The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. Poetry collection, first published in Great Britain by George Allen & Unwin, London, in November 1962, and in the United States by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, in October 1963. See further, Descriptive Bibliography A6.
HISTORY
Tolkien’s Aunt *Jane Neave wrote to him near the beginning of October 1961 to ask ‘if you wouldn’t get out a small book with Tom Bombadil at the heart of it, the sort of size of book that we old ’uns can afford to buy for Christmas presents’ (quoted in Biography, p. 244). Tom Bombadil had featured in a poem, *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, published in 1934, and in Book I of *The Lord of the Rings (1954). Tolkien replied that although he did not feel inclined to write any more about that character, the poem ‘might make a pretty booklet of the kind you would like if each verse could be illustrated by *Pauline Baynes’ (4 October 1961, Letters, p. 308). He had in mind a book with little text and many pictures in a small format, like The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter which would be an ‘interim amusement’ until *The Silmarillion could be completed. His publisher, *Rayner Unwin, suggested instead that the poem be fleshed out with other ‘occasional verses’, ‘to make a [more substantial] book and not a pamphlet’ (letters, 11 October and 2 November 1961, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins).
Between November 1961 and April 1962 Tolkien sifted through the poems he had written to date, even very early works such as *The Trees of Kortirion and possibly You & Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (*The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva), looking for any that could be reprinted or revised. To Jane Neave he wrote that he had enjoyed himself very much ‘digging out these old half-forgotten things and rubbing them up. All the more because there are other and duller things that I ought to have been doing’ (22 November 1961, Letters, p. 309). Writing to Rayner Unwin, however, he regretted that there were few among his verses (he felt) that were compatible with The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and few that fit well even with each other. He had particular misgivings about ‘the vaguer, more subjective and least successful piece labelled *The Sea-Bell’ (letter to Rayner Unwin, 8 December 1961, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). By 12 April 1962, as he told his publisher, he ‘lost all confidence’ in the poems under consideration,
and all judgement, and unless Pauline Baynes can be inspired by them, I cannot see them making a ‘book’. I do not see why she should be inspired, though I fervently hope that she will be. Some of the things may be good in their way, and all of them privately amuse me; but elderly hobbits are easily pleased.
The various items … do not really ‘collect’. The only possible link is the fiction that they come from the Shire from about the period of The Lord of the Rings. But that fits some uneasily. I have done a good deal of work, trying to make them fit better: if not much to their good, I hope not to their serious detriment. [Letters, pp. 314–15]
He now made an arrangement of sixteen poems: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; *Bombadil Goes Boating; *Errantry; *Princess Mee; *The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late; *The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon; *The Stone Troll; *Perry-the-Winkle; *The Mewlips; *Oliphaunt; *Cat; *Fastitocalon; *Shadow-Bride; *The Hoard; *The Sea-Bell; and *The Last Ship. (Thus the order of contents in the first printing of the Allen & Unwin edition; see below.) Most were revised versions of earlier works, three (The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late, Oliphaunt, and The Stone Troll) were reprinted from The Lord of the Rings, one (Cat) had been written by Tolkien a few years earlier to amuse his granddaughter Joanna (see *Michael Tolkien), and one (Bombadil Goes Boating) was written for the collection, based on earlier workings.
To these Tolkien added a preface, an extension of the fiction he had adopted in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in which he poses as the editor of Hobbit manuscripts, including the ‘Red Book of Westmarch’: ‘The present selection is taken from the older pieces [in the Red Book], mainly concerned with legends and jests of the Shire at the end of the Third Age, that appear to have been made by Hobbits, especially by Bilbo [Baggins] and his friends, or their immediate descendants’ (1962 edn., p. 7). The fiction is extended even to the dust-jacket of the book, which claims that ‘during his renewed study of the “Red Book”, the editor of The Lord of the Rings became interested in verses that are to be found in it, apart from those included in the various tales and legends: pieces written out on loose leaves, crowded into blank spaces, or scrawled in margins’.
Pauline Baynes, who had impressed Tolkien with her pictures for *Farmer Giles of Ham, agreed to illustrate his new book. He advised her that the poems ‘were conceived as a series of very definite, clear and precise, pictures – fantastical, or nonsensical perhaps, but not dreamlike! And I thought of you, because you seem able to produce wonderful pictures with a touch of ‘fantasy’, but primarily bright and clear visions of things that one might really see’ (6 December 1961, Letters, p. 312). He approved of her new art, excepting only her full-page illustration for The Hoard (in which the dragon should have faced the mouth of the cave, the better to defend it) and the orientation of the original binding art in which the figure of Tom Bombadil is placed on the lower rather than the upper cover; these were published nevertheless.
With the second Allen & Unwin printing (and the first Houghton Mifflin printing) Fastitocalon and Cat were reversed in order, so that the first of these would not be bisected by an illustration for the second. The full-page illustration for Cat thus was correctly associated with that poem, but a two-colour ilustration for Fastitocalon was moved to the side of a sheet which (as an economy measure) was not printed in two colours, thereby omitting the orange flames of a campfire.
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962) has been reprinted in *The Tolkien Reader (1966), *Poems and Stories (1980), *Tales from the Perilous Realm (1997), and elsewhere. In 1967 Tolkien recorded The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Mewlips, The Hoard, Perry-the-Winkle, The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon, and The Sea-Bell for the album Poems and Songs of Middle Earth (1967). On the same album, Errantry is sung by baritone William Elvin, accompanied on the piano by composer *Donald Swann. Tolkien also recorded Errantry and Princess Mee, which, however, were first issued only in 2001 as part of The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection (incorporating Poems and Songs of Middle Earth; see *Recordings).
An expanded edition, first published by HarperCollins, London, in October 2014, includes the text of the 1962 edition as well as commentary by editors Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, a selection of earlier published versions of the poems, one of the manuscript versions of the previously unpublished poem The Bumpus (precursor of Perry-the-Winkle), and the previously unpublished fragment of a prose story about Tom Bombadil (*‘Tom Bombadil: A Prose Fragment’). The volume also reprints the later Tom Bombadil poem *Once upon a Time, which is related to *An Evening in Tavrobel. The 1962 illustrations by Pauline Baynes are reprinted also, together with later art by Baynes for the collection as published in Poems and Stories, and calligraphic treatments by Tolkien of portions of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Errantry.
CRITICISM
With only a few exceptions, such as the anonymous critic in Junior Bookshelf (March 1963) who called it ‘a pathetic pip-squeak of a book’, reviewers approved of the Adventures of Tom Bombadil collection and found much to praise. Anthony Thwaite in ‘Hobbitry’ (The Listener, 22 November 1962, p. 831), for instance, described Tolkien’s poems as ‘by turns gay, pratling, melancholy, nonsensical, mysterious. And what is most exciting and attractive about them is their superb technical skill.’ And Alfred Leo Duggan, the unsigned author of ‘Middle Earth Verse’ in the Times Literary Supplement for 23 November 1962, wrote that ‘Tolkien is in fact a wordsmith, an ingenious versifier, rather than a discoverer of new insights. … Tom Bombadil himself is shown as a queer fellow, a little comical; but with something of the supernatural about him.’ The rhymes