A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

“Minor” Works

Maria Artamonova

13

The umbrella terms “minor” works or “shorter fiction” are used of necessity to refer to those of Tolkien’s writings whose only claim to belonging to a single group or collection is their short size and the absence of a straightforward relationship to Tolk-ien’s main oeuvre (usually described as his “mythology” or “legendarium”). This appar-ent lack of connection is misleading: what the “minor” works demonstrate very clearly is that any story Tolkien wrote was bound to be drawn into the orbit of his mythology by way of allusion, comment, analogue, or borrowing. In exploring the relationship between the “minor” works and the main legendarium, we have to be mindful of the fact that only a few of the former were published during Tolkien’s lifetime or consid-ered by him to be finished literary products. This means that we have to treat them as “work in progress,” with all the restrictions and insights that this concept entails.

The prose minor works fall into two rough categories: children’s stories (The Father Christmas Letters, Roverandom, Mr. Bliss), and stand-alone short stories for adults (Farmer Giles of Ham, “Leaf by Niggle,” Smith of Wootton Major). Most Tolkien readers would be more familiar with the second category: the three offshoots of Tolkien’s imagination which could be said to reflect its “academic” / “humorous,” “allegorical” / “Christian,” and “Faërie” / “visionary” aspects respectively. “Leaf by Niggle” and Smith of Wootton Major can also be viewed as Tolkien’s attempts to present, in figurative, allegorical, or mythological form, an evaluation of his own work and, to an extent, of his own life.

Although many Tolkien readers are first introduced to him in their childhood by reading The Hobbit, his other children’s tales, though admittedly few and far between and sometimes left unfinished (and some of which have never been written down, let

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alone published, and are only known to us from reports), often tend to go unnoticed or are dismissed as minor in terms of their significance and generally below par in terms of their literary merits. Nevertheless, they possess charm and character that enable them to stand on their own; moreover, they allow us some important insights into Tolkien’s working methods and shed some light on the genesis and progress of his legendarium.

There are three different angles from which we can approach the minor works. First and foremost, they can be viewed as independent pieces of writing, that represent, as Tom Shippey put it, “the pictures Niggle did not tack to the edges of his great picture” (Tolkien 2008e, xii–xiii). There are few of them: unlike many sci-fi and fantasy authors, he did not find the short story a useful vehicle, either for testing ideas which could be later elaborated in a more extensive form, or for offering snapshot-like glimpses or brief sketches of new worlds.

At the same time, as Tolkien himself acknowledged, both directly (Letters 136) and indirectly (in the allegorical language of “Leaf by Niggle”), his mythology refused to be kept at bay even from stories seemingly as remote from it as The Father Christmas Letters and Roverandom. The second approach, then, would look for parallels and refer-ences to the legendarium in the most unlikely places – from the cave-walls of the North Pole to the Dark Side of the Moon.

Finally, the minor works can be very profitably explored as chips off the same block that produced The Hobbit. Tolkien famously referred to his Arda legendarium as “the world into which Mr Baggins strayed” (HoH 874). It is through the minor works that we can glimpse the world that he strayed into Middle-earth from. The anecdote about Tolkien coining the phrase “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” one day while marking exam papers has been worn with use (see ch. 8), but Bilbo Baggins did not spring out of his head fully formed, complete with pipe and furry feet. The literary antecedents of The Hobbit (and Hobbits) have been discussed in detail (see, inter alia, Tolkien 2002a, HoH, Atherton 2012). It is not surprising that sources and analogues can also be readily found among Tolkien’s own short stories, all of which (except “Leaf by Niggle” and Smith of Wootton Major) were written in the 1920s and 1930s, more or less simultaneously with the composition of The Hobbit. All of them were submitted by Tolkien to Allen & Unwin for consideration after the success of the latter book, and all were judged promising but insufficient to stand on their own merit, therefore prompting Tolkien to embark on the composition of a sequel, “the new Hobbit.”

