Coming from the darker side of Tolkien's imagination, "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" is an important non Middle-earth work to set alongside his other retellings of existing legends, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, The Fall of Arthur and The Story of Kullervo. Together with Tolkien’s Corrigan Poems, the texts comprise a sequence that was the outcome of a short but intense period in Tolkien's life.