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- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
Step beyond Middle-earth into the mystical borders of the Perilous Realm—where talking animals, forgotten gods, and whimsical wizards come alive in richly imagined fables and fantasy. Tales from the Perilous Realm brings together five of Tolkien's most enchanting short works: Roverandom, Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and Smith of Wootton Major. From humorous satire to philosophical parable, these tales reveal Tolkien's wit, depth, and storytelling mastery beyond his epic sagas. Whether it's a dog turned moon traveler, a reluctant hero outsmarting a dragon, or a tiny town caught in a battle of giants, this collection is a treasure trove of magic, meaning, and charm. Ideal for readers of all ages, this volume is a beautiful portal into Tolkien's broader mythic imagination.
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TALES FROM THEPERILOUS REALM
BYJ.R.R. Tolkien
Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
ROVERANDOM
1
2
3
4
5
FARMER GILES OF HAM
FOREWORD
FARMER GILES OF HAM
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM BOMBADIL
PREFACE
1 THE ADVENTURES OF TOM BOMBADIL
2 BOMBADIL GOES BOATING
3 ERRANTRY
4 PRINCESS MEE
5 THE MAN IN THE MOON STAYED UP TOO LATE
6 THE MAN IN THE MOON CAME DOWN TOO SOON
7 THE STONE TROLL
8 PERRY-THE-WINKLE
9 THE MEWLIPS
10 OLIPHAUNT
11 FASTITOCALON
12 CAT
13 SHADOW-BRIDE
14 THE HOARD
15 THE SEA-BELL
16 THE LAST SHIP
SMITH OF WOOTTON MAJOR
SMITH OF WOOTTON MAJOR
LEAF BY NIGGLE
LEAF BY NIGGLE
APPENDIX
ON FAIRY-STORIES
FAIRY-STORY
ORIGINS
CHILDREN
FANTASY
RECOVERY, ESCAPE, CONSOLATION
EPILOGUE
NOTES
About the Author
Works by J.R.R. Tolkien
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
We do not know when Tolkien began to turn his thoughts to the Perilous Realm of Faërie. In his essay “On Fairystories”, to be found at the end of this book, he admits that he took no particular interest in tales of that kind as a child: they were just one of many interests. A “real taste” for them, he says, “was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war”. This seems to be strictly accurate. The first of his works to take an interest in fairies, that we know of, is a poem called “Wood-sunshine”, written in 1910, when Tolkien was eighteen and still at King Edward’s School in Birmingham. By the end of 1915, the year in which he took his Oxford degree and immediately joined the army to fight in the Great War, he had written several more, some of them containing major elements of what would be his developed Faërie mythology. By the end of 1917, most of which he spent in military hospital or waiting to be passed fit for active service once more, he had written the first draft of tales which would sixty years later be published in The Silmarillion, and much of Middle-earth, as also of Elvenhome beyond it, had taken shape in his mind.
What happened then is a long story, about which we now know a great deal more than we did, but once again it was summed up concisely and suggestively by Tolkien himself, in the story “Leaf by Niggle”. It is generally accepted that this has a strong element of self-portrait about it, with Tolkien the writer—a confirmed “niggler”, as he said himself—transposed as Niggle the painter. Niggle, the story tells us, was busy on all kinds of pictures, but one in particular started to grow on him. It began as just a single leaf, but then it became a tree, and the tree grew to be a Tree, and behind it a whole country started to open out, with “glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow”. Niggle, Tolkien wrote, “lost interest in his other pictures; or else he took them and tacked them on to the edges of his great picture”.
Once again this is an accurate account of what Tolkien can be seen doing in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. During those thirty years he kept working at variants of “Silmarillion” stories, writing occasional poems, often anonymously, and making up other stories, not always written down and sometimes told initially only to his children. The Hobbit started life as one of these, set in Middleearth, but to begin with connected only tangentially with the Elvish history of the Silmarils: it was, to use the modern term, a spin-off. The Lord of the Rings was a further spin-off, this time from The Hobbit, and initially motivated by Tolkien’s publisher’s strong desire for a Hobbit-sequel. But what Tolkien started to do, just like Niggle, was to take things he had written before and start “tacking them on to the edges”. Tom Bombadil, who had begun as the name for a child’s toy, got into print in 1934 as the hero of a poem, and then became perhaps the most mysterious figure in the world of The Lord of the Rings. That work also drew in other poems, some of them comic, like Sam Gamgee’s “Oliphaunt” rhyme, first published in 1927, others grave and sad, like the version Strider gives on Weathertop of the tale of Beren and Lúthien, again going back to a poem published in 1925, and based on a story written even earlier.
Quite what was the “leaf” of Tolkien’s original inspiration, and what he meant by “the Tree”, we cannot be sure, though the “forest marching over the land” does sound very like the Ents. But the little allegory makes one further point which corroborates what Tolkien said elsewhere, and that is that “fairy-stories”, whoever tells them, are not about fairies so much as about Faërie, the Perilous Realm itself. Tolkien indeed asserted there are not many stories actually about fairies, or even about elves, and most of them—he was too modest to add, unless they were written by Tolkien himself—were not very interesting. Most good fairy-stories are about “the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches”, a very exact description once again of Tolkien’s own tales of Beren on the marches or borders of Doriath, Túrin skirmishing around Nargothrond, or Tuor escaping from the Fall of Gondolin. Tolkien remained strongly ambivalent about the very notion of “fairy”. He disliked the word, as a borrowing from French—the English word is “elf”—and he also disliked the whole Victorian cult of fairies as little, pretty, ineffective creatures, prone to being co-opted into the service of moral tales for children, and often irretrievably phony. Much of his essay “On Fairy—Stories”, indeed (published in 1945 in a memorial volume for Charles Williams, and there expanded from a lecture given in 1939 in honour of Andrew Lang the fairy-tale collector) is avowedly corrective, both of scholarly terminology and of popular taste. Tolkien thought he knew better, was in touch with older, deeper, and more powerful conceptions than the Victorians knew, even those as learned as Andrew Lang.
