Roverandome
Roverandom is a children's book published posthumously in 1998 bythe English writer J. RR Tolkien . Tolkien wrote thestory of the little dog Rover in1925 for his son Michael, who wasturnedinto a toy for misbehavingtowards a wizard and then embarking on an adventurous journey to regain his original size consoling away his favorite toy.
In addition to its direct significance as an imaginative work of children's literature for Tolkien research, it is particularly interesting because of its parallel creation with the better-known book The Hobbit .
Table of contents
The narrative begins with Rover playing with a yellow ball. Suddenly an old man appears who turns out to be the magician Artaxerxes, who takes the ball to transform it. Rover growls angrily at him and demands his toy back. But the magician wants to tease him and takes the ball. The little dog then bites him and the dog turns him into a tiny toy dog. It is blown away by a magical wind and is initially found in a box. After a while it is taken out and displayed in the window of a toy store. Eventually it is sold and comes into the hands of a little boy as a gift. Still too angry about his unjust transformation to engage in his loving gimmicks, he decides to flee at the first opportunity, and in fact he falls unnoticed and not unwillingly while taking a walk on a section of the beach that is rarely used by humans out of his pocket. Saved from the approaching flood by the sand magician Psamathos Psamathides, who can restore his mobility but not his size, he is sent by him on the journey to the moon, where the most powerful of all magicians, the man in the moon, in a high white Tower lives. A seagull carries him on her back along the path laid by the moonlight on the sea to his destination.
On the moon
There, in addition to the Man in the Moon, he meets the winged moon dog Rover, with whom he soon becomes friends, even if he has to renounce his own name because of the similarity of names and instead take the name Roverandom.
Equipped with wings by magic, he and his new friend soon undertake increasingly extensive forays through the lunar landscape, which is inhabited by all kinds of animals, including 57 species of spiders. One of these trips takes the two friends to the edge of the dark side of the moon, where an ancient, ash-gray mountain piles up. In search of protection from a sudden snowstorm, they go into a cozy, warm hole in the ground - only to soon realize that this is only the uppermost branch of the large, white dragon's cave. This dragon - as the reader learns, only moved to the moon with the emergence of an unnatural appetite for dragon tails in King Arthur's time - is the only creature that can reasonably compete with the man in the moon and even occasionally annoys him with autocratic moon eclipses. The only means for the two friends is to escape, but when the dragon is not deterred from the chase even by the shooting star rocket, the man in the moon has no choice but to get his strongest spell from the cellar and onto the unprotected belly to fire the dragon. This has the desired effect - even the next lunar eclipse is canceled because the dragon is too busy curing its sensitive stomach.
At the invitation of the Man in the Moon, Roverandom can now officially get to know the other side of the moon. There he meets a crowd of singing children in a secluded garden, among whom he also recognizes his former master. The wondrous world was created by the Man in the Moon, but the reader learns that the children also bring a small part of their home with them - and that even the black spiders don't always let themselves be deterred from autocratically designing the garden. Rover has a happy time with his master, but it suddenly disappears - Roverandom has to learn that morning has come on earth and the children there are waking up from their sleep.
It's time for Roverandom to return to Earth too. At a mermaid party arranged by Psammathos for his sake, the magician Artaxerxes fell in love with the daughter of the sea king of all places and took up the post of resident ocean magician - the way to return home seems clear. Unfortunately, Artaxerxes had placed his strongest protection line on Roverandom's transformation and not even Psammathos can now undo it; Roverandom has no choice but to visit Artaxerxes himself and ask for his forgiveness.
Under the sea
In a whale called Uin called by Psammathos he makes his way to the palace of the sea king, which is on the seabed. There he found Artaxerxes at once; however, he is so taken with himself and his newfound meaning that it would be beneath his dignity to look after a toy dog. When Roverandom had a look around, he met a former ship's dog, who happened to be called Rover as well. Equipped with flippers by Artaxerxes at the behest of his wife, he and his new friend Rover are now experiencing numerous smaller adventures underwater, the largest of which leads him, together with the whale Uin, past the enchanted islands to the far west of the world, where he takes a look of the white shimmering city of the elves, situated on a green hill.
