The Wandering Feet of Feveren Tawardil
Goblin Feet
Cumaþ þá Nihtielfas
- by J.R.R. Tolkien (1915)
I am off down the road
Where the fairy lanterns glowed
And the little pretty flitter-mice are flying
A slender band of gray
It runs creepily away
And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.
The air is full of wings,
And of blundery beetle-things
That warn you with their whirring and their humming.
O! I hear the tiny horns
Of enchanted leprechauns
And the padded feet of many gnomes a-coming!
O! the lights! O! the gleams! O! the little twinkly sounds!
O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes!
O! the echo of their feet - of their happy little feet!
O! the swinging lamps in the starlit globes.
I must follow in their train
Down the crooked fairy lane
Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone.
And where silvery they sing
In a moving moonlit ring
All a twinkle with the jewels they have on.
They are fading round the turn
Where the glow worms palely burn
And the echo of their padding feet is dying!
O! it's knocking at my heart-
Let me go! O! let me start!
For the little magic hours are all a-flying.
O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colours in the dark!
O! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies!
O! the music of their feet - of their dancing goblin feet!
O! the magic! O! the sorrow when it dies.
* * *
"The idea of the Cottage of the Children was already in being in 1915, as the poem You and Me shows; and it was in the same year, indeed on the same days of April, that Goblin Feet (or Cumaþ þá Nihtielfas) was written, concerning which my father said in 1971: 'I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.'* Yet it is to be observed that in early notes Elves and Men are said to have been 'of a size' in former days, and the smallness (and filminess and transparency) of the 'fairies' is an aspect of their 'fading', and directly related to the domination of Men in the Great Lands.
* He had been asked for his permission to include the poem in an anthology, as it had been several times previously."
- The Book of Lost Tales Part One, "The Cottage of Lost Play"
Tolkien Library: Goblin Feet, a poem by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Blog of Mazarbul: ‘Goblin Feet’ – Sorrow and Loss in Tolkien’s Least Tale