However, while he had no time for fairies, Tolkien was all for Faërie itself, the land, as Bilbo Baggins puts it, of “dragons and goblins and giants”, the land where one may hear of “the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widow’s sons”. The stories and poems in this book show Tolkien trying out various approaches to perilous realms of one kind or another, all of them suggestive, original, independent. They represent, one may say, the pictures Niggle did not “tack on to the edges of his great picture”. They hint tantalisingly at directions which might have been explored further, like the later unwritten history of Farmer Giles’s Little Kingdom. And they give quite different views of Tolkien’s inspiration, spread over a period of at least forty years, and extending from maturity to old age. Also, as it happens, we know a good deal about how each of them came into being.
Roverandom, not published till 1998, began more than seventy years earlier as a story with a single limited purpose: to console a little boy for the loss of his toy dog. In September 1925 the Tolkien family, father, mother, and three sons, John (aged eight), Michael (aged five), and baby Christopher, went on holiday to the seaside town of Filey in Yorkshire. Michael at that time was very attached to a small toy dog, which went everywhere with him. He and his father and elder brother went down to the beach, he put it down to play, but when they went back for it they couldn’t find it: the dog was white with black spots, and on a white shingle beach it was invisible. They looked for it without success that day and the next, and then a storm wrecked the beach and made further search impossible. To cheer Michael up, Tolkien invented a story in which toy Rover was not a toy, but a real dog turned into a toy by an angry wizard; the toy then met a friendly wizard on the beach, who sent him off on various quests in order to become a real dog again, and be reunited with his one-time owner, the boy called “Two”. Like all Tolkien’s stories, this grew in the telling, being written down, with several of Tolkien’s own illustrations, probably around Christmas 1927, and reaching final shape at about the same time as The Hobbit, in 1936.
Besides the beach at Filey, where Rover meets the sandwizard Psamathos, Roverandom has three main settings, the light side of the Moon, where the Man in the Moon has his tower, the dark side, where sleeping children come down the moon-path to play in the valley of dreams, and the undersea kingdom of the mer-king, where the angry wizard Artaxerxes has gone to take up a position as Pacific Atlantic Magician, or PAM. Both in the Moon and under the sea Rover is befriended by a moon-dog, or a mer-dog, both called Rover, which is why he has to take the name Roverandom. The three of them get into continual scrapes, teasing the Great White Dragon on the Moon, and stirring up the Sea-serpent on the ocean-bed, whose writhings send a storm like the one that scattered the shingle at Filey, while Roverandom is carried by the great whale Uin across the Shadowy Seas and beyond the Magic Isles to within sight of Elvenhome itself and the light of Faery—the nearest Tolkien comes to attaching this story to his greater mythology. “I should catch it, if this was found out!”, says Uin, diving hastily, and we hear no more of what would be Valinor.
“Catch it!” captures the tone of this early and humorous piece. The little dogs’ adventures are playful, the animals who transport them, Mew the gull and Uin the whale, are no worse than condescending, and even the three wizards who make an appearance are good-natured or, in the case of Artaxerxes, something less than competent. Nevertheless there are hints of things older and darker and deeper. The Great White Dragon the dogs tease on the Moon is also the White Dragon of England in the Merlin legend, forever at war with the Red Dragon of the Welsh; the Sea-serpent recalls the Midgard Serpent who will be the death of Thor on the day of Ragnarok; mer-dog Rover remembers a Viking master who sounds very like the famous King Olaf Tryggvason. There is myth, and legend, and even history, in Roverandom. Nor did Tolkien forget that even for children there must be suggestions of peril in the Perilous Realm. The dark side of the Moon has black spiders, as well as grey ones ready to pickle little dogs for their larders, while on the white side “there were sword-flies, and glass-beetles with jaws like steel-traps, and pale unicornets with stings like spears…And worse than the insects were the shadowbats”, not to mention, on the way back from the valley where the children go in dreams, “nasty creepy things in the bogs” that without the Man in the Moon’s protection “would otherwise have grabbed the little dog quick”. There are sea-goblins too, and a whole list of calamities caused by Artaxerxes tipping out his spells. Already Tolkien had grasped the effect of suggestion, of stories not told, of beings and powers (like the Necromancer in The Hobbit) held just out of sight. Whatever logic may say, time spent on details, even when they lead nowhere, is not all simply “niggling”.
Humour is also the dominant tone of “Farmer Giles of Ham”, but it is humour of a different sort, more adult and even scholarly. Once again, this story began as a tale told impromptu to Tolkien’s children: his eldest son John remembered being told a version of it as the family sheltered under a bridge from a storm, probably after they moved to Oxford in 1926. (One of the major scenes in the story is the dragon Chrysophylax coming out from under a bridge to rout the king and his army.) In the first written version, the narrator is “Daddy”, and a child interrupts to ask what is a “blunderbuss”. The tale was steadily expanded, reaching its final shape when it was read to an Oxford student society in January 1940, and was eventually published in 1949.