Nevertheless, he cannot get rid of the thought of his former master and makes another attempt to change Artaxerxes' mind, which in turn rejects him. Roverandom resolves to teach him a lesson.
By now, Artaxerxes has noticed that the title of reigning ocean wizard is not all about convenience. All kinds of animals are up to mischief in the sea and now even the great sea snake threatens to wake up, which supposedly reaches from one end of the world to the other. Even the Man in the Moon was at the end of his magic with her (the last attempt to appease her a whole continent went under), so Artaxerxes is only forced to set out in his vehicle drawn by seven sharks to investigate the situation . Unrecognized, he is pursued by Roverandom and his new friend. When the wizard, having arrived at the sea snake's cave, is just indecisively inspecting the protruding, huge tail end, Rover bites one of the sharks in the tail out of sheer lust for revenge and thus unintentionally triggers a chain reaction: one shark after the other lets the man in front feel its teeth until finally the foremost shark bites the tail of the great sea snake for lack of an alternative.
It begins to move, which triggers a huge underwater hurricane that whirls up everything and everyone who is in the vicinity of the sea snake. When Roverandom arrives at the Palace of the Sea King many days and several smaller adventures later, he witnesses a massive uproar. The sea has still not come to rest from the movements of the sea serpent, which is now (still asleep) trying to get its own tail into its mouth. The fitness of the reigning ocean wizard is openly questioned by numerous demonstrators from the merfolk. Artaxerxes tries desperately in the next few weeks to come up with a suitable magic remedy; However, when it is applied, it turns out that it only leads the snake to dream that it is littered with all sorts of crustaceans and that it is slowly being roasted in a volcano. Understandably not very impressed by this vision, this half-waking, half-sleeping, threatens to wake up completely and to smash the whole world to pieces if the incompetent sea magician does not finally stop with his nonsensical spells.
Artaxerxes has now finally gambled away all sympathies with the merfolk and as a result set off with his wife to leave the sea. Roverandom, who still would like to see the little boy again, accompanies him and asks Artaxerxes to transform himself back on land. He is so touched that anyone can trust his magic that he gladly fulfills this wish. So it happens that Roverandom can make his way home to the little boy and is soon happily reunited with him - but Artaxerxes finally abandons the magic and opens a junk shop while his wife gives swimming lessons in order to make a living to contribute.
Work history
Roverandom , although only published in 1998, 25 years after the author's death, was created in the mid-1920s. Tolkien had started telling his children little stories on all sorts of occasions at an early age. For example, since 1920 he has written a letter from Santa Claus every year for Christmas (later published as The Father Christmas letters ); on other occasions he entertained his children through the adventures of the villain Bill Stickers and his opponent Major Road Ahead or told the story of the rag doll Tom Bombadil, which would later have a brief appearance in his main work, The Lord of the Rings . All of these pieces were created out of the moment, were kept in a very simple style and literarily not particularly mature in terms of form, content and language.
The story of the dog Rover was originally of a similar nature. It was probably first written orally in 1925 during a summer vacation of several weeks at the seaside resort of Filey on the east coast of Yorkshire , where the family lived in a farmhouse with a view of the sea. The immediate trigger was the traumatic loss of a toy dog by Tolkien's son Michael; to comfort him about this, Tolkien tried to find a reasonable explanation for the disappearance. Two incidents remembered by his son John make it clear that the story must have already originated in Filey: On the one hand, he tells of an enchantingly beautiful moonrise that threw a silver streak of light on the water, which was not difficult in connection with Rover's trip to the moon can be brought; on the other hand, he remembered a severe storm during which his father told stories to calm the children. The storm can be dated to September 5, 1925, based on received meteorological reports, which is therefore the earliest tangible date for the creation of the story, and it was reflected in Roverandom itself in the form of the turbulence caused by the restless sea serpent . The only other evidence from 1925 is a drawing that was probably also made in Filey.
