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 ‘oldest whale’, Uin, shows Roverandom ‘the great Bay of Fairyland (as we call it) beyond the Magic Isles’, and further off ‘in the last West the Mountains of Elvenhome and the light of Faery upon the waves’ and ‘the city of the Elves on the green hill beneath the Mountains’ (see here). For this is precisely the geography of the West of the world in the ‘Silmarillion’, as that work existed in the 1920s and 1930s. The ‘Mountains of Elvenhome’ are the Mountains of Valinor in Aman, and the ‘city of the Elves’ is Tún – to use the name given it both at one time in the mythology and in the first text (only) of Roverandom. Uin too is drawn from The Book of Lost Tales, and although he is not here quite his namesake ‘the mightiest and most ancient of whales’ (Part One, p.118), still he is able to carry Roverandom to within sight of the Western lands, which by this time in the development of the legendarium were hidden from mortal eyes behind darkness and perilous waters.
Uin says that he would ‘catch it’ if it was found out (presumably by the Valar, or Gods, who live in Valinor) that he had shown Aman to someone (even a dog!) from the ‘Outer Lands’ – that is, from Middle-earth, the world of mortals. In Roverandom that world in some ways is meant to be our own, with many real places mentioned by name. Roverandom himself ‘after all was an English dog’ (see here). But in other ways it is clearly not our earth: for one thing, it has edges over which waterfalls drop ‘straight into space’ (see here). This is not quite the earth depicted in the legendarium either, although it too is flat; but the moon of Roverandom, exactly like the one in The Book of Lost Tales, moves beneath the world when it is not in the sky above.
As more of Tolkien’s works have been published in the quarter-century since his death, it has become clear that nearly all of his writings are interrelated, if only in small ways, and that each sheds a welcome light upon the others. Roverandom illustrates once again how the legendarium that was Tolkien’s life-work influenced his storytelling, and it looks forward (or laterally) to writings on which Roverandom itself may have been an influence – especially to The Hobbit, whose composition (beginning possibly in 1927) was contemporaneous with the writing down and revision of Roverandom. Few readers of The Hobbit indeed will fail to notice (inter alia) similarities between Rover’s fearsome flight with Mew to his cliffside home and Bilbo’s to the eagles’ eyrie, and between the spiders Roverandom encounters on the moon and those of Mirkwood; that both the Great White Dragon and Smaug the dragon of Erebor have tender underbellies; and that the three crusty wizards in Roverandom – Artaxerxes, Psamathos, and the Man-in-the-Moon – each in his own way is a precursor of Gandalf.
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Before proceeding to the text it remains only to say a few additional words about the pictures accompanying it. They were not planned as illustrations for a printed book, and are not, in their subject matter, spaced equally throughout the story. Nor are they consistent even in style or media: two are in pen and ink, two in watercolour, and one chiefly in coloured pencil. Four are fully developed, the watercolours especially, while the fifth, the view of Rover arriving on the moon, is a much lesser work, with Rover, Mew, and the Man-in-the-Moon uncomfortably small.
In this drawing Tolkien was perhaps more interested in the tower and the (accurate) barren landscape, which however gives no hint of the lunar forests described in Roverandom.
The earlier Lunar Landscape is more faithful to the text: it includes trees with blue leaves, and ‘wide open spaces of pale blue and green where the tall pointed mountains threw their long shadows far across the floor’ (see here). It presumably depicts the moment when Roverandom and the Man-in-the-Moon, returning from their visit to the dark side, see ‘the world rise, a pale green and gold moon, huge and round above the shoulders of the Lunar Mountains’ (see here). But here the world is clearly not flat: only the Americas are shown, and therefore England and the other earthly locations mentioned in the tale must be on the opposite side of a globe. The title Lunar Landscape is written on the work in an early form of Tolkien’s Elvish script tengwar.
