It is not too much to say that The Lord of the Rings might not have come into being were it not for stories like Roverandom; for their popularity with the Tolkien children, and with Tolkien himself, led at last to a more ambitious work – The Hobbit – and so to its sequel. For the most part, these stories were ephemeral. Few were written down, and of those not many were finished. Tolkien settled happily into his role as a storyteller to his children, from at least 1920 when he wrote the first of the ‘Father Christmas’ letters. There were also stories of the villain Bill Stickers with his adversary Major Road Ahead, of the very small man Timothy Titus, and of the flamboyant Tom Bombadil, who was based on a Dutch doll that belonged to Michael Tolkien. None of these went very far, although Tom Bombadil later found a niche in poems and in The Lord of the Rings. An extremely odd tale of greater length, The Orgog, was written in 1924 and is extant in a typescript; but it is both unfinished and undeveloped.
In contrast Roverandom is complete and well-crafted; and it is further distinguished among Tolkien’s children’s fiction of this period for the unrestrained delight with which its author indulged in wordplay. It contains a richness of near-homonyms (Persia and Pershore), and of onomatopoeia and alliteration (‘yaps and yelps, and yammers and yowls, growling and grizzling, whickering and whining, snickering and snarling, mumping and moaning’, see here), of descriptive lists humorous by their length (such as the ‘paraphernalia, insignia, symbols, memoranda, books of recipes, arcana, apparatus, and bags and bottles of miscellaneous spells’ in Artaxerxes’ workshop, see here), and of unexpected turns of phrase (‘[The Man-in-the-Moon] vanished immediately into thin air; and anybody who has never been there will tell you how extremely thin the moon-air is’, see here). It includes as well a number of ‘childish’ colloquialisms, such as whizz, splosh, tummy, and uncomfy, which are of particular interest for their like is rarely met with in Tolkien’s published writings, having been omitted ab initio in his manuscripts or deleted in revision (as tummy was altered in The Hobbit to stomach). Here they are surely survivals from the story as it was originally told orally to the Tolkien children.
That Tolkien also included in Roverandom words such as paraphernalia, and phosphorescent, primordial, and rigmarole, is refreshing in these later days when such language is considered too ‘difficult’ for young children – a view with which Tolkien would have disagreed. ‘A good vocabulary,’ he once wrote (April 1959), ‘is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one’s age-group. It comes from reading books above one’ (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien [1981], pp. 298–9).
Roverandom is remarkable too for the variety of biographical and literary materials that went into its making. First among them of course was Tolkien’s own family, and the author himself: in Roverandom the Tolkien parents and children are seen or (in baby Christopher’s case) referred to, the cottage and beach at Filey appear in three chapters, Tolkien several times expresses his feelings about litter and pollution, and events of the 1925 holiday – the moon shining upon the sea, the great storm, and above all the loss of Michael’s toy dog – are elements in the tale. To these Tolkien added a wealth of references to myth and fairy-story, to Norse sagas, and to traditional and contemporary children’s literature: to the Red and White Dragons of British legend, to Arthur and Merlin, to mythical sea-dwellers (mermaids, Niord, and the Old Man of the Sea among many), and to the Midgard serpent, alongside borrowings from, or at least echoes of, the ‘Psammead’ books of E. Nesbit, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-glass and Sylvie and Bruno, even Gilbert and Sullivan. It is a wide range, but these diverse materials combined well in Tolkien’s hands, with little incongruity and much amusement – for those who recognize the allusions.
We identify and discuss many of Tolkien’s sources (definite or probable) for Roverandom – as also obscure words, a few matters which are specific to Britain and may be unfamiliar to readers from other lands, and subjects of special interest – in brief notes following the text. But here, in this general introduction, it seems good to call attention to a few points at greater length.
In his 1939 Andrew Lang lecture On Fairy-Stories Tolkien criticized the ‘flower-and-butterfly minuteness’ of many depictions of fairies, citing in particular Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia with the knight Pigwiggen riding on a ‘frisky earwig’ and ‘making an assignation in a cowslip-flower’. But at the time of Roverandom he had not yet eschewed whimsical ideas such as moon-gnomes riding on rabbits and making pancakes out of snowflakes, and sea-fairies who drive in shell carriages harnessed to tiny fishes. Only some ten years earlier he had published a now famous piece of juvenilia, the poem ‘Goblin Feet’ (1915) in which the author hears ‘tiny horns of enchanted leprechauns’ and dwells on ‘little robes’ and ‘little happy feet’; and as Tolkien once confessed, in the 1920s and 1930s he was ‘still influenced by the convention that “fairy-stories” are naturally directed to children’ (Letters, p. 297, draft of April 1959). Therefore he sometimes adopted common ‘fairy-story’ imagery and modes of expression: the playful, singing elves of Rivendell in The Hobbit, for example, and both in that work and (even more so) in Roverandom, a prominent authorial (or parental) voice as narrator. Later Tolkien regretted having in any way ‘written down’ to his children, and wished especially that ‘Goblin Feet’ could be buried and forgotten. Meanwhile, the Fairies (later Elves) of his imagined ‘Silmarillion’ mythology stood tall and noble, with little trace of ‘Pigwiggenry’.
Roverandom almost inevitably was drawn towards Tolkien’s mythology (or legendarium), which by then he had developed for a decade or more and which remained for him a preoccupation. Several comparisons may be made between these works. The garden on the dark side of the moon in Roverandom, for example, closely recalls the Cottage of Lost Play in The Book of Lost Tales, the earliest prose treatment of the legendarium. In the latter children ‘danced and played …, gathering flowers or chasing the golden bees and butterflies with embroidered wings’ (Part One [published 1983], p. 19), while in the moon-garden they are ‘dancing sleepily, walking dreamily, and talking to themselves. Some stirred as if just waking from deep sleep; some were already running wide awake and laughing: they were digging, gathering flowers, building tents and houses, chasing butterflies, kicking balls, climbing trees; and all were singing’ (see here).
The Man-in-the-Moon will not say how the children arrive in his garden, but at one point Roverandom looks towards the earth and seems to see, ‘faint and rather thin, long lines of small people sailing swiftly down’ the moon-path (see here); and as the children come to the garden while asleep, it seems certain that Tolkien had in mind his already existing vision of the Olórë Mallë or Path of Dreams leading to the Cottage of Lost Play: ‘slender bridges resting on the air and greyly gleaming as it were of silken mists lit by a thin moon’, a path no man’s eyes have beheld ‘save in sweet slumbers in their heart’s youth’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 211).
The most intriguing connection between Roverandom and the mythology, however, occurs when the ‘