It is unclear how comprehensive the narrative was originally: Tolkien himself writes in the first written mention of the story in his diary in 1926 that it grew as the story was told, but there apparently refers to another oral version that he made during the 1925 Christmas break / 26 must have presented.
The next references to Roverandom are not found again until 1927; there are three drawings clearly related to history that Tolkien probably made while on another summer vacation. It was not until the Christmas holidays of 1927/28 that the first handwritten manuscript was probably created together with another drawing. It is the first of four text versions that have survived to this day, but it is incomplete because part of the beginning is missing. All three later versions of the text are typewritten and contain numerous improvements, but no longer any major changes to the content. The title Roverandom appears for the first time in text version Two, the first typewritten manuscript, before it was still The Adventures of Rover . Text variant three consists of only nine pages and, like the previous version, is written on torn out notebook pages, but in contrast to this one in clean spelling, from which it is now concluded that Tolkien already prepared the manuscript with a view to publication; After the great success of The Hobbit , his publisher George Allen & Unwin asked his publisher George Allen & Unwin for more children's books towards the end of 1936, to which the text can be roughly dated, and Tolkien decided to submit Roverandom for assessment. The manuscript actually submitted was probably Text Version Four, a neatly written sixty-page document that Rayner Unwin, the publisher's son, recommended for acceptance on January 7, 1937 as well-written and amusing . This never happened, however, as the desire for more hobbit stories grew louder and louder among the publisher and readership, and Tolkien then set out to write a sequel - an undertaking that would eventually culminate in his work The Lord of the Rings . Roverandom fell into oblivion.
It was not until 1998, 25 years after the author's death and 73 years after the story was first told, that the work found in the estate was published together with the five drawings from Tolkien's hand. Both the manuscripts and the original versions of the images are now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford .
Features and sources
Like comparable stories from Tolkien from this time, Roverandom is still a very episodic narrative, which structurally breaks down into three roughly equal parts (on the earth, the moon and under water) and only through the figures of the magicians (Psammathos on the seashore, the man in the Moon and Artaxerxes in the realm of the mermaids) is held together.
Unusual with regard to Tolkien's later work are numerous elements that can be assigned to the classic fairy tale , such as rabbit-riding moon gnomes who bake pancakes from snowflakes, or elves who ride in mussel carriages drawn by fish. They show that Tolkien's decided antipathy towards belittling fairy stories was not as pronounced at this time as it would be a decade later in his lecture On Fairy-Stories . This impression is reinforced by expressions in children's language such as tummy (instead of stomach : stomach) or uncomfy (instead of uncomfortable : uncomfortable).
On the other hand, the vocabulary used also contains expressions such as paraphernalia (paraphernalia) or phosphorescent (phosphorescent), which are rarely found in children's literature and both from Tolkien's idea that children should not be saved from complicated adult expressions , as well as from his pure pleasure in the Witness language. This is also evident in the frequent use of onomatopoeia and alliteration as in yaps and yelps, and yammers and yowls, growling and grizzling, whickering and whining, snickering and snarling, mumping and moaning , homonyms such as Persia (Persia) and Pershore (city in England ) or impressive-sounding nonsense formations such as the psamathist Psamathos Psamathides (derived from the Greek psammos "sand"; meaning, for example, "sand expert Sandman, son of the Sandman").
In addition to such language games without external reference, there are also numerous examples that Tolkien incorporated current events into his history. In addition to the events on which the story itself is based, such as the loss of Michael's toy dog or the severe storm attributed to the implied waking up of the great sea serpent, Tolkien plays, for example, on an failed lunar eclipse (due to lack of clear visibility) or on a volcanic explosion reported by Santorini from the Mediterranean, without this being understandable for his sons at the time.