The first joke lies in the title, for we have two of them, one in English and one in Latin. Tolkien pretends to have translated the story out of Latin, and in his “Foreword” imitates a kind of scholarly introduction, which is thoroughly patronising. The imaginary editor despises the imaginary narrator’s Latin, sees the tale as useful mainly for explaining place-names, and raises a snobbish eyebrow at those deluded people who “may find the character and adventures of its hero attractive in themselves”. But the tale takes its revenge. The editor shows his approval of “sober annals” and “historians of the reign of Arthur”, but the “swift alternations of war and peace” he mentions come from the start of the romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as marvellous and unhistorical a source as one could hope to find. As the story indicates, the truth is that the “popular lays” which the editor sneers at are much more reliable than the scholarly commentary imposed on them. All through Farmer Giles, the old and the traditional defeat the learned and new-fangled. The “Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford” define a blunderbuss, and their definition is that of the great Oxford English Dictionary with (in Tolkien’s day) its four successive editors. Giles’s blunderbuss, however, defies the definition and works just the same. “Plain heavy swords” are “out of fashion” at the king’s court, and the king gives one away to Giles as being of no value: but the sword is “Tailbiter” (or if one insists on using Latin, “Caudimordax”), and Giles is heartened by having it, even in the face of dragons, because of his love of the old tales and heroic songs which have gone out of fashion too.
Gone out of fashion, maybe, but not gone away. All his life Tolkien was fascinated by survivals: words and phrases and sayings, even stories and rhymes, which came from a prehistoric past but which had been passed on by word of mouth, quite naturally, often garbled and generally unrecognized, right down to modern common experience. Fairy-stories are an obvious example, kept in being for centuries not by scholars but by old grannies and nursemaids. Nursery-rhymes too. Where do they come from? Old King Cole figures in Tolkien’s “Foreword” (suitably transferred to scholarly pseudohistory), and Chrysophylax quotes “Humpty Dumpty” when he comes out from under the bridge. Two more nursery-rhymes were rewritten as the “Man in the Moon” poems in Tom Bombadil. Riddles are survivals as well, told by Anglo-Saxons (we still have more than a hundred of them), and by modern schoolchildren. And then there are popular sayings, always open to revision—“Sunny Sam” the blacksmith inverts a couple of them in Farmer Giles, as does Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings, with his “All that is gold does not glitter”—but never dying out. And the commonest types of survival are names, of people and of places. They often descend from remote antiquity, their meaning is often forgotten, but they are still overpoweringly present. Tolkien was convinced that old heroic names hung on even in names associated with his own family, and one inspiration for Farmer Giles must be the urge to “make sense” of the local Buckinghamshire placenames of Tame and Worminghall.
Myths are the greatest of survivals, though, and the most important revenge in Farmer Giles is the revenge of the mythical on the everyday. For who is to say which is which? It is the young and silly dragons who conclude “So knights are mythical!…We always thought so.” It is the silly over-civilised court which prefers sweet and sticky Mock Dragon’s Tail to Real Tail. The courtiers’ descendants (Tolkien implies) will eventually substitute their feeble imitations for the real thing even in fantasy—just like Nokes the Cook in Smith of Wootton Major, with his sad diminished idea of the Fairy Queen and Faërie itself. Giles deals firmly and fairly with king and court and dragon alike, though we should not forget the assistance he receives from the parson—a scholar who makes up for all the others—and from the story’s unsung heroine, the grey mare. She knew what she was doing all the time, even when she sniffed at Giles’s unnecessary spurs. He didn’t need to pretend to be a knight.
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil also owe their existence to prompting from Tolkien’s family. In 1961 his Aunt Jane Neave suggested to him that he might bring out a little book with Tom Bombadil in it, which people like her could afford to buy as Christmas presents. Tolkien responded by collecting a clutch of poems he had already written at different times over the preceding forty years or more. Most of the sixteen had been printed, sometimes in very obscure publications, in the 1920s and 1930s, but Tolkien took the opportunity in 1962 to revise them thoroughly. By this time The Lord of the Rings had appeared, and was already well-known, and Tolkien did what Niggle had done with his earlier pictures: he put these early compositions into the overall frame of his greater one. Once again he used the device of the scholarly editor, this time someone who has access to the Red Book of Westmarch, the hobbit-compilation from which The Lord of the Rings was supposed to have been drawn, and who has decided this time to edit not the main story but the “marginalia”—the things which medieval scribes in reality often wrote round the edges of their more official works.
This device allowed Tolkien to put in poems which were clearly just jokes, like no. 12, “Cat”, written as late as 1956 for his granddaughter Joanna; or poems which had no connection with Middle-earth, like no. 9, “The Mewlips”, originally printed in The Oxford Magazine for 1937 and there sub-titled “Lines Induced by Sensations When Waiting for an Answer at the Door of an Exalted Academic Person”; or poems which did have such a connection, but one which now made Tolkien uneasy. No. 3, “Errantry”, for instance, had been first written at least thirty years before, and had then been revised to become a song sung by Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings, but the names in it did not fit Tolkien’s increasingly developed Elvish languages. Editor-Tolkien accordingly explains that while the poem is Bilbo’s, he must have written it not long after his retirement to Rivendell, at a time when he did not know much about Elvish tradition. By the time Bilbo composed the Lord of the Rings version, he knew better, though Strider still thinks he should have left well alone. Several other poems, like nos. 7 and 8, the two troll-poems, or no. 10, “Oliphaunt”, are ascribed to Sam Gamgee, which helps to account for their non-serious nature. Nos. 5 and 6, the two “Man in the Moon” poems, both of them dating back to 1923, confirm Tolkien’s interest in nursery-rhymes: they are, in Tolkien’s imagination, the old complete poems of which modern children’s rhymes are garbled descendants, and the kind of thing that would have been popular in his imaginary Shire.
