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.
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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