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

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happy to give her a free hand to condense or omit any parts of his contribution, in the interests of brevity; it is not known if any change was made in Tolkien’s text, though some parts of the introduction were omitted from the published work. Mrs Gordon stated in her preface that she wished to reduce the length of the book ‘in a way that would sacrifice as little as possible of the original material’, and that this ‘made it necessary to make extensive alterations in the form’ (p. iv).

      Later, when the question arose about whether his name should appear on the title-page of Pearl, Tolkien declined, giving full credit to his late friend; nor did Ida Gordon sign her name except to the Preface. The edition was published at last at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in June 1953; see further, Descriptive Bibliography B22. It is still well respected as a standard text.

      ‘FORM AND PURPOSE’

      A central feature of Tolkien’s part of the introduction to Pearl is a discussion of *allegory and symbolism in relation to the poem. ‘It is proper, or at least useful,’ he writes, ‘to limit allegory to narrative, to an account (however short) of events; and symbolism to the use of visible signs or things to represent other things or ideas …. To be an “allegory” a poem must as a whole, and with fair consistency, describe in other terms some event or process; its entire narrative and all its significant details should cohere and work together to this end.’ Pearl contains ‘minor allegories’; ‘but an allegorical description of an event does not make that event itself allegorical’ (pp. xi–xii). In the poet’s day

      visions … allowed marvels to be placed within the real world … while providing them with an explanation in the phantasies of sleep, and a defence against critics in the notorious deception of dreams …. We are dealing with a period when men, aware of the vagaries of dreams, still thought that amid their japes came visions of truth. And their waking imagination was strongly moved by symbols and the figures of allegory …. [pp. xiv–xv]

      This text was later printed also as part of the introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, pp. 18–23.

      Part One, ‘The Prologue and Appendices to The Lord of the Rings’, is divided into nine parts: ‘The Prologue’; ‘The Appendix on Languages’; ‘The Family Trees’; ‘The Calendars’; ‘The History of the *Akallabêth’; ‘The Tale of Years of the Second Age’; ‘The Heirs of Elendil’; ‘The Tale of Years of the Third Age’; and ‘The Making of Appendix A’ (‘The Realms in Exile’, ‘The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen’, ‘The House of Eorl’, ‘Durin’s Folk’). Christopher Tolkien did not realize when he brought the story of *The Lord of the Rings to an end in *Sauron Defeated (1992) that his father had done much work on the Prologue and the Appendices possibly even while writing the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings in the summer of 1948, and certainly immediately after that time, until by the middle of 1950 he had a series of fair copy texts which might provide the necessary background to the story. He probably did little more with this until 1952, when he began to prepare The Lord of the Rings for publication, and most of the final work on the Appendices was accomplished in 1954–5.

      Part Two, ‘Late Writings’, contains works from the final years of Tolkien’s life, c. 1967–1973: *Of Dwarves and Men; *The Shibboleth of Fëanor; *The Problem of Ros; *Glorfindel, together with extracts from two versions of a discussion of the Dwarves’ tradition that the spirits of their Seven Fathers were from time to time reborn (drawn from a larger discussion mainly on the reincarnation of Elves, hence see *Some Notes on ‘Rebirth’); *The Five Wizards (‘Note on the landing of the Five Wizards and their functions and operations’); and *Círdan. This was a time, Christopher Tolkien comments, when his father ‘was moved to write extensively, in a more generalised view, of the languages and peoples of the Third Age and their interrelations, closely interwoven with discussion of the etymology of names’ (The Peoples of Middle-earth, p. 293); cf. *The History of Galadriel and Celeborn and of Amroth King of Lórien in *Unfinished Tales (1980). These ‘historical-philological’ essays

      are not developments and refinements of earlier versions, and they were not themselves subsequently developed and refined …. Almost all of this work was etymological in its inspiration, which to a large extent accounts for its extremely discursive nature; for in no study does one thing lead to another more rapidly than in etymology, which also of its nature leads out of itself in the attempt to find explanations beyond the purely linguistic evolution of forms. [p. 294]

      Part Three, ‘Teachings of Pengoloð’, contains two works of the 1950s, the *Dangweth Pengoloð and *Of Lembas.

      Part Four, ‘Unfinished Tales’, contains *The New Shadow, an aborted sequel to The Lord of the Rings begun c. late 1958, and the story *Tal-Elmar, also from the 1950s.

      A lonely troll, whose ‘heart is soft’, ‘smile is sweet’, and ‘cooking good enough’, leaves his home in the hills and wanders through Michel Delving in the Shire. Despite good manners, he frightens everyone he meets, except for the lad Perry-the-Winkle. The troll carries him home ‘to a fulsome tea’, which becomes a Thursday tradition. In time, Perry-the-Winkle grows ‘so fat … / his weskit bust, and never a hat / would sit upon his head’; and he becomes a great baker, though not so good as the troll.

      Perry-the-Winkle is a revision of The Bumpus, one of a series of six poems called *‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’ (see also *The Dragon’s Visit, which includes the place-name ‘Bumpus Head’). Three versions of The Bumpus are known. On the first manuscript Tolkien sketched the ‘Bumpus’ as a plump, smiling, lizard-like figure with an apron around its waist, but in his text left its form unclear though certainly outlandish, with a tail long enough to ‘thump’, flat, flapping feet, and a lap in which William – not yet named Perry-the-Winkle – could sit. The second version of The Bumpus was published in the expanded edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014), pp. 202–6. The third version, titled William and the Bumpus, began to approach its later form, though many further additions and changes were yet to be made.

      Perry-the-Winkle in contrast is overtly a Hobbit poem, with references to the Shire and Bree, and in Tolkien’s preface to the Adventures of Tom Bombadil collection it is ascribed to Sam Gamgee (from *The Lord of the Rings). A typescript of Perry-the-Winkle in the Bodleian Library (MS Tolkien 19, f. 51) is headed ‘a children’s song in the Shire (attributed to Master Samwise)’.

      Tolkien recorded Perry-the-Winkle in 1967 for the album Poems and Songs of Middle Earth (1967, reissued in 2001 as part of The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection); see *Recordings.

      ‘A Philologist on Esperanto’ see Languages: Artificial

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