As I mentioned the other day, I’m reading about Old English wisdom poetry. What with the all the references to winter in the examples there, I suddenly realized that Bilbo’s little quatrain in Rivendell is just such a seasonal wisdom poem:
When winter first begins to bite,
and stones crack in the frosty night,
When pools are black and trees are bare,
‘Tis evil in the wild to fare. [LR 2.o3.o14]
As always when I think I’ve discovered something, I go check what Tom Shippey had to say about it. In Chapter 6 of The Road to Middle-earth1 Shippey makes the connection with the coda of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost and notes that both contain only words “… rooted in Old English. Both poems would require little change to make sense at any time between AD 600 and now.” So the idea of a wisdom poem is kind of there, but not explicitly stated. Scull and Hammond, in The Collected Poems2, bundle this poem in with “I Sit beside the Fire and Think”, but don’t make any further reference.
Bilbo’s quatrain supports my reading of the Exeter Maxim so well, I have to suspect that remembering it is what gave me that reading in the first place.
Tom Hillman
There’s also this.
https://alasnotme.blogspot.com/2019/08/when-winter-first-begins-to-bite-echoes.html
Joe
As I was typing, I wondered whether Bilbo had three more verses in some pile of paper on his desk. We’ll call that one of them.
tom hillman
perhaps it was in his pocketses