The first two and last three poems in the collection however show Tolkien working more deeply and more seriously. No. 1, the title poem, had also been published in The Oxford Magazine, in 1934, but no. 2, “Bombadil Goes Boating”, may date back even further. Like Roverandom, Bombadil had begun as the name of one of the Tolkien children’s toys, but had soon established himself as a kind of image of the English countryside and the country-folk and their enduring traditions, powerful, indeed masterful, but uninterested in exercising power. In both poems Tom is continually threatened, seriously by Barrow-wight, jokingly by otter-lad and by the hobbits who shoot arrows into his hat, or else teased by the wren and the kingfisher, and again by the hobbits. He gives as good as he gets, or better, but while the first poem ends on a note of triumph and contentment, the second ends on a note of loss: Tom will not come back.
The last three poems are all heavily reworked from earlier originals, and have become thematically much darker. “The Hoard” (going back to 1923) describes what Tolkien in The Hobbit would call “dragon-sickness”, the greed and possessiveness which successively overpowers elf and dwarf and dragon and hero and leads all of them—like Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit and the elf-king Thingol “Greycloak” in The Silmarillion—to their deaths. “The Last Ship” shows Tolkien balanced between two urges, on the one hand the wish to escape mortality and travel to the Undying Lands like Frodo, and on the other the sense that this is not only impossible, but ultimately unwelcome: the right thing to do is to turn back and live one’s life, like Sam Gamgee. Right it may be, but as Arwen finds, if there is no way to reverse it that choice is bitter. Finally, “The Sea-Bell” reminds us why the Perilous Realm is perilous. Those who have travelled to it, like the speaker of the poem, know they will not be allowed to stay there, but when they come back, they are overwhelmed by a sense of loss. As Sam Gamgee says of Galadriel, the inhabitants of Faërie may mean no harm, but they are still dangerous for ordinary mortals. Those who encounter them may never be the same again. In Tolkien’s editorial fiction, though the speaker should not be identified with Frodo himself, the hobbit-scribe who called the poem “Frodos Dreme” was expressing the fear created in the Shire by the dimly-understood events of the War of the Ring, as also (in reality) Tolkien’s own sense of loss and age.
These themes become stronger in Tolkien’s last published story, Smith of Wootton Major. This began with a request from a publisher, in 1964, that Tolkien should write a preface to a new illustrated edition of the story “The Golden Key”, by the Victorian author George MacDonald. (Tolkien had praised the story in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” nearly twenty years before.) Tolkien agreed, began work on the preface, and got a few pages into it when he started to illustrate his argument about the unexpected power of Faërie with a story about a cook trying to bake a cake for a children’s party. But at that point he broke off the preface, which was never resumed, and wrote the story instead. A developed version was read to a large audience in Oxford on 28 October 1966, and the story was published the following year.
Its title is almost aggressively plain, even more so than Farmer Giles of Ham, and Tolkien himself noted that it sounded like an old-fashioned school story. The name “Wootton”, however, though perfectly ordinary in England, has a meaning, as all names once did. It means “the town in the wood”, and the second sentence confirms that it was “deep in the trees”. Woods and forests were important for Tolkien, recurring from Mirkwood to Fangorn, and one of their recurrent (and realistic) features is that in them people lose their bearings and their way. One feels this is true of the inhabitants of Wootton Major, or many of them: a bit smug, easily satisfied, concerned above all with food and drink—not entirely bad qualities, but limited. To this Smith is an exception. At the children’s party which the village holds every twenty-four years he swallows a star, and this star is his passport into Faërie (or Faery, as Tolkien spells it here). The story follows Smith’s life, recounting some of his visions and experiences in Faërie, but also takes us through repeated festivals till the time when Smith has to give up the star, and allow it to be baked into a cake for some other child to succeed him. Smith knows when he leaves Faërie for the last time that “his way now led back to bereavement”. He is in the same position, if with more acceptance, as the narrator of “The Sea-bell”. The story is “a farewell to Fairyland”.
This does not mean that Smith has been a failure. His passport to the Other World has made him a better person in this one, and his life has done something to weaken what Tolkien called, in a commentary on his own story, “the iron ring of the familiar” and the “adamantine ring of belief”, in Wootton, that everything worth knowing is known already. The star is also passed on, in an unexpected way, and will continue to be. Nevertheless the power of the banal remains strong, and the main conflict in the story lies between Alf—an emissary from Faërie into the real world, as Smith is a visitor in the opposite direction—and his predecessor as Master Cook to the village, whose name is Nokes. Nokes sums up much of what Tolkien disliked in real life. It is sad that he has such a limited idea himself of Faërie, of whatever lies beyond the humdrum world of the village deep among the trees, but it is inexcusable that he denies that there can be any more imaginative one, and tries to keep the children down to his own level. Sweet and sticky is his idea of a cake, insipidly pretty is his idea of fairies. Against this stand Smith’s visions of the grim elf-warriors returning from battles on the Dark Marches, of the King’s Tree, the wild Wind and the weeping birch, the elf-maidens dancing. Nokes is daunted in the end by his apprentice Alf, revealed as the King of Faërie, but he never changes his mind. He gets the last word in the story, most of the inhabitants of Wootton are happy to see Alf go, and the star passes out of Smith’s family and into Nokes’s. If Smith and Alf and Faërie have had an effect, it will take a while to show. But that may be just the way things are.
