Poetry Friday: All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter

Or, why I should start carrying copies of all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings with me everywhere I go.

No, wait, I swear this is a poetry post! Don't kick me out, Poetry Friday peoples!

Anyway. Allow me to tell the sordid story, and post the poem. Which isn't at all sordid, actually. I don't read sordid poetry.



I was shelving books in my mum's classroom, and in the pile of books to be shelved I came upon a book entitled The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, by one Ann (without an e! *gasp*) Brashares. My first thought was, "My word that book looks idiotic." (It's totally okay if you enjoyed it, by the way. I recognise that that was a totally baseless assumption, but I'm telling it like it happened. And I still think it looks kind of stupid.)


So I began to leaf through the book, and at the beginning I saw an epigram, and the name below it caught my eye. J.R.R. Tolkien. So I was like, "WAIT WHAT IS THAT BOOK DOING QUOTING MY BELOVED* THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN."

The quote, according to the pants book, was, "Not all who wander are lost." After I was done being horrified, I was like, "Wait... that quote's not right, is it?" Had this book dared, not only to quote my beloved, but to quote him wrong? 

Surely, surely, surely, it was "Not all THOSE who wander are lost"? I was sure I remembered that. I knew that it was the second line in a poem, which began "All that is gold does not glitter." The rhythm wouldn't even WORK if there wasn't a those!

I've screenshotted the offending passage from that thing on Amazon where you can look at like five pages of the book before you buy it, so you know I'm not making it up or remembering wrong. There it is:

QUOTED RIGHTLY OR WRONGLY, TOLKIEN QUOTES SHOULD NOT APPEAR IN THAT FONT AND THEY SHOULD DEFINITELY NOT APPEAR SUPERIMPOSED OVER A PHOTO OF A PAIR OF JEANS THIS IS A DISGRACE TO HUMANITY AND CIVILISATION AND LITERATURE

I raced to the T's. The only volume of The Lord of the Rings that was there was The Return of the King. I went to the index. There were two indices of poetry. I went to the index of first lines. Much to my distress, that poem only appears in the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring.

I ran to the library. I ran like my life depended on it. (I don't run, except to books. I run into libraries and bookstores as if I'm being chased by a raging balrog.) There were five or six copies of The Two Towers, one of The Return of the King, five of The Hobbit, and two of The Silmarillion. No Fellowship. 

I was distressed. I was greatly distressed. I was, indeed, a damsel in distress!

But I always preferred the stories where the distressed damsel got un-distressed all by herself. I raced back to mum's classroom, and begged for the use of her computer, which she grudgingly granted.

I went to Our Evil Overlord The Great Google. 

I typed in "All that is gold does not glitter The Lord of the Rings." I pressed the search button. I clicked the first link that appeared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_that_is_gold_does_not_glitter


(Who knew Wikipedia-Source-of-All-Knowledge had articles about individual poems in The Lord of the Rings? So cool.) Anxiously I read the poem in the article.

I WAS RIGHT AND ANN BRASHARES WAS WRONG IT DOES SO SAY "NOT ALL THOSE WHO WANDER ARE LOST" THOSE THOSE THOSE AND SHE MISQUOTED MY BELOVED HOW DARE SHE I THINK SHE COULD PROBABLY BE SUED FOR LIBEL I'MMA GET ON THAT NOW AND ANYWAY SHE SPELLS HER NAME WITHOUT AN E AND EVERYONE WHO'S READ ANNE OF GREEN GABLES KNOWS THAT THAT'S WRONG THE END

Anyway. I love the poem; I think it's beautiful and awesome and it makes me squee and Aragorn is awesome**. So for Poetry Friday, I am posting "All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter" or "The Riddle of Strider," by J.R.R. Tolkien (or Bilbo Baggins; whatever you want to believe is okay with me).

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring.
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

(Update: Links to other people's Poetry Friday posts can be found here. Go check them out! I haven't read all of them yet, but I'm betting no one else has inane capslock and Ann Brashares bashing and Tolkien fangirling and Elrond fangirling. You can decide yourself if you think that's a good thing or not.)

__________
*YES TOLKIEN IS MY BELOVED I LOVE HIM OKAY SHUT UP

**I should probably make it clear right now that I was never one of those girls who longed after Aragorn. He's awesome, but he's about sixty-six years my senior, I don't think he ever bathes, and anyway he's in twoo wuv with Arwen. I never longed after Legolas, either. He's awesome too, but he's closer to about four hundred and eighty years my senior (at least), and he looks like a girl. If I WERE to become infatuated with a Lord of the Rings character, it would probably be Elrond. "He was as noble and as fair as an elf-lord, as strong as a warrior, as wise as a wizard, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer." The only problems are the "venerable" bit and the fact that he's married to Celebrían. If it weren't for that, we would totes be getting married.