Both poem and picture in turn are related to the appearance of the moon in the early ‘Silmarillion’ text The Book of Lost Tales (c. 1916–20): an island of glass, crystal, or silver, with a white turret from which an aged Elf, a stowaway on ‘the Ship of the Moon’, ‘watches the heavens, or the world beneath, and that is Uolë Kúvion who sleepeth never. Some indeed have named him the Man in the Moon …’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 193). Christopher Tolkien has commented that Uolë Kúvion ‘seems almost to have strayed in from another conception’, and that he was earlier called Uolë Mikúmi ‘King of the Moon’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 202). A ‘pallid minaret / Dizzy and white at its lunar height’ also appears, with yet another version of the Man in the Moon, in Tolkien’s children’s story Roverandom (conceived as an oral tale in 1925): ‘It was white with pink and pale green lines in it, shimmering as if the tower were built of millions of seashells still wet with foam and gleaming; and the tower stood on the edge of a white precipice, white as a cliff of chalk, but shining with moonlight more brightly than a pane of glass far away on a cloudless night’ (Roverandom (1998), p. 22).
Thomas Honegger has noted parallels between The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon and a much longer poem published in 1839–40, The Man in the Moon, by an unnamed undergraduate at Worcester College, Oxford. In this, the Man having become bored ‘Of living so long in the land of dreams; / ’Twas a beautiful sphere, but nevertheless, / Its lunar life was passionless’, he descends to earth like a falling star and seeks the ‘woes / And joys of human life’. But the earlier poet quickly departs from the Man in the Moon of nursery tradition, transforming the character into a winged angel or sprite; and despite his shared Oxford connection, there is no evidence that Tolkien knew of the earlier work, nor any reason why he should have drawn upon it for his own. It does seem likely, though, that Tolkien knew At the Back of the North Wind (1870) by George MacDonald, in which the nursery rhyme ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ is combined with the traditional ‘Man in the Moon’ verse quoted above (see also our notes for The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late):
But the man in the moon,
Coming back too soon
From the famous town of Norwich,
Caught up the dish,
Said, ‘It’s just what I wish
To hold my cold plum-porridge!’
Gave the cow a rat-tat,
Flung water on the cat,
And sent him away like a rocket.
Said, ‘O Moon there you are!’
Got into her car,
And went off with the spoon in his pocket.
Hey ho! diddle, diddle!
The wet cat and wet fiddle,
They made such a caterwauling,
That the cow in a fright
Stood bolt upright
Bellowing now, and bawling;
And the dog on his tail,
Stretched his neck with a wail.
But ‘Ho! ho!’ said the man in the moon —
‘No more in the South
Shall I burn my mouth,
For I’ve found a dish and a spoon.’
In revising and enlarging Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon for the Bombadil collection, Tolkien introduced references to Middle-earth geography while eliminating those to Norwich and England. The 1962 version is said in the Bombadil preface to be one of two poems (with The Last Ship) ‘derived ultimately from Gondor. [These] are evidently based on the traditions of Men, living in shorelands and familiar with rivers running into the Sea. No. 6 [the present poem] actually mentions Belfalas (the windy bay of Bel [the Bay of Belfalas, south of the kingdom of Gondor]) and the Sea-ward Tower, Tirith Aear, of Dol Amroth [the chief city and port of Belfalas]. …’ Among other differences, the Man is crowned with opals rather than gold, and pearls adorn his girdlestead (waist). Instead of a ‘silken robe’, he wears a ‘mantle grey’ (a grey cloak, but no longer a ‘faerie cloak’). His tower is made of moonstone (the literal meaning of selenite), and he is taken to land by ‘a fisherman’s boat’ (no longer a ‘Yarmouth boat’), now against his wish rather than because of it. Only a single tower, not fifty, tells the news of his ‘moonsick cruise’: here Tolkien chose an old word with the same meaning as the one he used in the earlier poem, lunatic, and moved the latter to the end of the revised poem, where the Man’s quest is ‘lunatic’ rather than ‘adventurous’. Lunatic is highly appropriate to the context of the poem, with its element luna- (Latin ‘moon’), reflecting a belief that changes of the moon cause insanity.