The way they are in this world, that is. In “Leaf by Niggle” Tolkien presents his vision of a world elsewhere, one with room in it for Middle-earth and Faërie and all other hearts’ desires as well. Nevertheless, although it presents a “divine comedy” and ends with world-shaking laughter, the story began in fear. Tolkien reported in more than one letter that the whole story came to him in a dream and that he wrote it down immediately, at some time (reports vary) between 1939 and 1942. This is the more plausible in that it is so obvious what kind of a dream it was: an anxiety-dream, of the kind we all get. Students with an exam to take dream that they have overslept and missed it, academics due to make a presentation dream they have arrived on the podium with nothing to read and nothing in their heads, and the fear at the heart of “Leaf by Niggle” is clearly that of never getting finished. Niggle knows he has a deadline—it is obviously death, the journey we all have to take—he has a painting he desperately wants to finish, but he puts things off and puts things off, and when he finally buckles down to it, first there is a call on his time he cannot refuse, and then he gets sick, and then an Inspector turns up and condemns his painting as scrap, and as he starts to contest this the Driver turns up and tells him he must leave now with no more than he can snatch up. He leaves even that little bag on the train, and when he turns back for it, the train has gone. This kind of one-thing-after-another dream is all too familiar. The motive for it is also easy to imagine, in Tolkien’s case. By 1940 he had been working on his “Silmarillion” mythology for more than twenty years, and none of it had been published except for a scattering of poems and the “spin-off” The Hobbit. He had been writing The Lord of the Rings since Christmas 1937, and it too was going slowly. His study was full of drafts and revisions. One can guess also that, like most professors, he found his many administrative duties a distraction, though Niggle (and perhaps Tolkien) is guiltily aware that he is easily distracted, and not a good manager of his time.
Concentration and time-management are what Niggle has to learn in the Workhouse, which most critics have identified as a version of Purgatory. His reward is to find that in the Other World, dreams come true: there before him is his Tree, better than he had ever painted it and better even than he had imagined it, and beyond it the Forest and the Mountains that he had only begun to imagine. And yet there is room for more improvement, and to make it Niggle has to work with his neighbour Parish, who in the real world had seemed only another distraction. What becomes their joint vision is recognized as therapeutically valuable even by the Voices who judge people’s lives, but even then it is only an introduction to a greater vision mortals can only guess at. But everyone has to start somewhere. As the Fairy Queen says in Smith, “Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all”, and better Faery than no sense of anything beyond the mundane world of everyday.
“Leaf” after all has two endings, one in the Other World and one in the world which Niggle left. The Other World ending is one of joy and laughter, but in the real world hope and memory are crushed. Niggle’s great painting of the Tree was used to patch a hole, one leaf of it went to a museum, but that too was burned down and Niggle was entirely forgotten. The last words ever said about him are “never knew he painted”, and the future seems to belong to people like Councillor Tompkins, with his views on practical education and—remember that this is a story of at latest the early 1940s—the elimination of undesirable elements of Society. If there is a remedy for us, Tolkien says, stressing that Niggle uses the word “quite literally”, it will be “a gift”. Another word for “gift” is “grace”.
“Leaf by Niggle” ends, then, both with what Tolkien in “On Fairy-Stories” calls “dyscatastrophe…sorrow and failure”, and with what he regards as the “highest function” of fairy-story and of evangelium, the “good news” or Gospel beyond it, and that is “eucatastrophe”, the “sudden joyous ‘turn’”, the “sudden and miraculous grace”, which one finds in Grimm, in modern fairy-tale, and supremely in Tolkien’s own “Tales of the Perilous Realm”. In the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo, which Tolkien edited in 1943-4 (in an anonymous pamphlet of which, characteristically, hardly any copies survive), the barons comfort the steward who has just been told his lord is dead, “and telleth him hou it geth, / It is no bot of mannes deth”. That’s the way it goes, they say, there’s no help for it, or as Tolkien rendered the last line in his posthumously-published translation of 1975, “death of man no man can mend”. The barons are compassionate, well-intentioned, and above all sensible: that is the way things go. But the poem proves them wrong, just this once, for Orfeo is alive, and has rescued his queen from captivity in Faërie as well. We find the same “turn” in The Lord of the Rings, as Sam, who has lain down to die on Mount Doom after the destruction of the Ring, wakes to find himself alive, rescued, and faced by the resurrected Gandalf. There is joy in the Perilous Realm, and on its Dark Marches too, all the stronger for the real-life sorrows and losses which it challenges and surmounts.
TOM SHIPPEY
ROVERANDOM
1
Once upon a time there was a little dog, and his name was Rover. He was very small, and very young, or he would have known better; and he was very happy playing in the garden in the sunshine with a yellow ball, or he would never have done what he did.
Not every old man with ragged trousers is a bad old man: some are bone-and-bottle men, and have little dogs of their own; and some are gardeners; and a few, a very few, are wizards prowling round on a holiday looking for something to do. This one was a wizard, the one that now walked into the story. He came wandering up the garden-path in a ragged old coat, with an old pipe in his mouth, and an old green hat on his head. If Rover had not been so busy barking at the ball, he might have noticed the blue feather stuck in the back of the green hat, and then he would have suspected that the man was a wizard, as any other sensible little dog would; but he never saw the feather at all.
When the old man stooped down and picked up the ball—he was thinking of turning it into an orange, or even a bone or a piece of meat for Rover—Rover growled, and said:
‘Put it down!’ Without ever a ‘please’.
Of course the wizard, being a wizard, understood perfectly, and he answered back again:
‘Be quiet, silly!’ Without ever a ‘please’.
Then he put the ball in his pocket, just to tease the dog, and turned away. I am sorry to say that Rover immediately bit his trousers, and tore out quite a piece. Perhaps he also tore out a piece of the wizard. Anyway the old man suddenly turned round very angry and shouted:
‘Idiot! Go and be a toy!’
