Roverandom
By
J.R.R. Tolkien

Edited by

CHRISTINA SCULL &
WAYNE G. HAMMOND

This book is dedicated to the memory of

Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien

1920–1984

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Roverandom

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Notes

Works by J.R.R. Tolkien

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

IN THE SUMMER of 1925 J.R.R. Tolkien, his wife Edith, and their sons John (nearly eight), Michael (nearly five), and Christopher (not yet one year old) went on holiday to Filey, a town on the Yorkshire coast which is still popular with tourists. It was an unexpected holiday, in celebration of Tolkien’s appointment as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, which he was to take up on 1 October that year; and it was perhaps intended as a period of rest for him before he not only assumed that post, but for two terms would continue to teach at the University of Leeds, as his old and new appointments overlapped. For three or four weeks at Filey – as explained below, the dates are uncertain – the Tolkiens rented an Edwardian cottage which may have belonged to the local postmaster, built high on a cliff overlooking the beach and the sea. From this vantage point the view to the east was unobstructed, and young John Tolkien was thrilled when for two or three beautiful evenings the full moon rose out of the sea and shone a silver ‘path’ across the water.

At this time Michael Tolkien was extremely fond of a miniature toy dog, made of lead and painted black and white. He ate with it and slept with it, and carried it around with him; he was reluctant to let it go even to have his hand washed. But during the holiday at Filey he went for a walk with his father and elder brother, and in the excitement of skimming stones into the sea put his toy down, onto the beach of white shingle. Against this background the tiny black and white dog became virtually invisible, and was lost. Michael was heartbroken when his toy could not be found, although the two older boys and their father searched for it that day and the next.

The loss of a favourite toy is of great moment to a child, and no doubt it was with this in mind that Tolkien was inspired to invent an ‘explanation’ for the occurrence: a story in which a real dog, named Rover, is turned into a toy by a wizard, is lost on a beach by a boy very much like Michael, meets a comical ‘sand-sorcerer’, and has adventures on the moon and under the sea. At least, that is the full story of Roverandom, as it was finally set down on paper. That it did not emerge fully formed, but was devised and told in several parts, might be deduced from its episodic nature, and from its length; and in fact this is verified by a tantalizingly brief entry in Tolkien’s diary (written almost certainly in 1926 as part of a résumé of events of 1925) about the composition of Roverandom at Filey: ‘The tale of “Roverandom” written to amuse John (and myself as it grew) got done.’ Unhappily it is not possible to know exactly what Tolkien meant by ‘got done’ – no more, perhaps, than that the complete story (as it then stood) was told during the holiday. The parenthetical note, however, confirms that the tale did indeed grow in the telling.

It is curious that only John is mentioned in this diary statement, when it was Michael’s misfortune which lay behind the story of Rover. It may be that Michael was satisfied with its earliest episode, which explained the disappearance of his toy, and was less interested than John in its continuation. Tolkien himself clearly warmed to the tale, which becomes more sophisticated as it proceeds. But it is nowhere recorded, and no one can now say, exactly in what form Roverandom was originally conceived – whether all of its clever twists of language and its allusions to myths and legends, for example, were part of the story from the beginning, or were added when Roverandom was at last written down.

Tolkien also wrote in his diary, after the same interval of a few months, that the family went to Filey (from Leeds) on 6 September 1925 and remained there until 27 September. But at least the first of these dates cannot be correct (and indeed is mistakenly recorded in the diary as a Saturday rather than a Sunday). Given that John Tolkien’s memory of the full moon shining upon the sea is still vivid, and that the sight was surely the inspiration for Rover’s journey along a ‘moon-path’ early in Roverandom, the Tolkiens must have been at Filey during the period of the full moon, which in September 1925 began on Tuesday the 2nd. They can also be placed at Filey, more definitely, in the afternoon of Saturday, 5 September, when the north-east coast of England was struck by a terrific storm. Again John Tolkien’s memory is vivid, and it is supported by newspaper reports. The sea rose hours before the scheduled high tide, swept over the sea wall and across the promenade at Filey, devastated structures along the shore, and threw the beach into upheaval – destroying in the process any remaining hope of finding Michael’s toy. Fierce winds shook the Tolkiens’ cottage so much that they were kept awake into the night, fearing that the roof would come off. John Tolkien remembers his father telling the two older boys a story to keep them calm, and that it was at this time that he began to tell them about the dog Rover who became the enchanted toy ‘Roverandom’. The storm itself no doubt inspired the late episode in Roverandom in which the ancient Sea-serpent begins to awaken, and in so doing causes a great disturbance in the weather. (‘When he undid a curl or two in his sleep, the water heaved and shook and bent people’s houses and spoilt their repose for miles and miles around’ [see here].)