Many critics over the years have commented on the “golden formula” of success achieved in The Lord of the Rings by fusing the remote, noble, and austere beauty of the “Silmarillion” legends with the more homely, familiar, and “human” touch rep-resented by the Hobbit characters. Humphrey Carpenter describes the minor works as the original source of that second theme:

So it was that during the nineteen-twenties and thirties Tolkien’s imagination was running along two distinct courses that did not meet. On one side were the stories

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composed for mere amusement, often specifically for the entertainment of his children. On the other were the grander themes, sometimes Arthurian or Celtic, but usually associated with his own legends. .  .  . Something was lacking, something that would bind the two sides of his imagination together and produce a story that was at once heroic and mythical and at the same time tuned to the popular imagination. He was not aware of this lack, of course; nor did it seem particularly significant to him when suddenly the missing piece fell into place. (1977, 174–175)

Other classifications of Tolkien’s shorter fiction are, of course, possible. The collection incorporating most of the works discussed in this chapter, tellingly entitled Tales from the Perilous Realm, is discussed in Tom Shippey’s introduction as illustrations of Tolk-ien’s “Faërie mythology” (Tolkien 2008e, ix–xii). Elsewhere, Shippey has repeatedly presented Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major, and “Leaf by Niggle” as “auto-biographical allegories” (Shippey 2000, Chapter VI; see also n. 10 below). Yet another dividing line would separate the posthumously published works (The Father Christmas Letters, Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, and some of the poems) from those prepared for print by the author himself, whether before or after the watershed marked by the publica-tion of The Hobbit in 1937.

What follows is a short overview of individual stories in rough chronological order, inasmuch as one can be established in view of complex textual histories which even the shortest of Tolkien’s writings tend to have. The individual nature of each work will be considered in brief, while their shared features, already outlined above, will be discussed in greater detail at the end of the chapter. Tolkien composed many stories while his own children were growing up: the spur-of-the-moment tales we only know by hearsay such as the adventures of Major Road Ahead and the villain Bill Stickers, the hitherto unpublished stories like “Orgog” (see Carpenter 1977, Chapter 6; Chronology 160–167; Drout 2007, 95–97 for useful summaries), the illustrated “comic books” like The Father Christmas Letters and Mr. Bliss, the story of the adventures of Roverandom, told to Tolkien’s son after he had lost his favorite toy, Farmer Giles of Ham, originally composed to while away the time and to explain a few local names – and, last but by no means least, The Hobbit itself.

The Father Christmas Letters1

The peculiarity of these yearly installments posted to the Tolkien children between 1920 and 1943 and published posthumously in 1976 lies in their private nature: they were not meant for publication and in a way represent a chronicle of the Tolkien fam-ily’s concerns and interests almost as revealing as his “proper” letters. In fact, some-times the similarity becomes uncanny; cf. this excerpt from a 1925 letter from Father Christmas:

I am dreadfully busy this year – it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it – and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the

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presents have got spoilt and I haven’t got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address. (Tolkien 2009d, 8)

Many other letters, especially those written during the war years, betray the very real anxieties that Tolkien had during that time. The more light-hearted entries can be enjoyed for themselves but also work as a quarry of “analogues” for his better-known fiction. Here, we find a kindly but irritable wizard who can do wonders with fireworks: “You have no idea what the old man can do! Litening [sic] and fireworks and thunder of guns!” (31), hordes of evil Goblins, and a secretary with an appropriately Elvish name of Ilbereth. Characteristically, even the traditional Christmas Elves are intro-duced into the story in 1932 in a rather dramatic fashion, not so much “Santa’s little helpers” as the warrior race of the Red Gnomes, Father Christmas’s military allies who come to the rescue and repel a Goblin invasion (25). Very tellingly, although the terms “Elves” and “Gnomes” (for slightly different creatures) were both used early on, the latter term eventually disappeared after 1936, probably reflecting Tolkien’s growing dislike of the name’s unwelcome associations with beings very different from his own Elves – whether the Noldor of his mythology or the fairy warriors and present-packers from Norway and the North Pole.2

We tend to think of Tolkien’s Elves as tall and stern immortals – he himself was keen to register his dislike of the Victorian diminutive fairies. But many critical studies have shown, over and again, that it took Tolkien quite a while to part from the image of mischievous and delicate creatures and move, as it were, from “Elfin” to “Elven” (cf. Tolkien 2002a, 112–114). A comparison of Tolkien’s drawings of the Red Gnomes and their ilk in The Father Christmas Letters (e.g., the years 1933 or 1935) to his nearly contemporaneous picture “Beleg finds Gwindor in the forest of Taur-nu-Fuin” (Tolkien 1992b, 37) reveals certain similarities – astonishing perhaps if we consider the apparently unbridgeable chasm between Beleg and Ilbereth. Thus, The Father Christmas Letters may be viewed as a link (or an offshoot) in the evolution of the idea of Elves, which proceeded from the playful and diminutive Fairies and Gnomes of the Lost Tales and the early poems to the mischievous Elves of The Hobbit and thence to the wise, immortal, and stern Elves of the later “Silmarillion” and The Lord of the Rings.

Roverandom

While The Father Christmas Letters, were generally well received, the reaction to Roverandom, written in 1925–1927 but published as late as 1998, was more mixed. Even sympathetic reviewers found the story a little underwhelming.3 There are obvious reasons for this: Tolkien himself had not considered Roverandom for publication after the initial attempt to submit it to Allen & Unwin in 1936. Moreover, any new Tolkien material published in 1998 was, understandably, eagerly anticipated by scholars and fans

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as well as heralded by the press as “a new Hobbit.” For a short story about the adven-tures of a little toy dog, this may well have proved too much to live up to. From Scull and Hammond’s heavily annotated edition, Roverandom has been cited by many critics because of the insights into the origins of The Hobbit and the development of Tolkien’s mythology it provides. While these will be addressed later, it is worthwhile to take a step back and consider the story for what it is – a children’s tale of adventure which uses an archetypal motif: the protagonist annoys a wizard, is put under a spell and then has to learn new things about the world, forge friendships and eventually return to his old home and original shape.4 Such tales tend to be moralistic, but Tolkien’s is very far from it, leaning instead toward humor and a very characteristic delight in the little dog’s journey. Roverandom does find out a lot about the world, leaving the familiar English seaside behind to discover a flat Earth that contains an undersea kingdom, the Light and Dark sides of the Moon haunted by dragons and spiders, and – a fact which is easy to miss in the tale itself but impossible to overlook when one considers the Roverandom criticism – a curious intrusion of the “other” mythology:

. . . they passed the Shadowy Seas and reached the great Bay of Fairyland (as we call it) beyond the Magic Isles; and saw far off in the last West the Mountains of Elvenhome and the light of Faery upon the waves. Roverandom thought he caught a glimpse of the city of the Elves on the green hill beneath the Mountains, a glint of white far away; but Uin dived again so suddenly that he could not be sure. If he was right, he is one of the very few creatures, on two legs or four, who can walk about our own lands and say they have glimpsed that other land, however far away.

‘I should catch it, if this was found out!’ said Uin. ‘No one from the Outer Lands is supposed ever to come here; and few ever do now. Mum’s the word!’

What did I say about dogs? They don’t forget ill-tempered lumps of rock . . . (Tolkien 1998a, 73–74)

As this excerpt illustrates, Roverandom is written in a peculiarly inconsistent style, ranging from very childish asides, exclamations, and addresses to the reader to haunt-ing, evocative passages laden with a sadness and longing which would not be out of place in The Silmarillion or The Lord of the Rings.

A reader may be excused for thinking that the idea of two little talking dogs sailing to the Uttermost West on the back of a whale is rather ridiculous.5 But it is worth remembering that the world of Tolkien’s legends was never set in stone, or cast in marble. A little furry-footed man who enjoys smoking and second breakfasts seems equally out of place in the world of Fëanor and the Children of Húrin. However, the Hobbits did eventually enter the legendarium, with momentous consequences – as did another seemingly incongruous intruder, Tom Bombadil. Moreover, it is easy to see from the changing concept of the Elves that the idea of the “indigenous” inhabit-ants of the world of The Silmarillion was by no means immutable either. In The Book of Lost Tales, written only about eight years before Michael Tolkien lost his toy dog on the beach in 1925, even the central tale of Beren and Tinúviel plays out as a cat-and-dog story. With this in view, Roverandom’s journey to Elfland no longer seems

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as far-fetched, especially since the idea of adventurous Hobbits (possibly even Bilbo Baggins) sailing away to “the Other Side” remained in The Hobbit for a long time after its publication (HoH 52).

