what where the earliest works of Tolkien?

[klugiglugus]

What was the first things Tolkien wrote about?

[Eledhwen]

In a p.s. to letter no.165: "This business began so far back that it might be said to have begun at birth. Somewhere about six years old I tried to write some verses on a dragon about which I now remember nothing except that it contained the expression a green great dragon and that I remained puzzled for a very long time at being told that this should be great green. But the mythology (and associated languages) first began to take shape during the 1914-18 war. The Fall of Gondolin (and the birth of Earendil) was written in hospital and on leave after surviving the Battle of the Somme in 1916."

[FoolOfATook]

Tolkien's first published work was a poem titled "The Battle of the Eastern Field", from The King Edward's School Chronicle, in March of 1911.

His first published scholarly work of any note was the 1922 A Middle English Vocabulary, written to use with Kenneth Sisam's Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose.

He published his first novel in 1937. Something about a Hobbit. ;)

[Eledhwen]

Are they in print anywhere, FoaT?

[FoolOfATook]

I'm totally, completely, almost 100% positive that the only work I mentioned that is still in print is The Hobbit. Tolkien's early poetry is occasionally quoted in Carpenter's Biography, but most of the poems before "Songs For Philologists" are out of print. (And if you've read the early poem "Goblin Feet", you'll understand why.)