In the revision, despite ‘hunger or drouth’ (drought, or rather, thirst) the Man receives no refreshment, indeed less than before, until he pays an even higher price than in the earlier poem. The punch and the ‘peppery stew’ he desires in the 1923 version became in 1962 ‘pepper [for meat], and punch galore’, with punch and ‘peppery brew’ in the intervening text (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 205). The time of the Man’s visit to earth also changed, becoming ‘ere Yule’: in the context of Middle-earth, this is a period of winter holidays, but the reader is meant to think of Christmas, when ‘puddings of Yule with plums’ are traditionally served. The Man in the Moon has arrived ‘so much too soon’ for this dish, the ‘plum-porridge’ of the earlier version, that is, much too early in the year. Plum in ‘plum-porridge’ (or ‘plum pudding’) tends to refer to prunes, i.e. dried plums, or to any kind of dried fruit, such as currants, raisins, or sultanas. The plum-porridge (or plum-pottage) of old was very different from today’s plum pudding, more liquid than firm, and savoury (with meat) rather than sweet.
In December 1927, Tolkien wrote a letter to his children in the guise of ‘Father Christmas’ (one of many such letters written between 1920 and 1943), in which the Man in the Moon visits the North Pole. ‘The Man in the Moon paid me a visit the other day’, Father Christmas relates; ‘he often does about this time, as he gets lonely in the Moon, and we make him a nice little Plum Pudding (he is so fond of things with plums in!)’ (Letters from Father Christmas (1999 edn.), p. 33). Given brandy by the North Polar Bear, the man falls fast asleep; and in his absence from the moon, dragons came out and obscure its light (evidently a reference to the lunar eclipse of 8 December that year). The Man awakes to set things right only just in time.
Although Tolkien judged Pauline Baynes’s large illustration for The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon relatively in keeping with the ‘world’ of the Bombadil poems, he felt that it was ‘defective as an illustration in making the Man’s garment too like a nightgown and omitting crown, belt, and cloak’ (letter to Rayner Unwin, 29 August 1962, A&U archive).
THE STONE TROLL
The earliest version of The Stone Troll was called Pēro & Pōdex (Latin ‘Boot and Bottom’). Revised as The Root of the Boot, it was included with other poems by Tolkien and by a colleague at the University of Leeds, E.V. Gordon, together with selections from Icelandic student songbooks, assembled by Gordon in the first half of the 1920s to amuse and encourage students in the Leeds English school. In 1935 or 1936, A.H. Smith, formerly a student at Leeds, gave a copy of the ‘Leeds Songs’ to a group of students at University College, London to print on an historic press; and in this way, The Root of the Boot was published (with twelve other poems by Tolkien) in the booklet Songs for the Philologists (1936):
A troll sat alone on his seat of stone,
And munched and mumbled a bare old bone;
And long and long he had sat there lone
And seen no man nor mortal —
Ortal! Portal!
And long and long he had sat there lone
And seen no man nor mortal.
Up came Tom with his big boots on;
‘Hallo!’ says he, ‘pray what is yon?
It looks like the leg o’ me nuncle John
As should be a-lyin’ in churchyard.
Searchyard, Birchyard!’ etc.
‘Young man’, says the troll, ‘that bone I stole;
But what be bones, when mayhap the soul
In heaven on high hath an aureole
As big and as bright as a bonfire?
On fire, yon fire.’
Says Tom: ‘Oddsteeth! ’tis my belief,
If bonfire there be, ’tis underneath;
For old man John was as proper a thief
As ever wore black on a Sunday —
Grundy, Monday!
But still I doan’t see what is that to thee,
Wi’ me kith and me kin a-makin’ free:
So get to hell and ax leave o’ he,
Afore thou gnaws me nuncle!
Uncle, Buncle!’
In the proper place upon the base
Tom boots him right — but, alas! that race
Hath a stonier seat than its stony face;
So he rued that root on the rumpo,
Lumpo, Bumpo!
Now Tom goes lame since home he came,
And his bootless foot is grievous game;
But troll’s old seat is much the same,
And the bone he boned from its owner!