It is unmistakable that in Roverandom Tolkien also made use of mythological ideas (well known to him) or other literary texts. The Greek mythology , for example, with Proteus , Poseidon and Triton , the Roman with Neptune and the younger Edda with njörðr represented - as the reader learns all the unfortunate predecessor Artaxerxes in the post of resident Ocean magician. The episode with the big, white dragon, on the other hand, alludes to the legend of the magician Merlin and King Vortigern, in which a red and a white dragon (Celts and Saxons) vie for supremacy in Britain. The Norwegian legend Heimskringla of King Olfa Tryggvason and his loyal dog explains the existence of another dog named Rover on the sea floor. Tolkien also took the great Midgard serpent devouring its own tail from Norse mythology; however, it reflects an old mythological motif and can be found symbolically as ouroboros in many cultures. Interestingly, in Roverandom she is not only held responsible for storms, underwater quakes and hurricanes; According to history , the downfall of Atlantis can also be attributed to them; Tolkien must have dealt with the Atlantean myth very early on, which he was to "historicize" in a completely different way in his later mythology . The "old man from the sea", a figure from the Arabic poetry of Sindbad the Navigator, reveals more exotic influences .
Other literary sources that Tolkien processed are William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night 's Dream , which mentions a man in the moon as well as his dog, Lewis Carroll's Alice behind the mirrors or Gilbert and Sullivan's opera Trial by Jury .
Relationships with the mythical world of Middle-earth
Finally, Tolkien borrowed from his own mythology , which at that time was already in an advanced stage of development.
In his poem Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon , written in 1915, the idea that the man in the moon lived in a white tower can already be found; in the Book of Lost Stories ( Book of Lost Tales published) records, however, the visit of children dreaming moon garden is already mapped out. Most noticeable, however, are the references to Rover's journey with the whale Uin to the "great bay of the Elbenland behind the enchanted islands". The mountains located in the far west of the world in the story, with the Elven city located on a green hill, partially correspond to Tolkien's description of Valinor, the paradisiacal land of the godlike Valar from his "serious" mythology. Tolkien has woven the central motif of the enchanted islands, which are supposed to prevent ordinary mortals from seeing Valinor, into Roverandom ; as the reader can infer, the taboo on looking at Valinor applies even to toy dogs.
Conversely, Roverandom also had a direct influence on at least one of Tolkien's later works, namely the Hobbit, begun in 1927 . Because of the very timely writing, it is not surprising that some clear parallels can be found between the two works. For example, Tolkien used the same drawing both times for the moon spiders and the spiders of the Mirkwood, which appear in the Hobbit ; The depiction of the large, white dragon in Roverandom and the dragon Smaug on the Wilderland map in the Hobbit is identical and with little imagination, the figure of the magician Gandalf can be seen in the three wizards in Roverandom (Artaxerxes, Psammathos and the man in the moon) divine from the hobbit . While it was still new in Roverandom that the content of Tolkien's serious mythology found its way into one of his children's stories, the connection between the two levels in the Hobbit already seems much more natural.
In addition to its importance as an imaginative children's book and as a stimulating reading for adults due to its numerous linguistic finesse and allusions, Roverandom is particularly relevant in the context of Tolkien's work because it reflects the author's enthusiasm for his seemingly trivial stories, which first (in the Hobbit) hesitantly and then increasingly determined to combine his stories with a huge mythological background taken from his long-developed world of legends. It was this connection of the low and the high level, first hinted at in Roverandom , that ultimately led to the success of the century in his main work The Lord of the Rings .
literature
- JRR Tolkien: Roverandom. Harper-Collins, London 1998, ISBN 0-261-10353-9 . (original English version)
- JRR Tolkien: Roverandom. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-608-93454-5 . (German translation)
In addition to the story itself, both editions contain an introductory commentary by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond on the genesis of the book and the illustrations it contains.
Audio book
- JRR Tolkien: Roverandom. DHV Der HörVerlag , Munich 2003, ISBN 3-89940-098-4 . (3 audio CDs. Read by Ulrich Noethen in German.)
Individual evidence
- ^ Roverandom, (pp. 11-16)