Tolkien poem, half-remembered - can anyone point me to it?

Cafe Society
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A while ago I came across a Tolkien poem, read it, and filed it away in the mental storage system - which of course has now sprung a gasket.

Supposedly, it was a poem of hobbit lore, a race memory from before they reached the Shire and safety. The poem was about some sort of monsters that preyed on the hobbits. The last line was “And the [name of monsters - dewlaps, maybe?] feed.” It struck me as a very dark poem, not like Tolkien’s normal stuff.

Can anyone point me to the poem?

Thanks.

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The shadows where the Mewlips dwell
Are dark and wet as ink,
And slow and softly rings their bell,
As in the slime you sink.

[ REMAINDER OF POEM DELETED BY MODERATOR ]

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How to find something like this using Google

Although a Tolkien fan to some degree (heck, I was just going on-and-on about him in another thread), I hadn’t heard of this poem before. I found it on Google, using the following search pattern:
Tolkien "and the * feed"

Evidently, “and the * feed” searches for the phrase “and the ___ feed”, where there is only one word in the blank. If you do “and the ** feed”, it expects two words in the blank, etc. I actually just now figured that out.

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Evidently, the poem is called “The Mewlips”, and is one of the poems from “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” found in The Tolkien Reader.

As for the Mewlips themselves, they are aparently “an evil race of cannibal spirits that inhabited the marshlands. Similar to a barrow-wight”

I found this here, in a trivia thread in a forum on a Tolkien fansite.

My original search led me to that site, and then I searched for “the Mewlips” to find the full text of the poem, shown above.

By the way, in case the bolding made it unclear in my above post, the character used to represent unknown words in a phrase on Google is just an ordinary asterisk *

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that’s it! brilliant googling there, tim314. I remembered “dewlaps”, which is close enough to mewlips that I don’t think I’ve completely lost my memory!

Thanks very much.

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Moderator speaketh:
tim314, while we and the OP are appreciative of the advice, the Straight Dope Message Board does NOT permit quoting an entire poem. The work is still under copyright by the Tolkien estate. You can quote a few lines or a stanza under the “Fair Usage” rules, but quoting the entire poem is a no-no.

Instead, provide a link, as you did later. I don’t know whether the site that you linked to has permission to quote the entire poem, and I don’t much care. Here at the Straight Dope, we respect the copyright of others and we expect other websites to respect our copyrights.