Tales From the Perilous Realm
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. H
is 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, j
ust 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.’