Roverandom

Roverandom is a children's tale by J. R. R. Tolkien that began as an oral story in 1925, when the author improvised it for his sons during a holiday in Filey, on the north-east coast of England. According to family accounts, the story was invented to console the young Michael, who had lost a cherished toy on the beach: a small leaden dog painted black and white. Tolkien, who had long made up stories for his children on all sorts of occasions, turned that loss into an adventure.

The plot follows Rover, a playful and rather bad-tempered puppy who bites a wizard named Artaxerxes. As punishment, the magician turns him into a toy. After a series of mishaps, the little dog ends up lost in the sand of a beach, and from there he goes on journeys that take him from the Moon to the bottom of the sea, all in search of a way to recover his size and his true form. The tale blends the everyday with the fantastic and moves along at a light, humorous pace.

The written version probably dates from around 1927, the year in which Tolkien drew five original illustrations for the story, and the surviving manuscript is incomplete. He tried to publish it in 1936, after the success of The Hobbit, but the book did not appear until 1998, posthumously, in an edition introduced and annotated by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond.

Although it seems to be a story for children of eight or ten, the text supports several readings. Young readers enjoy an amusing narrative and a richer vocabulary than is usual in children's literature of the period. Adult readers find allusions to Tolkien's family life, to the stories of Edith Nesbit, to a lunar eclipse that occurred while the tale was being composed, to the phonology of languages, the author's favourite field, and to several mythologies, from the Greek to the Celtic and Norse, as well as to elements of Tolkien's own mythology.

Its importance also lies in its chronology. Being almost contemporary with The Hobbit, Roverandom allows us to see the background to the literary world Tolkien would later develop in The Lord of the Rings, with beings, places and motifs that anticipate features of Middle-earth.