After that the most peculiar things began to happen. Rover was only a little dog to begin with, but he suddenly felt very much smaller. The grass seemed to grow monstrously tall and wave far above his head; and a long way away through the grass, like the sun rising through the trees of a forest, he could see the huge yellow ball, where the wizard had thrown it down again. He heard the gate click as the old man went out, but he could not see him. He tried to bark, but only a little tiny noise came out, too small for ordinary people to hear; and I don’t suppose even a dog would have noticed it.
So small had he become that I am sure, if a cat had come along just then, she would have thought Rover was a mouse, and would have eaten him. Tinker would. Tinker was the large black cat that lived in the same house.
At the very thought of Tinker, Rover began to feel thoroughly frightened; but cats were soon put right out of his mind. The garden about him suddenly vanished, and Rover felt himself whisked off, he didn’t know where. When the rush was over, he found he was in the dark, lying against a lot of hard things; and there he lay, in a stuffy box by the feel of it, very uncomfortably for a long while. He had nothing to eat or drink; but worst of all, he found he could not move. At first he thought this was because he was packed so tight, but afterwards he discovered that in the daytime he could only move very little, and with a great effort, and then only when no one was looking. Only after midnight could he walk and wag his tail, and a bit stiffly at that. He had become a toy. And because he had not said ‘please’ to the wizard, now all day long he had to sit up and beg. He was fixed like that.
After what seemed a very long, dark time he tried once more to bark loud enough to make people hear. Then he tried to bite the other things in the box with him, stupid little toy animals, really only made of wood or lead, not enchanted real dogs like Rover. But it was no good; he could not bark or bite.
Suddenly someone came and took off the lid of the box, and let in the light.
‘We had better put a few of these animals in the window this morning, Harry,’ said a voice, and a hand came into the box. ‘Where did this one come from?’ said the voice, as the hand took hold of Rover. ‘I don’t remember seeing this one before. It’s no business in the threepenny box, I’m sure. Did you ever see anything so real-looking? Look at its fur and its eyes!’
‘Mark him sixpence,’ said Harry, ‘and put him in the front of the window!’
There in the front of the window in the hot sun poor little Rover had to sit all the morning, and all the afternoon, till nearly tea-time; and all the while he had to sit up and pretend to beg, though really in his inside he was very angry indeed.
‘I’ll run away from the very first people that buy me,’ he said to the other toys. ‘I’m real. I’m not a toy, and I won’t be a toy! But I wish someone would come and buy me quick. I hate this shop, and I can’t move all stuck up in the window like this.’
‘What do you want to move for?’ said the other toys. ‘We don’t. It’s more comfortable standing still thinking of nothing. The more you rest, the longer you live. So just shut up! We can’t sleep while you’re talking, and there are hard times in rough nurseries in front of some of us.’
They would not say any more, so poor Rover had no one at all to talk to, and he was very miserable, and very sorry he had bitten the wizard’s trousers.
I could not say whether it was the wizard or not who sent the mother to take the little dog away from the shop. Anyway, just when Rover was feeling his miserablest, into the shop she walked with a shopping-basket. She had seen Rover through the window, and thought what a nice little dog he would be for her boy. She had three boys, and one was particularly fond of little dogs, especially of little black and white dogs. So she bought Rover, and he was screwed up in paper and put in her basket among the things she had been buying for tea.
Rover soon managed to wriggle his head out of the paper. He smelt cake. But he found he could not get at it; and right down there among the paper bags he growled a little toy growl. Only the shrimps heard him, and they asked him what was the matter. He told them all about it, and expected them to be very sorry for him, but they only said:
‘How would you like to be boiled? Have you ever been boiled?’
‘No! I have never been boiled, as far as I remember,’ said Rover, ‘though I have sometimes been bathed, and that is not particularly nice. But I expect boiling isn’t half as bad as being bewitched.’
‘Then you have certainly never been boiled,’ they answered. ‘You know nothing about it. It’s the very worst thing that could happen to anyone—we are still red with rage at the very idea.’
Rover did not like the shrimps, so he said: ‘Never mind, they will soon eat you up, and I shall sit and watch them!’
After that the shrimps had no more to say to him, and he was left to lie and wonder what sort of people had bought him.
He soon found out. He was carried to a house, and the basket was set down on a table, and all the parcels were taken out. The shrimps were taken off to the larder, but Rover was given straight away to the little boy he had been bought for, who took him into the nursery and talked to him.
Rover would have liked the little boy, if he had not been too angry to listen to what he was saying to him. The little boy barked at him in the best dog-language he could manage (he was rather good at it), but Rover never tried to answer. All the time he was thinking he had said he would run away from the first people that bought him, and he was wondering how he could do it; and all the time he had to sit up and pretend to beg, while the little boy patted him and pushed him about, over the table and along the floor.
At last night came, and the little boy went to bed; and Rover was put on a chair by the bedside, still begging until it was quite dark. The blind was down; but outside the moon rose up out of the sea, and laid the silver path across the waters that is the way to places at the edge of the world and beyond, for those that can walk on it. The father and mother and the three little boys lived close by the sea in a white house that looked right out over the waves to nowhere.
When the little boys were asleep, Rover stretched his tired, stiff legs and gave a little bark that nobody heard except an old wicked spider up a corner. Then he jumped from the chair to the bed, and from the bed he tumbled off onto the carpet; and then he ran away out of the room and down the stairs and all over the house.
