Bagme Bloma “Flower of the trees” is a poem composed by J. R. R. Tolkien and included in a collection called Songs of the Philologists. It is a scholars’ amusement made of comical verse – satirical poems, famous tunes, drinking songs – composed or translated in early Germanic languages. It was published privately in 1936 for Tolkien and his colleague and friend E. V. Gordon. A few have been published in T. A. Shippey’s critical essay The Road to Middle-earth, including this one, with a translation supplied by Rhona Beare. It is intended to be sung to the tune of O Lazy Sheep!

The poem is in a reconstitution of Gothic rather than in Gothic properly, for it includes many words unknown in this language because of its limited attestation, but that Tolkien plausibly reconstructed after the corresponding words in the other Germanic languages. Tolkien’s close association with Old English is sometimes mirrored in the semantics: for instance the word *bogus (no pun intended!) used in the first line (in the dative plural) has the sens of “bough” (Old English bóg) which is specific to English; this word is found in other Germanic languages but there rather means “shoulder”: Old High German buog (Modern German Bug “prow, shoulder, chuck”), Old Norse bógr “shoulder”.

The English translation is Rhona Beare’s interpretation of the poem.

The value of the spellings ai and au is debated: some scholars consider that everywhere they denote open varieties of e and o, long or short, while others assign them at times these values, at times the value of diphthongs, on etymological criteria. The first of these positions has been adopted here.

The text is transcribed in the Gothic alphabet invented by Wulfila. We made use of George Douros’ typeface Analecta.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe