BY JAKOB BARGER

One of my favorite essays is Gene Wolfe’s “The Best Introduction to the Mountains.” Wolfe has a rare way of putting his finger on something half-sacred without leaving any greasy fingerprints. His essay is about that sweet and awe-ful place which J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings have come to occupy in literature and in the lives of Middle-earth’s admirers. Go and read it.

It’s a great essay, but I want to focus on one incidental detail:

Wolfe has copied an excerpt of poetry into the half-title page of each volume in The Lord Of The Rings. For The Fellowship of the Ring, he has used Thoreau’s “The Atlantides.” For The Two Towers, he has used Conrad Aiken’s “Priapus and the Pool.” But for The Return Of The King, Wolfe has the following to say:

“The quotation I inscribed on its half-title is from Robert E. Howard. You have my leave to quarrel with me, but I think it the finest of the three, indeed one of the finest things [I] have ever read.

Into the west, unknown of man,

Ships have sailed since the world began.

Read, if you dare, what Skelos wrote,

With dead hands fumbling his silken coat;

And follow the ships through the wind-blown wrack–

Follow the ships that come not back.” 

  • Gene Wolfe, “The Best Introduction to the Mountains” (50, italicized)

And I have to agree. I have no quarrel with Wolfe for pointing it out. These are beautiful lines. I’ve never read any Robert E. Howard. I’ve always associated him with mass market paperbacks, yet this quote makes me rethink that. Yes, not only does it harmonize with Tolkien’s magnum opus, but “ships that come not back” actually takes my breath away.

Whenever a poet knocks me down like this, I have to sit there for a minute and try to figure out why. I suppose if you could understand exactly why, then you could teach a computer to do it.

It is something to do with death, that great “coming not back”, and with the sea, two elements bound up deeply in the human soul. Blood and water. The image of tall ships leaving forever—it has a connotation for me that I can’t communicate except by telling you to go read The Lord of the Rings, and there I will stop.

“To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce.”

  • Roger Lancelyn Green, quoted in Letter 299, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (388).

Everything Was a Lie

I was so impressed with the line that I had to Google it to see if anyone else had praised it. Were Wolfe and I alone in noticing its beauty?

I didn’t find any commentary, but there were several results archived on Google Books.

To my great surprise, I was able to catalogue seven (7) distinct poems which use this phrase.

  1. “Ships That Come Not Back” by Freeman Chase Leslie, from Ships That Come Not Back and Other Poems (1 [non-paginated]), apparently the only book Leslie ever published. 

Tell me, oh master of the deep,

Guide of the destinies of men,

Where do the silent waters keep

The ships that come not back again?

  1. The original reference to “The Pool of the Black One,” by Robert E Howard, published in pulp magazine Weird Tales vol. 4, no. 22 (October 1933, pp. 447–465) and part of his Conan the Barbarian series.
  1. “Daily Talk” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, from The Worlds and I (363).

Yet do we seem divided by a sea

Across whose still unatlassed waters move

Out-going silent ships, that come not back,

Still I do watch the track

Of that strange midnight craft, whereon you sailed.

Believing love like yours which never failed.

  1. “Wraith and Wrack” by Duncan J. Robertson, in Wraith and Wrack and Other Poems (3). This poem is quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, as we will see below.

Hers are the happy isles; she still can hear

Somewhere the sirens singing, sweet and clear;

The secrets of the ships that come not back

Lie ’mid her waith and wrack.

  1. “Similes,” by Sarah Dudley P. Jones, published in Our Paper (page number not available). The author is not notable.

Tomorrow, of the whirlwind’s track

No trace is seen,

Over the ships that come not back

The waves roll green

  1. “Treasure-Ships” by Julia C. R. Dorr, published in Poems (373). Apparently a popular author in her day.

Yet, O ye beautiful ships,

There are ships that come not back,

With flying pennant and swelling sail,

Over yon shining track!

  1. “By The Sea Of Life” by Dell A. Higgins, published in The Ladies Repository (748). The author is not notable, but Higgins had several poems published in periodicals.

Forever we wait by the sea of life

For our ships that come not back,

Though we sent the forth one sunny morn

With light on their joyous track;

Retracing Its Course

Given the dates, locations, and internal evidence like derivative rhymes, we can now begin to reconstruct the route this phrase took over the course of 70 years.

The line was first invented by Dell A. Higgins, a reader of and frequent contributor to The Ladies’ Repository: A Monthly Periodical Devoted To Literature And Religion. It was borrowed by Julia C. R. Dorr, a published author and the exact sort of woman who might read such a periodical. Next, a certain Sarah Dudley P. Jones contributed a version to a Massachusetts periodical called Our Paper. Ella Wheeler Wilcox published her own version in 1918.

All three of these women also copy Dell A. Higgin’s rhyme: back/track.

The first non-American to use the line was Duncan J. Robertson of Orkney. It is possible that Dorr’s poem was published in Great Britain and that Robertson came into contact with it. The preface states the poem might have been written as early as 1884. Robertson was a frequent contributor to Longman’s Magazine and I read in Katherine Langrish’s blog Seven Miles of Steel Thistles that he was the first folklorist to collect the tale of Kate Crackernuts. Robertson has a command of dialect and obscure words. He rhymes back with wrack, an obscure variant of wreck.

Enter the famous Robert E. Howard. Howard’s version is obviously—no, shamelessly based on Robertson’s Waith and Wrack because he also rhymes with wrack. The only way he could have made it more obvious would be to also use waith, a variant of waif in the dialect of Orkney, meaning “a thing abandoned”.

Lastly, Freeman Chase Leslie’s version might borrow from anyone previously mentioned. It was written just one year after Howard’s version and I suppose he probably borrowed it from Howard. The poem was reprinted in Minnesota Verse: An Anthology edited by Maude Colgrove Schilplin (85). It is the only version which goes “ships that come not back again,” and Leslie rhymes it with “men.” I ended up buying my own copy because there’s nothing online to be found. This version might even be my favorite.

Nothing New Under The Sun

I don’t object to the phrase being invoked by different poets. Poets have been reusing phrases since before literacy. 

But this phrase really started at the bottom. It crossed the Atlantic twice before arriving at the lofty heights of Robert E. Howard’s pulp fiction, and ultimately to Gene Wolfe’s essay. It’s funny that so many people also copied rhymes like track and wrack.

However, this is not the end of the story.

I found myself asking this question: did Howard even know what waith and wrack referred to? Was he shameless enough to copy the very literate Robertson without knowing what Robertson meant? These are both very obscure words. In fact, waith is so obscure that in the past, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cited Robertson’s poem as its only modern example. Howard might have acquired the W volume of the OED as early as 1928 and looked up these words (Alan Bell reports the volume containing V–Z appeared in the spring of that year).

(In fact, Howard might have copied the line straight from the dictionary, not the original Robertson poem.)

The Twist

Now that we’ve looked at waith in the OED, I’m going to tell you something surprising. We know a lot about these particular pages of the OED for an entirely different reason.

One of the senior editors, Henry Bradley, was working on this exact section of the OED in 1919 when a certain young philologist came to train under him. That young philologist was J.R.R. Tolkien. There’s a great paper on this period called “At the Wordface: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work on the Oxford English Dictionary” by Peter M. Gilliver in Mythlore.

Working in alphabetical order, Bradley and his student, Tolkien, worked closely together on several entries. Tolkien was Bradley’s sous-chef until, after a period of training, Tolkien started working independently. Peter M. Gilliver tells us that, after waistcoat and words related to wait, “With the exception of waith and waive and their cognates, the next five pages of the published Dictionary are closely based on Tolkien’s work.”

So there it is. Tolkien did not work on waith.

Even though waith isn’t credited to Tolkien, it seems unavoidable that Tolkien was at least exposed to waith at the very end of his training under Henry Bradley.

The lexicographers worked with thousands of slips of paper sent in by the public, each containing a reference or a clipping of a particular word. Perhaps Tolkien was the one who did the busywork of collecting the clippings into a folder and putting them on Henry Bradley’s desk. Perhaps somebody cut those pages out of Longman’s Magazine. Perhaps those pages found their way into Tolkien’s hands. We may never know.

Did Tolkien ever read those words? Did he, a bit like Gene Wolfe, think it one of the finest things he’d ever read? Did he turn those words over in his head until they took root deep in Middle-earth?

Are we seeing ripples bounce off the other shore and cross back over themselves in Gene Wolfe’s essay? I wonder what he would think.

No, Gene Wolfe, I have no quarrel with you.

Editor’s Footnote: Thanks to a Mythlore letter by Robert E. Howard’s first biographer, L. Sprague De Camp, scholars know that Tolkien read Howard’s work in a short story collection titled Swords and Sorcery, published by Pyramid Books in 1963 (41). However, “The Pool of the Black One” was not included in this collection, and De Camp reports that Tolkien did not like the book’s contents (ibid). Therefore, as tempting as it is to imagine that Tolkien came across waith in Howard’s work, there’s no evidence he took any inspiration from Howard.

Works Cited

Bell, Alan. “Scholarly and Reference Publishing,” in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), The History of Oxford University Press: Volume III: 1896 to 1970, The History of Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2013; online edition, Oxford Academic, 21 August 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199568406.003.0011. Accessed 18 September 2025.

Carpenter, Humphrey (ed). The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

De Camp, L. Sprague. “Letters.” Mythlore vol. 13, no. 4, (Spring 1987), pp. 41–45.

Dorr, Julia C.R. Poems. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889.

Higgins, Dell A. “By The Sea Of Life.” The Ladies Repository vol. 14 (1864), p. 748.

Gilliver, Peter M. “At the Wordface: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work on the Oxford English Dictionary.” Mythlore vol. 21, no. 2 (Winter 1996), pp. 173–186.

Jones, Sarah Dudley P. “Similes.” Our Paper vol. 10 (1894), page number not available. 

Langrish, Katherine. “Strong Fairy Tale Heroines #26: KATE CRACKERNUTS.” Stell Thistles, 27 August 2020, https://steelthistles.blogspot.com/2020/08/. Accessed 18 September 2025.

Leslie, Freeman Chase. Ships That Come Not Back and Other Poems. Broadway Press, 1934. 

—. “Ships That Come Not Back.” in Maude Colgrove Schilplin, ed., Minnesota Verse: An Anthology, Times Co. Publishing Company, 1934, p. 85.

Robertson, Duncan J. Wraith and Wrack and Other Poems. Longsmans, Green & Co., 1914.

“Waith.” The Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1049593492.

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. The Worlds and I. George H. Doran Company, 1918.

Wolfe, Gene. “The Best Introduction to The Mountains.” Interzone vol. 174 (December 2001), pp. 49–51.