There is no evidence that Roverandom was written down while Tolkien was at Filey. However, one of the five illustrations he made for the story, the lunar landscape reproduced in this book, is dated 1925, and it is conceivable that it was drawn at Filey during that summer. Three of the remaining illustrations for Roverandom date specifically from September 1927, while the Tolkiens were on holiday at Lyme Regis on the south coast of England: The White Dragon Pursues Roverandom & the Moondog, inscribed to John Tolkien; House Where ‘Rover’ Began His Adventures as a ‘Toy’, inscribed to Christopher Tolkien; and the splendid watercolour The Gardens of the Merking’s Palace. On each of these is written the month and year; another drawing, of Rover arriving on the moon riding upon the seagull, Mew, is inscribed ‘1927–8’. All of these pictures are also reproduced in the present book. The evidence of the September 1927 illustrations suggests that Roverandom was retold at Lyme Regis, perhaps because the Tolkiens were once again on holiday by the sea and recalled the events at Filey only two years earlier. The inscription to Christopher Tolkien on House Where ‘Rover’ Began His Adventures as a ‘Toy’ suggests as well that Christopher was now old enough to appreciate Roverandom (he was of course only an infant in September 1925), and that the story may have been retold at least partly because he had not heard it on the previous occasion.

This apparent revival of interest in Roverandom in summer 1927 may have been the spur that led Tolkien at last to commit the story to paper; for he seems to have done so later that year, probably during the Christmas holidays. So we are inclined to think – and we can only conjecture, in the absence of dated manuscripts or other firm evidence – on the basis of two interesting (if admittedly tenuous) points. Each of these concerns the end of chapter 2 of Roverandom, where it is told how the Great White Dragon is disturbed by Roverandom and his friend the moon-dog and pursues them in a wild chase. The dragon is described as often a troublemaker: ‘Sometimes he let real red and green flames out of his cave when he was having a dragon-feast or was in a tantrum; and clouds of smoke were frequent. Once or twice he had been known to turn the whole moon red, or put it out altogether. On such uncomfortable occasions the Man-in-the-Moon … went down into the cellars, uncorked his best spells, and got things cleared up as quick as possible’ (see here). In the present episode his pursuit of the two dogs is stopped by the Man-in-the-Moon only in the nick of time, by a magic spell shot at the dragon’s stomach. Because of this ‘the next eclipse was a failure, for the dragon was too busy licking his tummy to attend to it’ (see here) – a reference to the notion, established in the earlier passage, that lunar eclipses are caused by dragon-smoke.

Elements of this chapter of Roverandom – one of which (a troublesome dragon on the moon) certainly was part of the story in September 1927, as shown by the dated illustration – also appear, in a strikingly similar form, in an unpublished portion of the story-letter Tolkien wrote to his children in December of that year in the guise of ‘Father Christmas’. In this, one of the remarkable series of ‘Father Christmas’ letters Tolkien wrote between 1920 and 1943, the Man-in-the-Moon visits the North Pole and drinks rather too much brandy while eating plum pudding and playing ‘snapdragon’. He falls asleep and is pushed under the sofa by the North Polar Bear, where he remains until the next day. In his absence dragons come out on the moon and make such a great smother that they cause an eclipse. The Man-in-the-Moon is forced to hurry back and work a terrific magic to set things right.

The similarities between this fiction and the Great White Dragon episode in Roverandom are too great to be coincidental; and from these one can reasonably suppose that Tolkien had Roverandom in his thoughts while writing his ‘Father Christmas’ letter in December 1927. Whether he introduced the notion of moon-dragons causing eclipses first in the letter, or drew for that purpose upon a conception already existing in Roverandom, it is impossible to say; but the two works must be related.