What Roverandom exemplifies, sometimes in a more clear-cut way than The Hobbit, is the tension between two modes of writing, the two sides to Tolkien’s imagination described by Carpenter, and given that Tolkien was moving towards a more “grown-up” and less playful vision of the mythology which eventually even led him to reconsider the style of The Hobbit, it is perhaps unsurprising that he did not return to Roverandom in later years.

Mr. Bliss

Mr. Bliss is a picture book inspired by Tolkien’s children and their toys, like Roveran-dom, and abundantly illustrated by the author, like The Father Christmas Letters. It was also written in the late 1920s or early 1930s and published posthumously in 1982 (see Tolkien 2007a). It is a satirical and humorous tale involving a little man in a tall hat, a mysterious creature called the Girabbit, a little town populated by a number of characters, some roguish bears, an uncouth family of gluttons called the Dorkinses, a temperamental motor-car, and a donkey. Just like Roverandom, Mr. Bliss has had its share of critics and proponents. The story can appear charming or absurd, depending on the point of view. It has echoes of The Wind in the Willows and Beatrix Potter, but contains hardly any references to Tolkien’s legendarium – although just like Tolkien’s other children’s stories, it has important parallels with The Hobbit and the Shire char-acters from The Lord of the Rings.6 Shippey (2007, 363) reads it as an audacious tale of anarchy and vulgar language that refuses to date. It has certainly not disappeared from the attention of Tolkien fans: a short animated film was privately made in 2004 featuring the original drawings.

Farmer Giles of Ham

The famous story of Tolkien reading Farmer Giles of Ham aloud at a meeting of an Oxford society in 1938 (Letters 39) tends to overshadow the fact that the scholarly humor for which the tale is so much admired was added during a rewriting in prepa-ration for this reading, and that Farmer Giles had begun life in the late 1920s as yet another children’s story, complete with the figure of Daddy the narrator who often interrupts himself to explain things and answer questions (see Tolkien 2008a for an exhaustive history and commentary by Scull and Hammond).

Although Farmer Giles is among Tolkien’s most popular stories, it has a special appeal for medievalists and philologists. There are elements in it which cry out for comment and annotation, from veiled allusions to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Arthurian legends, and Tolkien’s own essay on Beowulf, to local lore and Oxford-shire toponymy. The latter is doubly ironic as the joke has been inevitably turned on

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Tolkien himself; his fictional editor examining Farmer Giles as the work of an equally fictional medieval scribe cites “the light that it throws on the origin of some difficult place-names” among the excuses “for presenting a translation of its curious tale.” Even though most readers “find the character and adventures of its hero attractive in them-selves” (Tolkien 2008e, xvi), an appreciation of Farmer Giles of Ham seems incomplete without locating the villages of Worminghall and Oakley, the Rollright Stones, and the town of Thame itself on the map of modern Oxfordshire. Tolkien does not include many references to the real Oxford or the surrounding area in his fiction (with some notable exceptions such as “The Notion Club Papers”), so his deep interest in place-names and local histories has to be gleaned from his academic works and from the rich toponymy of The Lord of the Rings.

Philological methods are often unable to determine the original reason why, deep in time, a certain name was given to a certain place. Therefore, from the point of view of etymology, the stories derived from a modern version of a place-name are strictly speaking just as justified – or no more justified – than the ones that evolve around an early recorded version of the same place-name. And that is exactly what Tolkien is doing in Farmer Giles, by offering the story as an explanation of names such as Worminghall and Thame.

The “philological gest,” of course, in no way overshadows the story itself, which is proven by its textual history. It was the original shorter version, lacking most of the scholarly humor and placing less of an emphasis on the quasi-medieval setting, which was offered for publication in 1936 and enthusiastically received by the publishers (and the young Rayner Unwin); but it was the now-familiar second version that saw light in 1949.

