A small thought concerning Bilbo and poetry - Alphaelin wrote:
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Regarding Bilbo’s preference to write only poetry at this point – could that be a reflection of Tolkien’s own admiration for poetry? Perhaps Bilbo, knowing his time was now limited, only wanted to put his efforts into a more noble form of literature (in his & Tolkien’s opinions) than simply writing memoirs or translating lore. (I admire good poetry because I always found it so darn hard to write, lol.) I’m basing this speculation on the fact that Tolkien’s first attempts to write down his mythology were in poems, and he wrote the stories of ‘Luthien and Beren’ and ‘The Children of Hurin’ as epic poems before they were in narrative form in The Silmarillion.
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What I find interesting is that, at least on a superficial inspection, Tolkien himself changed in the opposite direction from Bilbo. Tolkien wrote far less poetry, or at least, far less poetry related to Middle-earth, after LotR than he did before. The first five volumes of HoMe are filled with verse, but there is hardly any in the final three, or in UT.