Incipit Visio Petri Aratoris de Doworst

Incipit Visio Petri Aratoris de Doworst is a humorous poem written by J.R.R. Tolkien in a medieval style reminiscent of Piers Plowman.

Poem excerpt

In a summer season when sultry was the sun
with lourdains and lubbers I lounged in a hall,
and wood in his wits was each wight as meseemed:
on his [head] was a hat as hard as a board,
on his neck was there knotted a noose all of white
with bow big and broad as a butterfly's wings.
Most of that meiny had on mantles of stuff,
shrouds short as shrift and shapeless as sacks
that never covered their tails nor their touts either.
The clamour of that company was like the cackle of hens,
till a bell rang brazenly — that abated their noise.
They were summoned it seemed to an assize to be held
by four clerks very fell whom few could appease
that should judge them ungently with jesting unkind.
Then I went in their wake walking slowly,
as they passed down a passage paved all with marble
to a double doorway in a dim corner.
An usher it opened, and we entered in fear,
filing in like footmen or folk of the street.

Background

The earliest surviving manuscript, entitled both Doworst and Visio Petri Aratoris de Doworst, was given by Tolkien to R.W. Chambers on December 21 of 1933. After the death of Chambers in 1942, the decorated manuscript came into the possession of his secretary, Winifred Husband. In 1957, upon her retirement, Husband gave the manuscript to Arthur Brown, who later became the Professor of English at Monash University in Australia.

While the manuscript was later lost upon Brown's death in 1979, parts of the poem and its background were printed as "Do Worst" in "Fantasy that! — a Tolkien original", an article published in July 1975 within the third issue of the Monash Review. The article describes the poem's background and contains a transcription of a letter from Tolkien to R.W. Chambers.

In the summer of 1978, the first nineteen lines of the poem were printed as "Doworst" in an article on the third page of A Elbereth Gilthoniel! 1, no. 2, an issue of A Elbereth Gilthoniel!, a newsletter published by The Fellowship of Middle Earth, a Tolkien fan-group at Monash University. The exact month and day of the issue’s publication is untold, but it was likely published either between June and July, or between May and August.

In the summer of 1953, Tolkien revised the poem, shortening it significantly, and gave a copy of it to Kathleen Lea, who sent him a letter of thanks on August 5. This version was entitled Visio de Doworst.

Though the original manuscript was lost, Tolkien made another manuscript entitled Incipit Visio Petri Aratoris de Doworst, which Tolkien gave to C.S. Lewis. After Lewis's death, the manuscript came into Walter Hooper's possession and ended ip in the Bodleian Library after Hooper's death.