The comic tone of the story sets it apart from the others, although the humor is very much the same as in his other writings. Its medieval setting – the Little Kingdom – seems unique (if one discounts the abandoned draft for a Farmer Giles sequel), but the idea of a fictionalized period in the history of what is essentially our own world is, after all, the underlying concept behind Tolkien’s mythology as a whole. Giles the reluctant hero comes from the same stock as Tolkien’s Hobbit characters including Farmer Maggot, and his failure to kill a dragon but success in finding its weak spot offers a close parallel to Bilbo’s story. The presentation of the story is a mockery of medievalist textual criticism and editorial practices, and has suggested to Shippey an allegorical reading (2000, 289–292; 2005, 111–114), which would argue for a closer tie between the story and Tolkien’s other two important short tales, “Leaf by Niggle” and Smith of Wootton Major.

“Leaf by Niggle”

Much has been made of the “allegory vs. applicability” conundrum with regard to “Leaf by Niggle,” a story which was written in the early 1940s, after the publication of The Hobbit, and in many ways reflects the problems and anxieties involved in the ongoing composition of The Lord of the Rings.

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In view of Tolkien’s clearly expressed dislike of allegory, are we entitled to treat his short story as one? He himself is ambiguous on the matter: “the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’ ” (Letters 121).7 Nearly every analysis of “Leaf by Niggle,” starting with Tolkien’s own assessment of his story in a letter to his aunt Jane Neave (Letters 320–322), has unfailingly picked up on the Christian allegory: the plot is interpreted as a man’s journey from earthly life to Purgatory and thence to Heaven.8 On the other hand, it can be read as an allegorical interpretation of Tolkien’s own life: his “niggling” perfectionist attitude to work, the slow emergence of the Great Tales that grow in the telling after starting from a single “leaf,” the uncertainties of a man beset by everyday cares which prevent him from finishing the work that is so dear to his heart; and finally, the hope of a deeply religious man, expressed much more confidently in the last lines of his earlier poem “Mythopoeia,” that his imagination would somehow be given tangible form in the next life. Despite its allegorical nature, “Leaf by Niggle” can clearly be read just as a story, a counterpart to The Pilgrim’s Regress, the allegorical autobiography written by Tolkien’s closest friend C. S. Lewis which highlights the differences between the two men.

The world that Niggle inhabits is described in tones remarkably reminiscent of twentieth-century social satire. In the first line of the story, he is called a “little man” (Tolkien 2008e, 285), a term which in the context of world literature is often applied to an unremarkable “everyman” who has to face the hostile and impersonal power of the state, or fate, or some other overbearing odds which either crush him or reveal his hidden strengths. He lives in a world which is almost Orwellian in its austerity, with clear echoes of wartime Britain, in which the society is represented by rather Big-Brotherish Councillors and Inspectors whose very language suggests an image of a machine-like world so abhorrent to Tolkien: “I dare say he could have been made into a serviceable cog of some sort” (Tolkien 2008e, 309). This presentation of Niggle as a man whose fate is decided by “the Others” persists even in the “Purgatorial” chapters where he undergoes “treatment” dished out in a very matter-of-fact and perhaps even brusque fashion. Even Niggle’s dreams and fantasies before his journey are presented in a similar way: his idea of happiness is someone giving him a “public pension” to finish his Picture. He does not come into his own until he literally “comes into his own” and becomes master of the country brought to life by his imagination. In “Leaf by Niggle” it seems that Tolkien’s deeply-rooted Catholic notions of a fallen world and a fallen man within that world are expressed in a language peculiarly reminiscent of the dystopian fiction of his time, despite his ostensible lack of interest in contemporary literature.

Smith of Wootton Major

Smith of Wootton Major is different from all the other stories previously discussed in that it postdates them by at least 20 years. It was written in 1964, after The Hobbit

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and The Lord of the Rings had already been published and established. Smith’s journeys into Faërie have sometimes been seen as yet another allegory, Tolkien’s attempt to step outside the boundaries of his legendarium and present an evaluation of his own life in mythological terms.

The metaphor of the special-occasion Cake shared between the children of the village can be read in different ways. It can be dismissed as “the popular misunder-standing of Faërie as saccharine and meant only for children” (Tolkien 2005, 61). It could also be interpreted as an apology for fairy-stories, which, though imperfect and often wrong-footed, still preserve some vestige of memory of the Perilous Realm. “Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awaking,” says the Queen in Smith of Wootton Major (38), and this senti-ment echoes Tolkien’s attitudes to his own work expressed elsewhere directly and indirectly. In almost the last lines of “Leaf by Niggle” the “Second Voice” says of his country: “It is proving very useful indeed . . . As a holiday, and a refreshment. It is splendid for convalescence; and not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains” (Tolkien 2008e, 143).

