--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "akoddsson" <konrad_oddsson@...>
wrote:

> Most things can be done in English, as Tolkien saw ;)

Have you read his alliterative epic The Lay of the Children of Húrin,
dealing with events that are told in a more sagalike way in the
Silmarillion?

The dusty dunes of Dor-na-Fauglith
hissed and spouted. Huge rose the spires
of smoking vapour swathed and reeking,
thick billowing clouds from thirst unquenched,
and dawn was kindled dimly lurid
when a day and a night had dragged away.

That's a bit of the storm after Túrin inadvertantly kills Beleg. It
was published in The Lays of Beleriand. And speaking of the master, I
wonder how we can get our hands on item 82 on this list of unpublished
manuscripts:

§82. Völsungakvida in nyja "The New Lay of the Volsungs."

http://www.geocities.com/athens/parthenon/9902/unpub.html

I read an article by Tom Shippey a while back that mentioned Tolkien's
compositions in Old Norse, only there they were called Sigurðarkviða
hin nýja and Guðrúnarkviða hin nýja.

"All his life, Tolkien enjoyed filling gaps in what survives. There
is, for instance, a well-known gap in the Codex Regius manuscript of
the Poetic Edda, where some eight pages of the Sigurðr cycle are
missing. But Tolkien wrote two poems to fill this gap, in Old Norse,
in the appropriate meter, which are called, we believe, Sigurðarkviða
hin nýja and Guðrúnarkviða hin nýja. Unfortunately these remain
unprinted." Tolkien and Iceland, the Philology of Envy [
http://www2.hi.is/Apps/WebObjects/HI.woa/wa/dp?detail=1004508&name=nordals_en_greinar_og_erindi
].

Could Völsungakviða in nýja be a collective title for these, or are
they three distinct poems? And I wonder what else is lurking in no.
86, besides the Old English ones and the single poem in Gothic were
published in The Road to Middle Earth:

"§86. Songs of the Philologists, Tolkien's own fanzine published in
the days of youthful folly includes several poems in dead languages by
him and his friends. ... Otherwise this is known from privately
circulated photocopies."