The Last of the Old Gods

Around 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a melancholic poem on "a fair copy typescript" that he initially titled The Last of the Gods before changing the name to The Last of the Old Gods. After the end of line 36, Tolkien wrote "end?" in addition to briefly pondering whether to delete "the final two stanzas" before deciding to possibly only delete lines 73 to the end. In the third section of a list of poems headed "Kortirion among the Trees" that may have began as a revision of a 1926/27 list labeled "Contents", Tolkien added The Last of the Old Gods as Last of the [Old] Gods. After making the "Kortirion among the Trees" list, Tolkien assigned "a rough programme" to each section, with the third one (the one The Last of the Old Gods was in) being labeled as "The Silmarillion". In the third section of another, subsequent, list, Tolkien also included The Last of the Old Gods among poems relating to the legendarium.

In September of 2024, the poem was published for the first time as entry 126 in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. In their commentary, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull suggest that while The Last of the Old Gods "does not have any overt connection with Tolkien’s mythology", Tolkien did include The Last of the Old Gods in a list alongside poems that "are explicitly related to the 'Silmarillion' mythology". They note further that "it is possible to find…elements in common", comparing "the notion of 'a timeless time when musics grew" to "the Ainulindalë…in 'The Silmarillion'" and "the titular old god…watching for 'a light upon the margins…of this deep world beneath the sun'" to "the Valar" waiting "for the coming of Elves and Men". Despite this, they point out that: Hammond and Scull note that the slightly later Latin poem, Quare Fremunt Omnes Gentes, in 1932 may have "a similar outlook" to The Last of the Old Gods. In a review of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien in the Journal of Tolkien Research, John R. Holmes notes that The Last of the Old Gods "presents a melancholy Götterdämmerung" like what Tolkien called the "long defeat". Holmes suggests that this concept was not unique to "the northern myths", but that the theme was explored in Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine" in 1866 that deals with "the classical Roman gods". In addition to suggesting that The Last of the Old Gods "is generalized enough…to apply to the…receding of the elves in Tolkien’s Middle-earth", Holmes notes that, "as Scull and Hammond point out, however, the twilight mood also fits Tolkien's World War I generation in 1931". On 29 September of 2025, Sean Johnson noted on "The Daily Poem Podcast" that The Last of the Old Gods shows that many of the eucatastrophe themes of The Lord of the Rings were "already well-formed" long before.

1. Esta ficha se ha importado inicialmente de TolkienGateway.net el día 30/05/2026.