After the publication of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was receiving numerous grateful comments from people for whom his works opened a door into Faërie, which prompted him to muse:

What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grate-ful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop. (Letters 98)

The allegorical nature of Smith of Wootton Major has been a controversial issue, debated at length by major Tolkien scholars such as Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, and David Doughan.9 Tolkien himself, despite praising Roger Lancelyn Green for saying that “to seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce” (Letters 388), provided an allegorical reading in a long essay he wrote on his own story: “[P]lainly enough the Master Cook and the Great Hall etc are a (somewhat satirical) allegory of the village-church, and village parson: its functions steadily decaying and losing all touch with the ‘arts’, into mere eating and drinking” (Tolkien 2005, 70). Indeed, the first paragraphs of Smith of Wootton Major read like the beginning of one of C. S. Lewis’s allegorical illustrations to a religious argument. But this is not a Lewis story, and the arithmetic fails to work; Alf Prentice, the King of Faërie who forsakes his realm to work as a village Cook, is not a Christ figure, and the “deep magic” he invokes is not equated with God’s power.

Whatever approach is adopted, it is important to note two facts about Smith of Wootton Major. First, there is the much-cited circumstance that the story grew out of a never-written preface to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key. In genesis, if not anywhere else, it was intended to be a metaphorical illustration of the concept of “Faërie,” also discussed in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories.” Second, we have to con-sider the ways in which Tolkien’s mind worked. He was aware of allegorical elements

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in his work, but as he progressed, he was more and more immersed in it just as a “story.” Wootton itself is located “between Far Easton and the Westwood” (Tolkien 2008e, 255), that is, between East and West, somewhere in this “middle-earth.” However, Tolkien typically provided a follow-up for the story in his explanatory essay and notes, offering both his own evaluation of its meaning and an elaboration of the geography and economics of Wootton and its relationship with Faërie. This is yet another step away from allegory and into the realm of applicability, that is, the infinite opportunities for interpretation provided by people and places, real or imaginary.

The Minor Works as Backdrop for The Hobbit

Whenever the affinities between the minor works and The Hobbit are discussed, much store is set by textual similarities and plot details. The Father Christmas Letters and Roverandom contain passages which might have been lifted straight from The Hobbit, and in fact are very close in date to the composition of the latter book (such as the Polar Bear’s adventure in the Goblin cave in the 1932 letter or the White Dragon chasing after Rover and Roverandom on the Moon in Roverandom). But the connections go far beyond textual echoes.

One feature shared by The Father Christmas Letters, Roverandom, the early version of Farmer Giles of Ham, and The Hobbit is the presence of an implied narrator figure. This concept, originally suggested by the real situation (Tolkien telling stories to his chil-dren), is inevitable in the epistolary genre represented by The Father Christmas Letters but becomes a more formal device in the other stories, especially in the original Farmer Giles, where the narrator is identified as “Daddy” and provides both an introduction and a moral at the end.10 It is significant that Tolkien gradually became dissatisfied with this device in The Hobbit and removed many of the original asides and addresses to the reader from later editions of the book. However, a vestige of it is retained in the famous passage in The Lord of the Rings, when Sam Gamgee imagines the story of their adventures as a book that is read aloud by a father to his children (TT, IV, viii, 932).

