The Stone Troll is a poem composed by Samwise Gamgee after encountering petrified figures of trolls, which the Hobbits recognized from Bilbo's story. The song appears in Chapter XII of Book One of The Lord of the Rings.

Troll sat alone on his seat of stone,
And munched and mumbled a bare old bone;
For many a year he had gnawed it near,
For meat was hard to come by.
Done by! Gum by!
In a cave in the hills he dwelt alone,
And meat was hard to come by.

Up came Tom with his big boots on.
Said he to Troll: ‘Pray, what is yon?
For it looks like the shin o’ my nuncle Tim,
As should be a-lyin’ in graveyard.
Caveyard! Paveyard!
This many a year has Tim been gone,
And I thought he were lyin’ in graveyard.’

‘My lad,’ said Troll, ‘this bone I stole.
But what be bones that lie in a hole?
Thy nuncle was dead as a lump o’ lead,
Afore I found his shinbone.
Tinbone! Thinbone!
He can spare a share for a poor old troll,
For he don’t need his shinbone.’

Said Tom: ‘I don’t see why the likes o’ thee
Without axin’ leave should go makin’ free
With the shank or the shin o’ my father’s kin;
So hand the old bone over!
Rover! Trover!
Though dead he be, it belongs to he;
So hand the old bone over!’

‘For a couple o’ pins,’ says Troll, and grins,
‘I’ll eat thee too, and gnaw thy shins.
A bit o’ fresh meat will go down sweet!
I’ll try my teeth on thee now.
Hee now! See now!
I’m tired o’ gnawing old bones and skins;
I’ve a mind to dine on thee now.’

But just as he thought his dinner was caught,
He found his hands had hold of naught.
Before he could mind, Tom slipped behind
And gave him the boot to larn him.
Warn him! Darn him!
A bump o’ the boot on the seat, Tom thought,
Would be the way to larn him.

But harder than stone is the flesh and bone
Of a troll that sits in the hills alone.
As well set your boot to the mountain’s root,
For the seat of a troll don’t feel it.
Peel it! Heal it!
Old Troll laughed, when he heard Tom groan,
And he knew his toes could feel it.

Tom’s leg is game, since home he came,
And his bootless foot is lasting lame;
But Troll don’t care, and he’s still there
With the bone he boned from its owner.
Doner! Boner!
Troll’s old seat is still the same,
And the bone he boned from its owner!

The first version of the song however was composed long before writing The Lord of the Rings (around 1923–24), and some other variations were published in other Tolkien's books including “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil”. The tune of the song matches British folk song “The Fox Went Out”, but the rhyme structure was altered a little bit. Overall there are some similarities to limerick form, but there are 7 lines in each verse instead of 5. Rhyme structure is AAXBBAB but also with frequent in-line rhymes (e.g. AA/BBA/CC/D/DD/A/D). The metric foot is mostly iambic, but occasionally switches to anapaest or just becomes irregular, and the shortest line is trochee.

The was no hard attempt to keep the rhyme, syllable per line count or poetic meter exactly, as they were quite irregular in the original anyway. But generally, if one counts long syllables instead of stressed one, the iambic meter is preserved. The grammar in the translation is rather loose, but doesn't switch to analytic style. The names Tom and Tim were left as is.

Once again, the silliest, most childish Tolkien's songs proved to be the hardest to translate. A lot of words were missing in the dictionary before:

Finally, a Nûrlâm translation:

• The Stone Troll poem at Tolkien Gateway
• The Fox Went Out song at Wikipedia