Roverandom

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Литагент HarperCollins USD. Roverandom

Roverandom. By. J.R.R. Tolkien

CHRISTINA SCULL & WAYNE G. HAMMOND

Introduction

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Notes

Works by J.R.R. Tolkien

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

Edited by

Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien

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The Man-in-the-Moon will not say how the children arrive in his garden, but at one point Roverandom looks towards the earth and seems to see, ‘faint and rather thin, long lines of small people sailing swiftly down’ the moon-path (see here); and as the children come to the garden while asleep, it seems certain that Tolkien had in mind his already existing vision of the Olórë Mallë or Path of Dreams leading to the Cottage of Lost Play: ‘slender bridges resting on the air and greyly gleaming as it were of silken mists lit by a thin moon’, a path no man’s eyes have beheld ‘save in sweet slumbers in their heart’s youth’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 211).

The most intriguing connection between Roverandom and the mythology, however, occurs when the ‘oldest whale’, Uin, shows Roverandom ‘the great Bay of Fairyland (as we call it) beyond 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.

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