Delightful, that’s perhaps the best word to describe the JRR Tolkien novella Roverandom. It’s a story I wasn’t familiar with when I picked up a copy of Tales From the Perilous Realm, a collection of Tolkien’s non-Middle Earth stories. It’s about a dog which bites the posterior of a wizard, and so is cursed and changed into a toy-sized mutt. Rover, or later called Roverandom, goes on a series of adventures taking him from the moon to under the ocean.
Honestly, it’s a story I might have skipped over had it not been the first one in Tales From the Perilous Realm. I’m glad it was up front, because while it’s not much like The Hobbit and it’s leagues from The Lord of the Rings, it still made for an enjoyable read.
While I love a good epic, not all fantasy has to take place on a grand scale. Roverandom deals wth some rather fantastic subjects like the Man-in-the-Moon and the Mer-King but at the same time it feels like a much more intimate tale from the professor. In fact, in some ways it reads a little more like something his friend, CS Lewis, would have written. If you’re a fan of The Chronicles of Narnia, this story should be a delight.
Of course, it’s also keeping in tone with some of Tolkien’s other non-Middle Earth works, like Letters From Father Christmas, which are geared at a younger and more innocent audience. He can’t exactly load such stories up with linguistical explorations.
But Roverandom does contain some delightful prose. For example: “When 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.”
However, for fans of Middle Earth, it’s fun to see some allusions to that favored land. Tolkien puts fearsome, large spiders on the moon which could easily be descendants of Ungoliant. At one point, while riding on a seagull, the little dog sees the mountainous homes of the elves of the West, beyond the sea. A familiar character, the whale Uin, is key to Rover getting to the undersea kingdom. There are a few other allusions to places from the Silmarillion and other Middle Earth texts, but they’re not quite as obvious.
Just don’t expect nearly the same gravity or depth in Roverandom as in Tolkien’s Middle Earth tales like The Lord of the Rings or even The Hobbit. Still, it’s a short and enjoyable read, if you want something charming and innocent.
Like many good children’s stories, Roverandom was written by Tolkien to amuse and console his son, Michael, after he lost a toy dog on a beach. The dog in the story is turned into a toy at one point and is dropped by the boy who loves him on the beach. It’s touching that the professor was so dedicated to his children he would go to such lengths to not only keep them entertained, but also to help them process grief at a young age.