What really brings the children’s stories together and provides an important back-drop and parallel to The Hobbit is their setting. At first glance, it may seem that there is little similarity between the Shire, the fairy-tale North Pole, the Moon, the undersea kingdom, the quaint home of Mr Bliss, the pseudo-medieval Little Kingdom, the dystopian suburbia of Niggle’s home, and the imaginary pre-industrial countryside around Wootton. John Rateliff remarks in The History of The Hobbit that “modern settings are relatively rare in Tolkien and are generally confined to single indoor loca-tions: Mr. Bliss is a significant exception” (HoH 462). Nevertheless, nearly all the minor works have a setting (if only as an initial point) that can be tentatively described as “contemporary”: Father Christmas is clearly writing to the children “here and now,” Roverandom’s adventures start and end in what is essentially the real world as Tolk-ien’s sons knew it, and Mr Bliss lives in a village which belongs to the twentieth

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century. Niggle’s town, albeit deliberately non-specific, is also firmly rooted in Tolk-ien’s own time. But modern or not, all the settings in the minor works seem to represent different facets of an image which may be labeled “The Shire,” “the Little Kingdom,” or perhaps even “Little England.”11

To the prose works that are the focus of this chapter can be added some poems from the cycles “Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay” (see Tolkien 2002a) and The Adven-tures of Tom Bombadil (see Tolkien 2008e). From the fanciful “Dragon’s Visit” to the viciously satirical “Progress in Bimble Town,” we encounter the tell-tale signs that we are still in the same country. It is decidedly non-urban: at best a small market town, but usually a village at the heart of “an imaginary (but English) country-side” (Tolkien 2005, 84). It is populated by “little people,” not yet literally small in size as the Hobbits, but ordinary people preoccupied with their everyday concerns. Even their names have the same slightly comic and rustic ring to them; the following illustrative selection is taken, in no particular order, from all the works here described: Atkins, Tompkins, Perkins, Mr Bliss, Mr Binks, the Dorkinses (Albert, Herbert, Egbert), Mrs Simkins, Mrs Biggins (the dragon-slayer!), Nokes and Noakes, Bill Huggins, Grubb and Burrows, Tom Bombadil and John Pompador, and Bingo Bolger-Baggins.12 There are also “Sam, Sergeant Boffin’s eldest boy,” Sunny Sam, and, of course, Sam Gamgee, the son of “Gaffer Gamgee” who first makes his appear-ance in Mr. Bliss – literally, as he is depicted in the illustration (Tolkien 2007a, 36). One is inevitably reminded of the roll-call from Bilbo’s famous address to his guests in the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes the names can be incongru-ously grand: we are now used to Peregrin Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck, but we are still mindful of the effect produced by Hamilcar (later Belisarius) Bolger and Bellomarius; we chuckle at Augustus Bonifacius Ambrosius Aurelianus Antoninus and Psamathos Psamathides, let alone Artaxerxes, the Pacific and Atlantic Magician, and those aware of the origins and meaning of the names chuckle twice. Rather than having names in Tolkien’s invented languages, what the characters in the minor works share with the Hobbits is a combination of the homely traditional or mock-traditional English names and the grand-sounding names of the celebrities of the medieval and Classical world.

The inhabitants of the generic “Little England” (which has its pseudo-medieval or fairy-tale counterparts in the Little Kingdom and both the Woottons), although more than a little absurd and comical, can be presented as embodiments of traditional values and a deep love of home (see also ch. 24). At their worst, they are images of “bourgeois smugness” and a narrow-minded, bigoted outlook that refuses to accept anything outside their “limited world” (Tolkien cited by Rateliff, HoH xiii). Again, the simi-larities are apparent although the range is vast: from Mr Binks the car seller in Mr. Bliss (“He ought to be in prison he ought, sending home a nice car bent and all, and full of a parcel of bears and strange folk”; Tolkien 2007a, 37), Councillor Tompkins’s sneery dismissal of Niggle as “silly little man, . . . no use to Society at all” (Tolkien 2008e, 309), Nokes’s haughty and mistrustful treatment of Alf in Smith of Wootton Major, to Bilbo’s neighbors who gossip about “mad Baggins” and yet turn up in force

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for his parties and Barliman Butterbur the barman who doesn’t have a kind word to say about the man he calls Strider the Ranger.

It is precisely the fact that they do something “queer” that separates the protago-nists of the stories from their parochial if idyllic environment: whether it is going on a car ride to visit some bears or embarking on a long journey to reclaim gold from a dragon, painting a picture or venturing into Faërie; indeed, as Bilbo Baggins himself put it, “anything from climbing trees to visiting elves – or sailing in ships, sailing to other shores” (H 7).