Donor, Boner!
As a point of comparison with The Root of the Boot, the sixth stanza in Pēro & P?dex reads (The Return of the Shadow, p. 144):
In the proper place upon the base
Tom boots him right — but, alas! that race
Hath as stony a seat as it is in face,
And Pero was punished by Podex.
Odex! Codex!
The complete manuscript of Pēro & P?dex is transcribed in The History of The Hobbit, Part One: Mr. Baggins by John D. Rateliff (2007), pp. 101–2.
Tolkien made several corrections to The Root of the Boot in a personal copy of Songs for the Philologists, reflected in the text printed above (and see The Return of the Shadow, pp. 142–3). He also changed the third line of the third stanza from ‘In heaven on high hath an aureole’ (halo, celestial crown) to ‘Hath a halo in heaven upon its poll’ (the human head), and suggested that ‘proper’ in the penultimate verse might be ‘prapper’, a pronunciation more in keeping with Tom’s dialectal English. In the second stanza, ‘me nuncle’ is Tom’s version of ‘my nuncle’, that is, ‘mine uncle’, mine once having been used as a possessive pronoun, instead of my, when the following word (like uncle) began with a vowel. In the fifth stanza, ‘ax leave’ is a version of ‘ask leave’ (compare ‘axin’ leave’ for ‘asking leave’ in The Stone Troll). Tom’s speech is characterized by clipped speech (a-lyin’, a-makin’) and broad vowels (doan’t for ‘don’t’).
Here Mumbled means ‘bite or chew with the gums, or without much use of teeth, or to fondle with the lips’. Oddsteeth is an abbreviation of the Elizabethan oath ‘God’s teeth’. John is not in heaven, Tom says, but ‘underneath’, in hell, for he was a thief, albeit one who piously wore black on Sunday; in any event, John is Tom’s relation (‘kith and kin’). In the final stanza, boned is a verb meaning ‘stole’, playing on bone as a noun (compare, in the third verse, ‘that bone I stole’). The two words at the end of each stanza which rhyme with the final word of each fourth line – such as ortal and portal, as rhymes for mortal – generally have no meaning of note, except for ‘Grundy, Monday’ at the end of the fourth stanza, which refers to the nursery rhyme which begins ‘Solomon Grundy, / born on a Monday’.
Tolkien noted in his copy of Songs for the Philologists that The Root of the Boot was to be sung to the tune of ‘The Fox Went Out’. This English folk song begins:
The Fox went out on a chilly night
He prayed for the moon to give him light
For he had many a mile to go that night
Before he reached the town-o, town-o, town-o
He had many a mile to go that night
Before he reached the town-o
Christopher Tolkien has said that his father ‘was extremely fond of this song, which went to the tune of The fox went out on a winter’s night [the lyrics vary], and my delight in the line If bonfire there be, ’tis underneath is among my very early recollections’ (The Return of the Shadow, p. 142).
When Tolkien needed a song for Bingo (later Frodo) to sing at the inn at Bree in Book I, Chapter 9 of The Lord of the Rings, his first choice was The Root of the Boot, but almost immediately he substituted The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late. Eventually he used the ‘troll song’ for a comic turn by Sam Gamgee in Book I, Chapter 12, and that only after deciding that it should not be sung later in the story, in the house of Elrond (where, instead, Bilbo chants Eärendil Was a Mariner; see our notes for Errantry). The final version of Sam’s song, as published in The Lord of the Rings, was reprinted in the Bombadil collection, with only one small change in punctuation, as The Stone Troll.
That text was reached, however, only after several revisions, one of which was printed and discussed by Christopher Tolkien in The Treason of Isengard, pp. 59–61. This draft version is notable for many alterations, especially the substitution of ‘John’ for ‘Tom’ and ‘Jim’ for ‘Tim’, the omission of references to Christian practice such as ‘churchyard’ and ‘wore black on a Sunday’, and a different outcome for the troll. Here, John having delivered his kick (breaking both boot and toe, but not the ‘stony seat’), the troll ‘tumbled down, and he cracked his crown’, and
There the troll lies, no more to rise,
With his nose to earth and his seat to the skies;
But under the stone is a bare old bone
That was stole by a troll from its owner.
