The Versus Tennysonianos II Project

Inspired by the Versus Tennysonianos ("Tennysonian Verses") edited by Canon Arthur Wright and published in 1882, this project seeks to compile a collection of translations and adaptations of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's famous epitaph for Sir John Franklin, the ill-fated Arctic Explorer: Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou Heroic sailor-soul Art passing on some happier voyage now Toward no earthy pole. For questions about the project, use the ask box. To submit a translation, please contact us at [email protected]

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Background Image: Aurora Borealis, Frederic Edwin Church, 1865. Oil on canvas, 142.3 x 212.2 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Translation Spotlight: Eleanor Anne Porden's The Arctic Expeditions (1818)

This week, I've translated Tennyson's epitaph for Sir John Franklin...

Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou Heroic sailor-soul Art passing on some happier voyage now Toward no earthy pole.

....using only words from the poem The Arctic Expeditions, written by Eleanor Anne Porden in 1818 about Captain Franklin, who later became her husband in 1823.

Image: Eleanor Anne Porden, attributed to Richard Westall, 1807. Oil on canvas, 113 x 143.8 cm, Krannert Art Museum.

No star in heaven [15] hails [23] your course[.] [15] But [11] thou, [8] discoverer[,] [19] Fear not [14] [the] chill that wraps your heart, alone[.] [17] The [23] misty North [7] lays [23] even [29] giant[s] low[,] [23] my [3] love[.] [21] Sail [7] on! [22] To different stars [18] in seas unknown. [7]

The numbers in the above transcription indicate the page numbers from which I pulled each of the words and phrases. Although Porden died of tuberculosis in 1825—twenty years before her husband disappeared in the Arctic—the polar context of her words speaks well, I think, to the circumstances of her husband's death. I wanted to convey what a more intimate version of the epitaph might sound like, with the endearment "my love" and the reassurance that "the misty North lays even giants low."

There's a bit of an eerie pun in the final line, however: Porden's invocation of "different stars" (a translation of the original "no earthly pole") might call to mind the 2009 work of narrative nonfiction titled The Indifferent Stars Above—about the Donner Party, another instance of icy survival cannibalism that took place at the same time as Sir John Franklin's final, fatal expedition to the Arctic.

If you enjoyed this and feel inspired to adapt Tennyson's epitaph yourself, please consider submitting to the Versus Tennysonianos II.

Submissions are open through November 1st, 2025!

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Translation Spotlight: Quenya (Elvish)

The text above is translation—into J.R.R. Tolkien's Quenya (or "High Elvish") language—of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's epitaph for his uncle, the ill-fated polar explorer Sir John Franklin:

Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou Heroic sailor-soul Art passing on some happier voyage now Toward no earthy pole.

The text can also be rendered in with the Latin alphabet:

Lá sinomë! Helcaraxë harya axotyar; ar etyë, Mánë callociryando, Autëa mestatyanen anvalima silumë Lancanna lá cemeno.

Or even broken down into its grammatical components:

Not in-this-place! Grinding-Ice possess-aorist-tense bone-thy-plural; and even-thou Departed-spirit hero-sailor-genitive, Depart-present-tense journey-thy-instrumental comparative-happy at-this-time Sharp-edge-allative not earth-genitive.

Since this is, to my knowledge, the first translation of these verses into Quenya, I have tried to retain the structure and vocabulary of the original English verses, at the expense of poetic concerns such as meter and rhyme, though my translation does preserve the epitaph’s ABAB rhyme scheme solely in terms of the final vowel sounds—where Tennyson uses the pure rhyming pairs “thou” / “now” and “soul” / “pole,” this translation uses –ë at the end of lines 1 and 3, and –o at the end of lines 2 and 4. In terms of vocabulary, I have prioritized words that allowed for assonance and consonance, while also reaching for terms that I felt made sense within the cosmology of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. For example, to render the idea of “the white North” as a place, I used the word “Helcaraxë,” a location to the far North of Middle-earth.

Image: Helcaraxë by Anérea, for the Silmarillion Writers' Guild.

Tolkien’s description of Helcaraxë as a region where “the sea-streams were filled with clashing hills of ice and the grinding of ice deep-sunken,” (Silmarillion, Chapter 9, “Of the Flight of the Noldor”) resonates with the harsh conditions of the Arctic archipelago where Franklin met his death. Furthermore, the “ks” sound at the end of “Helcaraxë” created a pleasing consonance with the word “axotyar” meaning “thy bones.” Similarly, I struggled initially to render the idea of a geo-magnetic pole (an idea which does not appear within Tolkien’s writings about Arda, the larger world of which Middle-earth is one part). I eventually found the Quenya noun “lanca,” referring to a sharp edge or sudden end, which Tolkien further defines as “e.g. a cliff-edge, or the clean edge of things made by hand or built, also used in transferred senses, as in kuivie-lankasse [cuivië-lancassë], literally ‘on the brink of life,’ of a perilous situation in which one is likely to fall into death” (Vinyar Tengwar 42, 8). Although Tolkien makes no mention of geo-magnetic poles in Arda, he created a unique explanation for why some ancient cosmologies understand the world as flat, and others depict the world as round: according to Tolkien, the world was originally flat, and was “made round” to punish the hubris of the men of Númenor, who dared to seek Valinor, the land of the Valar (Silmarillion, Akallabêth, “The Downfall of Númenor”).

Image: Downfall of Númenor by Ian Alexander via Wikipedia.

