Éadig béo þu “Good luck to you” 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 the modern translation given here. It is intended to be sung to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

The poem alludes to the rivalry in departments of English studies between “language” and “literature” courses. Tolkien disliked those names, found them inappropriate, and preferred to call the courses “lit.” and “lang.” or even better “A” and “B”. He ultimately thought that this opposition was silly and damaging, and advocated for a mixed approach: this can be seen for instance in his Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford, published in The Monsters and the Critics and other essays. Yet when pressed into a camp, he unsurprisingly sided firmly with “lang.” or “B.”: indeed in this poem, beorc (the birch, but also the name of the Anglo-Saxon rune corresponding to a B) flourishes on, while ác (the oak, but also the name of the Anglo-Saxon rune corresponding to a A) ends up into the fire!

We added to the text a few missing acute accents.

The text is transcribed in tengwar or “letters of Fëanor”. Tolkien created two different adaptations of the general use of the Third Age to Old English, presented in Sauron Defeated p. 318-327. We especially attempted here to emulate the mode of the so-called “Text II”. We made use of Måns Björkman Berg’s typeface Tengwar Eldamar.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe