramar Hotel before he was well enough to resume living independently. During circa 14–18 October, while Hill was helping Tolkien to set up his new office and library, she made a discovery. "As I picked up a pile of books in my arms and put them on the shelf", she recalled in 1990, "something dropped out from between two of them. It was an exercise book: just the cover with a single sheet between, and on the page, a poem. [Tolkien] asked what it was; I gave it to him, and he read it aloud. It was Bilbo's Last Song. Hill and Tolkien used to enjoy guessing what kind of presents his devotees had sent to him.
Tolkien died on 2 September 1973, and Hill arranged for the poem to be published shortly afterwards. When she herself died in 1991, the poem's copyright was bequeathed to the Order of the Holy Paraclete, an Anglican educational foundation.
The text
The poem comprises three stanzas, each containing four rhyming couplets. As Scull and Hammond point out, the poem cannot have reached its final form until after Tolkien had conceived how The Lord of the Rings would conclude.
Precursors and parallels
thumb|upright|The Navigator-monk [[St Brendan at St Benin's Church, Kilbannen. In his 1955 poem Imram, Tolkien sends Brendan past Númenor to Aman, bringing him home to die in Ireland. and the quest of Reepicheep to sail to the holy country of the divine lion Aslan in Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Bilbo's Otherworld journey has further parallels in writings of Tolkien's own. The figure of the mortal who sails from the quotidian world to a paradise beyond the sea is a motif that recurs in Tolkien's poems and stories throughout his creative life. Examples are Roverandom, Eriol in The Book of Lost Tales, Tuor in Quenta Silmarillion, Ar-Pharazôn in Akallabêth, Ælfwine in The Lost Road, St Brendan in Imram, Sam and Gimli in The Lord of the Rings and the narrator of "The Sea-Bell" in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.
Publication history
Bilbo's Last Song first appeared at the end of 1973, translated into Dutch by Max Schuchart for a limited edition of two thousand numbered posters that the publisher Het Spectrum distributed as corporate New Year's gifts. In April 1974, Houghton Mifflin published the poem in the US as a poster decorated with a photograph of a river taken by Robert Strindberg. A second hardcover edition was published in 2002 by Hutchinson in the UK and by Alfred A. Knopf in the US. A large-format paperback edition was published in both the UK and the US by Red Fox Picture Books in 2012. The second and third editions of the poem omitted some of the illustrations published in the first. Translations of the poem have appeared in Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
Pauline Baynes's illustrations
The endpapers of Unwin Hyman's and Houghton Mifflin's 1990 edition of Bilbo's Last Song show Bilbo, Elrond, Galadriel and Gildor riding with a company of elves through an autumnal landscape, watched by a variety of woodland creatures. The text of the poem is then presented in twelve full-colour two-page spreads, each dedicated to a single couplet. The couplets are printed on the verso pages, each with a unique illuminated first letter and with a unique painting of a reposing Bilbo beneath. The recto pages present roundels narrating Bilbo's journey from retirement in Rivendell to his arrival at "fields and mountains ever blest": Bilbo is seen at his desk, looking out across the ravine of the Bruinen, talking to Elrond, mounting his horse, riding through the Shire, crossing Woody End, arriving at the Far Downs, meeting Círdan and Gandalf, hugging Sam, greeting Merry and Pippin, setting sail and nearing the Undying Lands. Each roundel is framed by a unique pair of overarching trees, beneath, on and above which are a multitude of birds and beasts: a beaver, a fox, an otter, badgers, bats, frogs, hedgehogs, mice, rabbits, squirrels, stoats, toads, a blackbird, a crow, a dove, a gull, a magpie, a wader, a woodpecker, some owls and many others. At the foot of every page, both verso and recto, is a vignette that depicts a scene from the adventures of Bilbo that Tolkien had told in The Hobbit. Baynes's twenty-six Hobbit paintings illustrate many scenes not represented in Tolkien's own Hobbit art, including, for example, the dwarves' feast in Bag End and their meetings with Elrond and Thranduil, Bilbo's finding of the One Ring and his conversation with Gollum, Bilbo's and Gandalf's meeting with Beorn, Bilbo's fight with the spiders of Mirkwood and the Battle of Five Armies. Anonymous notes at the back of the book key Baynes's paintings to the passages in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which they illustrate. Swann wrote about Bilbo's Last Song in his autobiography. "The lyric was handed to me at Tolkien's funeral by his dedicated secretary, Joy Hill, who is a close friend and neighbour of mine in Battersea. I was stirred up that day and went off and wrote a tune for it, to be sung as a duet, although I often perform it solo... The tune is based on a song from the Isle of Man ... [and] also resembles a Cephallonian Greek melody." Swann's setting of the poemhis favourite among his Tolkien compositionswas added to The Road Goes Ever On for its second (1978) and third (2002) editions.
In 1981, Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell used Bilbo's Last Song to conclude the dramatization of The Lord of the Rings that they wrote for BBC Radio 4. The poem was set to music by Stephen Oliver, who had provided all the music for the series. An album of Oliver's music from the series included a version of the song in which Vine sang all three stanzas. Oliver's version was recorded by the Dutch Tolkien Society band The Hobbitons for their 1996 CD J. R. R. Tolkien's Songs from Middle-earth. A Howard Shore composition for choir and orchestra called Bilbo's Song accompanies part of the Fan Club Credits on home media releases of The Return of the Kings Extended Edition, but this has nothing to do with Bilbo's Last Song; its text is a translation into Tolkien's invented Sindarin of his poem I Sit Beside the Fire and Think. "[Bilbo's] words could, ... entirely appropriately for myth, be removed from their 'Grey Havens' context and be heard as the words of a dying man: but one dying contented with his life and what he had achieved, and confident of the existence of a world and a fate beyond Middle-earth." He suggests that Tolkien would have been wiser to allow Bilbo's final poetic utterance to be the version of his song The Road Goes Ever On that he recites by the fireside in his room in Rivendell near the end of The Return of the King.