Although he was very pleased to be able to move again, and having once been real and properly alive he could jump and run a good deal better than most toys at night, he found it very difficult and dangerous getting about. He was now so small that going downstairs was almost like jumping off walls; and getting upstairs again was very tiring and awkward indeed. And it was all no use. He found all the doors shut and locked, of course; and there was not a crack or a hole by which he could creep out. So poor Rover could not run away that night, and morning found a very tired little dog sitting up and pretending to beg on the chair, just where he had been left.
The two older boys used to get up, when it was fine, and run along the sands before their breakfast. That morning when they woke and pulled up the blind, they saw the sun jumping out of the sea, all fiery-red with clouds about his head, as if he had had a cold bathe and was drying himself with towels. They were soon up and dressed; and off they went down the cliff and onto the shore for a walk—and Rover went with them.
Just as little boy Two (to whom Rover belonged) was leaving the bedroom, he saw Rover sitting on the chest-of-drawers where he had put him while he was dressing. ‘He is begging to go out!’ he said, and put him in his trouser-pocket.
But Rover was not begging to go out, and certainly not in a trouser-pocket. He wanted to rest and get ready for the night again; for he thought that this time he might find a way out and escape, and wander away and away, until he came back to his home and his garden and his yellow ball on the lawn. He had a sort of idea that if once he could get back to the lawn, it might come all right: the enchantment might break, or he might wake up and find it had all been a dream. So, as the little boys scrambled down the cliffpath and galloped along the sands, he tried to bark and struggle and wriggle in the pocket. Try how he would, he could only move a very little, even though he was hidden and no one could see him. Still he did what he could, and luck helped him. There was a handkerchief in the pocket, all crumpled and bundled up, so that Rover was not very deep down, and what with his efforts and the galloping of his master, before long he had managed to poke out his nose and have a sniff round.
Very surprised he was, too, at what he smelt and what he saw. He had never either seen or smelt the sea before, and the country village where he had been born was miles and miles from sound or snuff of it.
Suddenly, as he was leaning out, a great big bird, all white and grey, went sweeping by just over the heads of the boys, making a noise like a great cat on wings. Rover was so startled that he fell right out of the pocket onto the soft sand, and no one heard him. The great bird flew on and away, never noticing his tiny barks, and the little boys walked on and on along the sands, and never thought about him at all.
At first Rover was very pleased with himself.
‘I’ve run away! I’ve run away!’ he barked, toy barking that only other toys could have heard, and there were none to listen. Then he rolled over and lay in the clean dry sand that was still cool from lying out all night under the stars.
But when the little boys went by on their way home, and never noticed him, and he was left all alone on the empty shore, he was not quite so pleased. The shore was deserted except by the gulls. Beside the marks of their claws on the sand the only other footprints to be seen were the tracks of the little boys’ feet. That morning they had gone for their walk on a very lonely part of the beach that they seldom visited. Indeed it was not often that anyone went there; for though the sand was clean and yellow, and the shingle white, and the sea blue with silver foam in a little cove under the grey cliffs, there was a queer feeling there, except just at early morning when the sun was new. People said that strange things came there, sometimes even in the afternoon; and by the evening the place was full of mermen and mermaidens, not to speak of the smaller sea-goblins that rode their small sea-horses with bridles of green weed right up to the cliffs and left them lying in the foam at the edge of the water.
Now the reason of all this queerness was simple: the oldest of all the sand-sorcerers lived in that cove, Psamathists as the sea-people call them in their splashing language. Psamathos Psamathides was this one’s name, or so he said, and a great fuss he made about the proper pronunciation. But he was a wise old thing, and all sorts of strange folk came to see him; for he was an excellent magician, and very kindly (to the right people) into the bargain, if a bit crusty on the surface. The mer-folk used to laugh over his jokes for weeks after one of his midnight parties. But it was not easy to find him in the daytime. He liked to lie buried in the warm sand when the sun was shining, so that not more than the tip of one of his long ears stuck out; and even if both of his ears were showing, most people like you and me would have taken them for bits of stick.
It is possible that old Psamathos knew all about Rover. He certainly knew the old wizard who had enchanted him; for magicians and wizards are few and far between, and they know one another very well, and keep an eye on one another’s doings too, not always being the best of friends in private life. At any rate there was Rover lying in the soft sand and beginning to feel very lonely and rather queer, and there was Psamathos, though Rover did not see him, peeping at him out of a pile of sand that the mermaids had made for him the night before.
But the sand-sorcerer said nothing. And Rover said nothing. And breakfast-time went by, and the sun got high and hot. Rover looked at the sea, which sounded cool, and then he got a horrible fright. At first he thought that the sand must have got into his eyes, but soon he saw that there could be no mistake: the sea was moving nearer and nearer, and swallowing up more and more sand; and the waves were getting bigger and bigger and more foamy all the time.
The tide was coming in, and Rover was lying just below the high-water mark, but he did not know anything about that. He grew more and more terrified as he watched, and thought of the splashing waves coming right up to the cliffs and washing him away into the foaming sea (far worse than any soapy bathing-tub), still miserably begging.
That is indeed what might have happened to him; but it did not. I dare say Psamathos had something to do with it; at any rate I imagine that the wizard’s spell was not so strong in that queer cove, so close to the residence of another magician. Certainly when the sea had come very near, and Rover was nearly bursting with fright as he struggled to roll a bit further up the beach, he suddenly found he could move.
His size was not changed, but he was no longer a toy. He could move quickly and properly with all his legs, daytime though it still was. He need not beg any more, and he could run over the sands where they were harder; and he could bark—not toy barks, but real sharp little fairy-dog barks equal to his fairy-dog size. He was so delighted, and he barked so loud, that if you had been there, you would have heard him then, clear and far-away-like, like the echo of a sheep-dog coming down the wind in the hills.
