The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2 - Christina Scull

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masters at *King Edward’s School, Birmingham. Nesbit dedicated her adult novel The Incomplete Amorist (1906) partly to Reynolds and used his Christian name for one of the Bastables in her children’s fiction.

      To supplement family income Nesbit sold poems and juvenile and adult fiction to magazines, much of it hack-work. It was not until she was almost forty that she wrote the first of the children’s stories that brought her fame. Her stories of the Bastable family began to appear in 1897, and were published in book form as The Story of the Treasure Seekers in 1899. Tales of children trying to find ways to make money to amend the fortunes of their impoverished family, they were appreciated by readers of all ages. Further books about the Bastables followed, including The Wouldbegoods (1901) and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). *Roger Lancelyn Green notes in Tellers of Tales: Children’s Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1964 (rewritten and rev. edn. 1965) that it was from her own ‘holiday life that Edith derived the joyous recollections of childhood’ evident in her work (p. 208). ‘She had, as perhaps no other author has quite possessed it, the power of becoming a child again, of thinking and inventing with her child characters, speaking and writing from their point of view – but with the skill and discrimination of a practised author’ (p. 206). The Railway Children, probably her best known story about ordinary children and their leisure activities, was first published (in book form) in 1906.

      In 1900 eight short stories by Nesbit which had appeared in Strand Magazine the previous year were collected in The Book of Dragons. In writing of many of these dragons, comic figures that are no match for their child opponents, Nesbit may have been influenced by ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ by *Kenneth Grahame (1898), and Grahame’s story and Nesbit’s collection may have contributed in turn to the character of Chrysophylax in *Farmer Giles of Ham (1949).

      Nesbit also wrote two stories about children travelling into their family’s past, The House of Arden (1908) and Harding’s Luck (1909). Virginia Luling has suggested (‘Going Back: Time Travel in Tolkien and E. Nesbit’, Mallorn 53 (Spring 2012)) that the first of these, in which the protagonists, Edred and Elfrida, find themselves living in the bodies of their ancestors, may have influenced Tolkien in writing *The Lost Road and *The Notion Club Papers.

      But better known among Nesbit’s works are those in which contemporary children experience magical adventures, especially Five Children – and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Roger Lancelyn Green’s comment on the opening of the first of Nesbit’s dragon stories is also applicable to these: ‘And so straight into the realm of magic, with the prosaicness of everyday life that makes it absolutely real and acceptable; the mixture of fancy and observation which is the real child-world, the game come to life and the day-dream that stands up to the clear light of noon’ (Teller of Tales, p. 211).

      On 31 August 1938 Tolkien wrote to C.A. Furth at George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) that Nesbit was ‘an author I delight in’ (courtesy of Christopher Tolkien), and in drafts for *On Fairy-Stories he wrote of the ‘triumphant formula that E. Nesbit found in the Amulet and the Phoenix and the Carpet’ (*On Fairy-Stories (extended edn. 2008), p. 251). From The Story of the Amulet and the earlier Five Children – and It Tolkien borrowed the Psammead for his own *Roverandom (1998). In Five Children – and It, while digging a hole in a gravel-pit children find in sand at the bottom a strange creature: ‘Its eyes were on long horns like a snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s’ (1912 printing, p. 14). It is a Psammead, or sand-fairy. It likes to sleep in warm sand, dislikes getting wet, and if disturbed can be rather gruff. Like Gandalf at the beginning of *The Hobbit it plays with the meaning of words and conventional phrases: when one of the children says that ‘now one comes to look at you’ she can see that it is a sand-fairy, the Psammead replies, with literal correctness, ‘You came to look at me several sentences ago’ (p. 16). The Psammead magically grants the children a series of wishes, almost all of which have unfortunate consequences, but luckily the magic lasts only until sunset. Similarly in Roverandom the dog Rover, who has been turned into a toy, meets a ‘sand-sorcerer’ called Psamathos Psamathides, ‘an excellent magician’ who ‘liked to lie buried in warm sand when the sun was shining, so that not more than the tip of one of his long ears stuck out’ (p. 11; ‘long ears’ was an emendation from ‘long horns’), ‘certainly was ugly’ (p. 13), and had ‘a fat tummy’ (p. 16) and ‘legs like a rabbit’ (p. 57). Psamathos saves Rover from the incoming tide, and sends him on excursions to the Moon and to the mer-king’s palace under the sea. In the earliest text of Roverandom the sand-sorcerer is actually called a psammead.

      Another work by Nesbit with elements analogous to some in Tolkien’s fiction is The Enchanted Castle, first published in 1907. Among the treasures of an estate (the ‘castle’ of the title) in England’s West Country is a magic ring whose power changes according to whatever its possessor declares – sometimes unwittingly, and as always in a Nesbit story, with unfortunate consequences. Most notably, the ring can confer invisibility, but has no effect on the wearer’s shadow: ‘In the blazing sunlight that flooded the High Street four shadows to three children seemed dangerously noticeable. A butcher’s boy looked far too earnestly at the extra shadow, and his big liver-coloured lurcher snuffed at the legs of that shadow’s mistress and whined uncomfortably’ (ch. 3). The presence of a shadow cast by an otherwise unseen person recalls The Hobbit, Chapter 5, in which goblins see the invisible Bilbo’s shadow as he escapes through the back-gate, while the ability of a dog to detect someone who cannot be seen brings to mind early texts of The Lord of the Rings in which Bingo puts on the Ring, becoming invisible, in the house of Farmer Maggot, but the farmer’s dog ‘remained behind jumping and frisking round Bingo to his annoyance’ (The Return of the Shadow, p. 94) or ‘halted near Bingo sniffing and growling with the hair rising on its neck, and a puzzled look in its eyes’ (The Return of the Shadow, p. 290). In another scene, when the invisible Mabel is having tea, ‘it was rather horrid to see the bread and butter waving about in the air, and bite after bite disappearing from it apparently by no human agency; and the spoon rising with apple in it and returning to the plate empty’, or ‘a mug of milk was suspended in the air without visible means of support’ (ch. 3). Compare again, perhaps, invisible Bingo’s (later Frodo’s) visit to Farmer Maggot during which a ‘mug left the table, rose, tilted in the air, and then returned empty to its place’ (The Return of the Shadow, pp. 96, 292).

      Neither Christopher nor Priscilla Tolkien recall having read The Enchanted Castle, though other books by Nesbit were on their shelves.

      See further, Noel Streatfeild, Magic and the Magician: E. Nesbit and Her Children’s Books (1958), and Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858–1924 (1987).

      See further, René van Rossenberg, Hobbits in Holland: Leven en Werk van J.R.R. Tolkien

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