The Christmas holidays offered Tolkien time away from his academic responsibilities, in which Roverandom could have been written down; and although it is not definite that he did so in December 1927, one other clue points to that date, at least as a terminus a quo for the earliest (undated) extant text: the reference in Roverandom to a failed eclipse. In the earliest text ‘the next eclipse was a failure’ (as quoted above) is followed by the note ‘the astronomers [> photographers] said so’. And this indeed was the prevailing opinion, reported in the Times of London, of the total lunar eclipse that occurred on 8 December 1927 but was hidden from observers in England by clouds. On this point the 1927 ‘Father Christmas’ letter is once again useful, for it dates the eclipse that occurred in the Man-in-the-Moon’s absence precisely to 8 December, and thereby confirms Tolkien’s knowledge of the real-world event.

The earliest extant text of Roverandom is one of four versions among the Tolkien papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Unhappily one-fifth of it has been lost, equivalent to the present chapter 1 and the first half of chapter 2. The remainder survives on twenty-two pages, written quickly in an occasionally difficult hand on a variety of blank sheets (torn possibly from school exercise books), and with numerous emendations. This text was followed by three typewritten versions, likewise undated, in the course of which Tolkien progressively enlarged the story and made many improvements of expression and detail but no major change of plot. The first typescript, on thirty-nine heavily corrected pages, was closely based on the manuscript and has been of great help in deciphering the less legible parts of the earlier version. But the typescript is notably distinguished from its predecessor towards the end, where the passage in which Rover is restored to his original shape and size (before almost an anticlimax, now a dramatic as well as humorous moment) was greatly expanded. The new text was entitled originally The Adventures of Rover, but Tolkien altered the heading in pen to Roverandom, thereafter the title he preferred.

The second of the three typescripts breaks off, apparently by conscious decision of the author, after only nine pages, with only a few lines on the final sheet. It extends from the beginning of the story to the point where the moon ‘began to lay its shining path on the water’ (cf. below, chapter 2, here). In addition, a fragment of writing is typed on what is now the verso of one sheet, which was immediately rejected by Tolkien and the text taken up again, further revised, and continued on the recto. As far as it goes, the second typescript incorporates revisions noted on the first and includes some further improvements. But it is perhaps more important to note the neat appearance of this version, compared with the first typescript. Tolkien now was concerned with matters of presentation, such as typing page numbers on the sheets rather than adding them later in pen, and breaking dialogue into paragraphs to indicate different speakers, whereas before (in what is clearly a working document) it was sometimes run on. Also the new typescript includes only a handful of manuscript emendations, all carefully made and for most part only of typographical errors.

This improved manner of presentation leads us to suspect that Tolkien prepared the second typescript for submission to his publisher, George Allen & Unwin, towards the end of 1936. At that time The Hobbit had been accepted with enthusiasm, and although it was only in production and had not yet proved a success, on the strength of it Tolkien was invited to submit other children’s stories to be considered for publication. He obliged by sending to Allen & Unwin his picture book Mr. Bliss, his mock-medieval story Farmer Giles of Ham, and Roverandom. If, as we think, the fragmentary second typescript of Roverandom was made for this purpose, it may be that Tolkien abandoned it because its text still was not wholly to his liking – or perhaps because, like the preceding drafts, it was made on sheets torn apparently from exercise books, with one long edge slightly ragged, and the author wished his work to have a more professional appearance.

Indeed the third and latest typescript of Roverandom is neatly typed (although not without emendations) complete on sixty sheets of commercial bond paper (although not entirely uniform); and it was here that chapter divisions were introduced, together with further changes, small but numerous, of dialogue and description, and of punctuation and the division of paragraphs. This is almost certainly the text that Tolkien submitted to Allen & Unwin and that the chairman of the firm, Stanley Unwin, gave to his young son Rayner to appraise.

