Alan Lee - Tales from the Perilous Realm - Roverandom and Other Classic Faery Stories

HarperCollins Publishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2008

This collection first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1997

Farmer Giles of Ham first published 1949

Copyright © The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1949

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil first published 1961

Copyright © The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1962

Leaf By Niggle first published in Tree and Leaf 1964

Copyright © The Tolkien Trust 1964

Smith of Wootton Major first published 1967

Copyright © The Tolkien Trust 1967

Roverandom first published 1998

Copyright © The Tolkien Trust 1998

Introduction © Tom Shippey 2008

® and Tolkien® are registered trade marks of The J.R.R. Tolkien Estate Limited

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Source ISBN: 9780007280599

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009:9780007348169

Version: 2014-12-08

Title Page

Copyright

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

Keep Reading

About the Author

Works by J.R.R. Tolkien

About the Publisher

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.