And then the sand-sorcerer suddenly stuck his head out of the sand. He certainly was ugly, and about as big as a very large dog; but to Rover in his enchanted size he looked hideous and monstrous. Rover sat down and stopped barking at once.
‘What are you making such a noise about, little dog?’ said Psamathos Psamathides. ‘This is my time for sleep!’
As a matter of fact all times were times for him to go to sleep, unless something was going on which amused him, such as a dance of the mermaids in the cove (at his invitation). In that case he got out of the sand and sat on a rock to see the fun. Mermaids may be very graceful in the water, but when they tried to dance on their tails on the shore, Psamathos thought them comical.
‘This is my time for sleep!’ he said again, when Rover did not answer. Still Rover said nothing, and only wagged his tail apologetically.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked. ‘I am Psamathos Psamathides, the chief of all the Psamathists!’ He said this several times very proudly, pronouncing every letter, and with every P he blew a cloud of sand down his nose.
Rover was nearly buried in it, and he sat there looking so frightened and so unhappy that the sand-sorcerer took pity on him. In fact he suddenly stopped looking fierce and burst out laughing:
‘You are a funny little dog, Little Dog! Indeed I don’t remember ever having seen another little dog that was quite such a little dog, Little Dog!’
And then he laughed again, and after that he suddenly looked solemn.
‘Have you been having any quarrels with wizards lately?’ he asked almost in a whisper; and he shut one eye, and looked so friendly and so knowing out of the other one that Rover told him all about it. It was probably quite unnecessary, for Psamathos, as I told you, probably knew about it beforehand; still Rover felt all the better for talking to someone who appeared to understand and had more sense than mere toys.
‘It was a wizard all right,’ said the sorcerer, when Rover had finished his tale. ‘Old Artaxerxes, I should think from your description. He comes from Persia. But he lost his way one day, as even the best wizards sometimes do (unless they always stay at home like me), and the first person he met on the road went and put him on the way to Pershore instead. He has lived in those parts, except on holidays, ever since. They say he is a nimble plum-gatherer for an old man—two thousand, if he is a day—and extremely fond of cider. But that’s neither here nor there.’ By which Psamathos meant that he was getting away from what he wanted to say. ‘The point is, what can I do for you?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rover.
‘Do you want to go home? I am afraid I can’t make you your proper size, at least not without asking Artaxerxes’ permission first, as I don’t want to quarrel with him at the moment. But I think I might venture to send you home. After all, Artaxerxes can always send you back again, if he wants to. Though of course he might send you somewhere much worse than a toyshop next time, if he was really annoyed.’
Rover did not like the sound of this at all, and he ventured to say that if he went back home so small, he might not be recognized, except by Tinker the cat; and he did not very much want to be recognized by Tinker in his present state.
‘Very well!’ said Psamathos. ‘We must think of something else. In the meantime, as you are real again, would you like something to eat?’
Before Rover had time to say ‘Yes, please! YES! PLEASE!’ there appeared on the sands in front of him a little plate with bread and gravy and two tiny bones of just the right size, and a little drinking-bowl full of water with drink puppy drink written round it in small blue letters. He ate and drank all there was before he asked: ‘How did you do that?—Thank you!’
He suddenly thought of adding the ‘thank you’, as wizards and people of that sort seemed rather touchy folk. Psamathos only smiled; so Rover lay down on the hot sand and went to sleep, and dreamed of bones, and of chasing cats up plum-trees only to see them change into wizards with green hats who threw enormous plums like marrows at him. And the wind blew gently all the time, and buried him almost over his head in blown sand.
That is why the little boys never found him, although they came down into the cove specially to look for him, as soon as little boy Two found he was lost. Their father was with them this time; and when they had looked and looked till the sun began to get low and tea-timish, he took them back home and would not stay any longer: he knew too many queer things about that place. Little boy Two had to be content for some time after that with an ordinary threepenny toy dog (from the same shop); but somehow, though he had only had him such a short while, he did not forget his little begging-dog.
At the moment, however, you can think of him sitting down very mournful to his tea, without any dog at all; while far away inland the old lady who had kept Rover and spoiled him, when he was an ordinary, proper-sized animal, was just writing out an advertisement for a lost puppy—‘white with black ears, and answers to the name of Rover’; and while Rover himself slept away on the sands, and Psamathos dozed close by with his short arms folded on his fat tummy.
2
When Rover woke up, the sun was very low; the shadow of the cliffs was right across the sands, and Psamathos was nowhere to be seen. A large seagull was standing close by looking at him, and for a moment Rover was afraid that he might be going to eat him.
But the seagull said: ‘Good evening! I have waited a long time for you to wake up. Psamathos said that you would wake about tea-time, but it is long past that now.’
‘Please, what are you waiting for me for, Mr Bird?’ asked Rover very politely.
‘My name is Mew,’ said the seagull, ‘and I’m waiting to take you away, as soon as the moon rises, along the moon’s path. But we have one or two things to do before that. Get up on my back and see how you like flying!’
Rover did not like it at all at first. It was all right while Mew was close to the ground, gliding smoothly along with his wings stretched out stiff and still; but when he shot up into the air, or turned sharp from side to side, sloping a different way each time, or stooped sudden and steep, as if he was going to dive into the sea, then the little dog, with the wind whistling in his ears, wished he was safe down on the earth again.
He said so several times, but all that Mew would answer was: ‘Hold on! We haven’t begun yet!’
