The Bidding of the Minstrel, from the Lay of Eärendel

The Bidding of the Minstrel, from the Lay of Eärendel is a poem of thirty-six lines in its final form that was written in 1914 by J.R.R. Tolkien. It is a poem that describes a crowd asking a minstrel to sing a Lay of Eärendel to them, but the minstrel is unwilling. The poem is divided into two stanzas: the first about the imploring words of the crowd, and the second why the minstrel refuses.

First stanza

'Sing us yet more of Eärendel the wandering,
Chant us a lay of his white-oared ship,
More marvellous-cunning than mortal man's pondering,
Foamily musical out on the deep.
Sing us a tale of immortal sea-yearning
The Eldar once made ere the change of the light,
Weaving a winelike spell, and a burning
Wonder of spray and the odours of night;
Of murmurous gloamings out on far oceans;
Of his tossing at anchor off islets forlorn
To the unsleeping waves' never-ending sea-motions;
Of bellying sails when a wind was born,
And the gurgling bubble of tropical water
Tinkled from under the ringéd stem,
And thousands of miles was his ship from those wrought her
A petrel, a sea-bird, a white-wingéd gem,
Gallantly bent on measureless faring
Ere she came homing in sea-laden flight,
Circuitous, lingering, restlessly daring,
Coming to haven unlooked for, at night.'

In other versions

The Minstrel renounces the song

The first version of the poem was written by Tolkien in his rooms in Oxford on St. John's Street during the winter of 1914. After finishing the poem, he hastily titled it as The Minstrel renounces the song. This version was longer than the subsequent versions. In this version, the minstrel answers the bidding at line 5 unlike the latest version. In addition, the terms, Eldar and Elven were originally written as "fairies" and "fairy" respectively.

The Lay of Eärendel

The second version of the poem was given the title of The Lay of Eärendel.

Further revisions

The second version was followed by one intermediate version before the name was changed in a fourth version to The Bidding of the Minstrel, from the Lay of Eärendel. In early 1915, Tolkien divided this version in two, naming the second part The Mermaid's Flute from 'The Lay of Earendel' and making a few minor revisions to the first part between 1920 and 1924.

The two earlier versions (and The Mermaid's Flute) were published in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.