I thought that the term “lanca” (sharp edge) evoked the “Straight Road” used by Elves to reach Valinor even after rounding of the world, and this term allowed for consonance with the following phrase “lá cemeno,” meaning “not of the earth.” Within my conception of how the story of Sir John Franklin might transfer into the world of Middle-earth, I have imagined Franklin as an exceptional mortal Man to whom a temporary exemption from the “Gift of Ilúvatar” has been granted. Within this narrative conceit, Franklin’s soul—or more specifically his “mánë,” referring to a “spirit that has gone to the Valar” (The Book of Lost Tales, Vol. I, 260), likely deriving from the Latin term manes or the “the departed spirit, ghost, shade of a person” (Lewis & Short, s.v. Manes, Manium)—will live with the Valar before he eventually departs “whither the Elves know not” (Silmarillion, Chapter 1, “Of the Beginning of Days”). 

Image: The Travel of Eärendil to Valinor with Elwing, by Giovanni Calore.

If you found this interesting, you can read more about the history of translating Tennyson's epitaph HERE, and consider submitting a translation of your own for publication! More info on that HERE.

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Call for Translations & Creative Works

In 1845, Sir John Franklin set sail from England with two ships and 128 men, seeking a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean through the labyrinth of straits and channels now known as the Canadian Arctic. Neither Franklin nor any of his men returned to England alive. Following Franklin’s death, the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson composed an epitaph for a cenotaph erected for Franklin in Westminster Abbey. Tennyson considered these four short lines one of the best epitaphs he ever wrote:

Not here: the white North has thy bones; and thou, Heroic sailor-soul, Art passing on thine happier voyage now Toward no Earthly pole.

This epitaph captured the hearts of Victorian poets and antiquaries so thoroughly that one of Franklin’s nephews was able to compile a volume of 165 distinct translations of the epitaph, mainly into Latin and Greek. Inspired by these Versus Tennysonianos (“Tennysonian Verses”), published in 1882, we are seeking translations, adaptations, and creative reimaginings of Tennyson’s epitaph to be published as a part of a digital zine. 

Please send all submissions to [email protected] by November 1st, 2025, with all the components of your submission in an appropriate file format (e.g. use .docx files for the text aspects of submissions, and .png files of at least 2000x2000 pixels for images). Your submission should include: 

Your name. (If you prefer not to be named, you may omit #2 and you will be listed as “Anon.”)

A short biography of yourself (not more than 100 words). 

Your translation or adaptation—either text or images or both. 

A short translator’s note (not more than 600 words).

In the spirit of the original volume, we may print up to eight works by any given contributor. We welcome works in all languages and idioms, using all reproducible visual media. In particular, we seek translations that question the hero-worship underpinning Tennyson’s words and the imperialism that forms the foundation of nineteen-century polar exploration such as the Arctic voyages of Franklin. 

We cannot offer financial compensation to translators at this time. In acknowledgement of the harm done by British and American polar explorers to native communities of the circumpolar north—if there is sufficient interest to motivate the production of a physical volume—any proceeds will be donated to the Nunavut Food Bank, the Qajuqturvik Community Food Centre, and the Oxen Network. Many thanks to Terror Camp for identifying these organizations. 

If you have any questions, you can contact us by email via [email protected] or send us an ask here on tumblr!

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Versus Tennysonianos: A Brief History

If you attended Terror Camp IV (2024), you may have heard me talk about the Versus Tennysonianos, an edited volume from 1882, created to memorialize the ill-fated polar explorer Sir John Franklin. Using the slides from my Terror Camp talk, here's a TL;DR version of my talk about the volume and its translations!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate of England, composed this four-tine epitaph for Sir John Franklin, who was his uncle by marriage. The poem was inscribed below a bust of Sir John as part of a cenotaph (an empty tomb) in Westminster Abbey. According to his son, Tennyson thought this verse was the best epitaph he ever wrote—and he wasn’t the only person who felt this way.

In 1882, there appeared an edited volume with 165 different translations of this poem, written by 95 different translators. Most of these translations were composed in either Latin or ancient Greek. 

Sir John’s nephew, Reverend Arthur Wright, created this collection as part of his life-long dedication to his uncle’s memory.

And Wright’s little book had a wide readership—in 1885, the Constantinople-based newspaper Kosmos praised the volume for increasing public attention around both Sir John as a martyr and ancient Greek as a language.

As part of my dissertation work, I’ve worked to analyze the Versus Tennysonianos to better understand the workings of polar fandom in Victorian England. First, I translated each poem back into (hyper-literal) English. 

Next, I made a series of spreadsheets that chart commonalities across the Greek and Latin translations. Some aspects of the verses were very consistent; for example, 78% of all Latin translators used the word ossa for “bones.” Other aspects changed significantly, however—especially because all of the poems were written in different meters. 

I scanned every poem to determine its poetic meter. Again, there are patterns—most (64%) of the poems were written in Elegiac Couplets—and there are outliers, like Arthur Sidgwick’s elegant Greek translation using the same meter as the ancient poetess Sappho. 

Once I had evaluated all of the translations, I turned to the translators. I used the bare-bones information contained in the volume (typically just a first initial and last name, sometimes supplemented by a job posting at a school or rectory) to identify all of the translators and record their biographical details. 

Finally, I began tracing out the personal and professional relationships between the translators, and delving into the archives to piece together the history of how the volume came together. 

While I write up my findings on the original Versus Tennysonianos for publication, I’ve decided to start a side-project, inspired by the enthusiasm of several of my friends, who freely began translating Tennyson’s epitaph for Franklin themselves. 

TL;DR, I’m creating a sequel to Arthur’s Wright’s volume. And I’d like YOU to contribute!