Conclusion

Although few readers nowadays have the chance to subject them to this test, Tolk-ien’s minor works can be evaluated and appreciated independently from his mythol-ogy, which tends to overshadow them by creating false expectations. But even when viewed within the context of the mythology, their relevance is far greater than that of something “tacked on the side,” a quarry of sources and analogues – a fate which Tolkien would not have wished on any of his works. Perhaps most importantly, the minor works offer samples of the same fertile ground that produced The Hobbit, after which Middle-earth was never the same again, in either the primary or the secondary world.

Notes

1 This title refers to the abridged edition by Baillie Tolkien, first published in 1976. The more extensive collection, Letters from Father Christmas, appeared in 1999.

2 For a discussion of the word “Gnome” and its fate in Tolkien’s writings, see Lost Tales I (38) as well as Letters (318). Note Shippey’s remark in The Road to Middle-earth: “He kept using the term ‘Gnomes’ for the Noldor till at least 1937” (Shippey 2005, 333).

3 “Roverandom lacks the sense of realism and serious purpose of The Lord of the Rings and even The Hobbit . . . It is whimsical and ‘mini-aturized’ in a way Tolkien later came to dislike” (Croft 2004, 68); “The invention in Roverandom is short-winded and the charac-terisation rudimentary” (Mars-Jones 1998); “I find it hard to believe that he [Tolkien] would have tolerated Roverandom in its present state” (Asaro 1998).

4 One parallel would be Selma Lagerlöf’s 1907 Swedish book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, in which a wicked boy is unkind to an

Elf, is turned into a tiny creature himself, and has to learn a lot about the world during his travels with wild geese before he is deemed worthy of regaining his original shape and returning home.

5 See Mark Atherton’s recent discussion of Roverandom in the context of the origins of The Hobbit: “The myths sit a little uneasily with a story set in a modern world” (Atherton 2012, 21).

6 See an excellent exploration of the bear char-acters and other aspects of Mr. Bliss in Tolk-ien’s tales in Rateliff (HoH 253–256).

7 A similar sentiment was also expressed in Letter 131 to Milton Waldman (Letters 145).

8 “In the middle of the morning they gave Niggle a biscuit and a glass of wine; and then they gave him a ticket” (Tolkien 2008e, 301).

9 To follow the debate, see Shippey (2007, 351–362); Shippey (2000, 296–304); Shippey (2005, 308–318); Doughan (1991); and Flieger (1997, Chapter 11).

“Minor” Works 201

10 The narrator is also present in Mr. Bliss, if only as the figure of the artist who is occasion-ally given a voice (cf. the caption on p. 26: “The car is just here (and the ponies and donkey) but I am tired of drawing it”).

11 See ch. 24 for a thorough discussion of the concept of “Little England” and its reflections in Tolkien’s work.

12 “Bingo Bolger-Baggins” sounds like a P. G. Wodehouse character but in fact owes his name to a family of toy bears owned by Pris-cilla Tolkien; it took Tolkien a long time to drop this name in favor of “Frodo Baggins” (Tolkien 1988).

References

Asaro, Vincent. 1998. “Roverandom: Let Sleeping (Toy) Dogs Lie.” Available at http://www.spiral sea.com/ports/arkoftitan/titanzine/octnov98/tolkien.html, accessed November 29, 2013.

Atherton, Mark. 2012. There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin.

Croft, Jane Brennan. 2004. “Beyond The Hobbit: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Other Works for Children.” World Literature Today, 78.1: 67–70.

Doughan, David. 1991. “In Search of the Bounce: Tolkien Seen Through Smith.” In Lewis (1991), 17–22.

Drout, Michael C., ed. 2007. J. R. R. Tolkien Ency-clopaedia. London: Routledge.

Flieger, Verlyn. 1997. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

Mars-Jones, Adam. 1998. “Hobbit Forming.” The Observer, January 1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1998/jan/01/jrrtolkien.classics, accessed November 29, 2013.

Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins.

Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins.

Shippey, Tom. 2007. Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers.

Further Reading

Hiley, Margaret, and Frank Weinreich, eds. 2008. Tolkien’s Shorter Works: Essays of the Jena Con ference 2007. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers.

Lewis, Alex, ed. 1991. Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction. The Tolkien Society.