Donor! Boner!
Under the stone lies a broken bone
That was stole by a troll from its owner.
Tolkien had a later draft of the poem in hand when he tape-recorded it in 1952 (see our introduction), and sang it to a tune different from the one commonly found in recordings of ‘The Fox Went Out’.
In the final poem, the troll has ‘gnawed [the bone] near’ (closely and thoroughly). In the fourth stanza, one of the rhyming words, trover, is apt under the circumstances (Tom demanding that his uncle’s shinbone be handed over), as this is a legal term which means ‘compel the payment of damages by someone who has made improper use of one’s property’. The troll’s reply, that ‘for a couple o’ pins’ he would eat Tom too, refers to pin as something of little or no value, as in the saying ‘not worth a pin’. At this, Tom kicks the troll ‘to larn him’, that is, to ‘learn him’, in the ancient sense of ‘teach’ (now archaic or slang); and as a result, his leg is game (lame).
Artist Pauline Baynes interpreted the name ‘Tom’ – associated, maybe, with the character’s ‘big boots’ – to refer to Tom Bombadil, and drew him accordingly in one of her illustrations for The Stone Troll. The history of the work makes it clear, however, that Tolkien did not intend ‘Tom’ (or ‘John’) to be any character in particular, and in the context of The Lord of the Rings, as Sam says (bk. I, ch. 12), the poem is ‘just a bit of nonsense’.
PERRY-THE-WINKLE
Perry-the-Winkle is a revision of a poem originally entitled The Bumpus, one of a series of works Tolkien wrote c. 1928, the ‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’, centred on an imaginary English coastal town and harbour. Six poems in this series are known, and of these, three so far have been published: The Dragon’s Visit, Glip, and Progress in Bimble Town (all are most conveniently found in the second edition (2002) of The Annotated Hobbit, edited by Douglas A. Anderson). Christopher Tolkien kindly sent us three versions of The Bumpus for comparison with Perry-the-Winkle, which has no earlier published text. Following is the second (manuscript) version, which closely follows the first but includes several new features, notably mentions of Bimble Bay (revised from ‘the beautiful land of Bong’) and of ‘Mountains Blue’, the Blue Mountains mentioned also in The Dragon’s Visit, ‘where dragons live’ (not to be confused with the Ered Luin of Middle-earth):
The Bumpus sat on an old grey stone
And sang his lonely lay:
‘O why, O why should I live all alone
In the hills of Bimble Bay?
The grass is green,
the sky is blue,
The sun shines on the sea,
But the Dragons have crossed the Mountains Blue
And come no more to me.
No Trolls or Ogres are left at all,
But People slam the door
Whenever they hear my flat feet fall
Or my tail along the floor.’
He stroked his tail and looked at his feet,
And he said: ‘They may be long,
But my heart is kind, and my smile is sweet,
And sweet and soft my song.’
The Bumpus went out, and who did he meet
But old Mrs. Thomas and all
With umbrella and basket walking the street;
And softly he did call:
‘Dear Mrs. Thomas, good day to you?
I hope you are quite well?’
But she dropped her brolly and basket too
And yelled a frightful yell.
Policeman Pott was a-standing near;
When he heard that awful cry,
He turned all purple and pink with fear,
And swiftly turned to fly.
The Bumpus followed surprised and sad:
‘Don’t go!’ he gently said;
But old Mrs. Thomas ran home like mad,
And hid beneath her bed.
The Bumpus then came to the market-place
And looked up over the walls.
The sheep went wild when they saw his face;
The cows jumped out of their stalls.
Old Farmer Hogg he spilled his beer;
And the butcher threw his knives;
And Harry and his father howled with fear
And ran to save their lives.
The Bumpus sadly sat and wept
Outside the cottage door;
And William Winkle out he crept,
And sat down on the floor:
‘Why do you weep, you great big lump,
And wash the step like rain?’
The Bumpus gave his tail a thump,
And smiled a smile again.
‘O William Winkle, my lad,’ he said,
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Page 10