In a report dated 7 January 1937 Rayner Unwin found the story ‘well written and amusing’; but despite his positive review it was not accepted for publication. Roverandom was apparently one of the ‘short fairy stories in various styles’ that Tolkien had (it was thought) practically ready for publication in October 1937, as Stanley Unwin noted in a memo; but by then The Hobbit was so successful that Allen & Unwin wanted a sequel, with more about hobbits, above all else, and Roverandom seems never again to have been considered by either author or publisher. Tolkien’s attention now became primarily directed towards the ‘new Hobbit’, the work that would become his masterpiece: The Lord of the Rings.

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 ‘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.

* * *

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.

The White Dragon Pursues Roverandom & the Moondog is also faithful to the text, and has several points of interest besides the dragon and the two winged dogs. Above the titling are one of the moon-spiders and, probably, a dragonmoth; and in the sky again the earth is shown as a globe. When he came to illustrate The Hobbit Tolkien used the same dragon on his map Wilderland, and the same spider in his drawing of Mirkwood. ‘Moondog’ as in the title was used (variably with ‘moon-dog’) only in the earliest texts.

The splendid watercolour The Gardens of the Merking’s Palace reveals the structure of ‘pink and white stone’ as if it were an aquarium decoration, perhaps with a hint of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Tolkien chose to show the palace and its gardens in all their beauty, rather than Roverandom making his fearful way up the path; probably we are meant to be seeing through his eyes. The whale Uin is in the upper left corner, much like the leviathan in one of Rudyard Kipling’s illustrations for ‘How the Whale Got His Throat’ in his Just So Stories (1902). ‘Merking’ as in the title appeared only in the earliest texts, variably with ‘mer-king’ (the sole form in the final typescript). Tolkien was also inconsistent in his spelling of other mer-compounds, which in the present text we have regularized as hyphenated, excepting the familiar spellings mermaid (mermaids, mermaidens) and mermen.

The picture House Where ‘Rover’ Began His Adventures as a ‘Toy’, no less accomplished a watercolour, is however a puzzle. Its title would suggest that it depicts the house where Rover first met Artaxerxes, though no indication is given in the text that this was on or near a farm. Also the glimpse of the sea in the background and the gull flying overhead would contradict the statement in the text that Rover ‘had never either seen or smelt the sea’ before he was taken to the beach by little boy Two, ‘and the country village where he had been born was miles and miles from sound or snuff of it’ (see here). Nor can this be the little boys’ father’s house, which is described as being white and on a cliff with gardens running down to the sea. We are almost tempted to wonder if this picture was originally unconnected with the story, and then details, such as the gull, were added while it was being painted to give it relevance. The black and white dog at bottom left may be intended as a picture of Rover, and the black animal in front of him – like Rover, partially obscured by a pig – may be the cat, Tinker; but none of this is certain.

The text that follows is based on the latest version of Roverandom. Tolkien never fully edited the work for publication, and it cannot be doubted that he would have made a great many revisions and corrections, to make it more suitable for an audience apart from his immediate family, had it been accepted by Allen & Unwin as a successor to The Hobbit. In the event it was left with a number of errors and inconsistencies. When writing at speed Tolkien tended to be inconsistent in his manner of punctuation and capitalization; for Roverandom we have followed his (generally minimalist) practice where his intentions are clear, but have regularized punctuation marks and capitalization where it seemed necessary, and have corrected a few obvious typographical errors. With Christopher Tolkien’s consent we have also amended a very small number of awkward phrases (retaining others); but for the most part the text is as its author left it.

For their advice and guidance in the making of this book we are especially grateful to Christopher Tolkien, whom we also thank for supplying the statement in his father’s diary quoted on (see here); and to John Tolkien, who shared with us his memories of Filey in 1925. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance and encouragement of Priscilla and Joanna Tolkien; Douglas Anderson; David Doughan; Charles Elston; Michael Everson; Verlyn Flieger; Charles Fuqua; Christopher Gilson; Carl Hostetter; Alexei Kondratiev; John Rateliff; Arden Smith; Rayner Unwin; Patrick Wynne; David Brawn and Ali Bailey of HarperCollins; Judith Priestman and Colin Harris of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the staff of the Williams College Library, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Christina Scull

Wayne G. Hammond

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 cliff-path 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.

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