‘Come, you’re the boy for me,
And though you ought to be in bed
I’ll take you home to tea.
Jump on my back, and hold on tight!’
And off they went flop flap,
And William had a feast that night,
And sat on the Bumpus’ lap.
There was buttered toast, and pikelets too,
And jam and cream and cake;
And the Bumpus made some scrumptious Gloo,
And showed him how to bake —
To bake the beautiful Bumpus-bread,
And bannocks light and brown;
And then he tucked him up in a bed
Of feathers and thistle-down.
‘Bill Winkle, where have you been?’ they said.
‘I have been to a Bumpus-tea,
And I feel so fat, for I have fed
On Bumpus-bread,’ said he.
The People all knocked at the Bumpus’ door:
‘A beautiful Bumpus-cake
O bake for us, please!’ they all now roar,
‘O bake, O bake, O bake!’
Policeman Pott came puffing fast,
And made them form a queue,
And old Mrs. Thomas was late and last,
And her bonnet was all askew.
‘Go home! go home!’ the Bumpus said.
‘Too many there are of you!
Only on Thursdays I bake my bread,
And only for one or two.
Go home! go home, for goodness sake!
I did not expect a call.
I have no pikelets, toast or cake,
For William has eaten all.
Old Mrs. Thomas and Mr. Pott
I wish no more to see.
Good bye! Don’t argue, it’s much too hot —
Bill Winkle’s the boy for me!’
Now William Winkle, he grew so fat
A-eating of Bumpus-bread,
His weskit bust, and never a hat
Would sit upon his head.
But Every Thursday he went to Tea
And sat on the kitchen mat;
And smaller the Bumpus seemed to be,
As he grew fat and fat.
And Bill a Baker great became:
From Bimble Bay to Bong,
From sea to sea there went the fame
Of his bread both short and long.
But it war’nt so good as Bumpus-bread;
No jam was like the Gloo
That Every Thursday the Bumpus spread,
And William used to chew!
The third version, a typescript entitled William and the Bumpus, includes a few more lines concerning the Bumpus teaching William the baker’s art, and in other respects begins to approach the poem of 1962 – here, for instance, the Bumpus complains that his ‘cooking [is] good enough’, though many further additions and changes were yet to be made.
The Bumpus is an outlandish creature. It has a tail long enough to ‘thump’, flat, flapping feet, and a lap in which William can sit. The words of the poem leave its form unclear; in the first manuscript, however, Tolkien drew a sketch of the Bumpus as a plump, smiling, lizard-like figure with an apron around its waist. Neither we nor Christopher Tolkien can say if Bumpus had any special significance to the author of the poem, except as the name of a well-known London bookseller of the day. In the transition to Perry-the-Winkle, the Bumpus became ‘the lonely troll’, but the place-name ‘Bumpus Head’ remained in The Dragon’s Visit.
An investigation of the name Winkle, an existing surname, could exhaust many pages; but the most promising connection, suggested by the title of the revised poem, seems to be with the shortened form of periwinkle, in the sense of an edible mollusc rather than of the trailing plant Vinca. Brolly in the third stanza of The Bumpus is slang for ‘umbrella’. Bong in the final stanza appears to have no more meaning than as a convenient, Edward Learian rhyme for ‘long’.
A pikelet is a small round teacake, and a bannock a round, flat loaf. We find no source for cramsome, and must suppose that it is a Tolkien coinage after the verb cram ‘overfeed, stuff, fill to satiety’ (Oxford English Dictionary) or the noun meaning ‘a dough or paste used in fattening poultry’ or more generally for any food used to fatten animals. In Perry-the-Winkle ‘cramsome’ replaced ‘Bumpus-’ as in ‘Bumpus-bread’, ‘Bumpus-cake’, while ‘a Bumpus-tea’ became ‘a fulsome tea’. The ingredients of the Bumpus’ or Troll’s prized baked goods, let alone of the ‘scrumptious Gloo’, unfortunately remain a mystery.
Moke, by which some People journey to the old Troll’s home in Perry-the-Winkle, is a dialect word for ‘donkey’. Weskit is a variation on waistcoat (American vest).
In the editorial fiction of the Bombadil preface, Tolkien says that Perry-the-Winkle (‘No. 8’) is marked in the Red Book ‘SG [Sam Gamgee], and the ascription may be accepted’. A typescript of the poem preserved in the Bodleian Library (MS Tolkien 19, f. 51) contains the heading ‘a children’s song in the Shire (attributed to Master Samwise)’. The main points of transition from The Bumpus to Perry-the-Winkle, besides the change to the kind of creature the ‘Winkle’ meets, involved placing the events of the poem firmly in Hobbit country rather than the region of Bimble Bay. Thus Tolkien included, as alterations to the earlier text or in added lines or stanzas, references to the Shire; to Delving, or Michel Delving, the chief township of the Shire, with its Lockholes or jail; to Bree, the settlement of Hobbits and Men east of the Shire; and to Weathertop, a hill north-east of Bree. Faraway, as in ‘hills of Faraway’, appears as a place-name nowhere else in the Middle-earth corpus; in Perry-the-Winkle the name replaces and achieves the same rhyme as ‘Bimble Bay’ in The Bumpus.
THE MEWLIPS
The precursor to The Mewlips was published in the Oxford Magazine for 18 February 1937, as Knocking at the Door: Lines Induced by Sensations When Waiting for an Answer at the Door of an Exalted Academic Person:
The places where the Mewlips dwell
Are dark as deepest ink,
And slow and softly rings the bell,
As in the bog you sink.
You sink into the bog, who dare
To knock upon their door,
While fireworks flicker in the air
And shine upon the shore.
The sparks hiss on the floors of sand
All wet with weeping fountains,
Where grey the glooming gargoyles stand
Beneath the Morlock Mountains.
Over the Morlock Mountains, a long and weary way,
Down in mouldy valleys where trees are wet and grey,
By the dark pools’ borders without wind or tide,
Moonless and sunless, there the Mewlips hide.
The caverns where the Mewlips sit
Are cool as cellars old
With single sickly candle lit;
And wet the walls of gold.
Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go splashing with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.
They peep out slyly through a crack
All cased like armadilloes,
And your bones they gather in a sack
Beneath the weeping willows.
Beyond the Morlock Mountains, a long and lonely road,
Through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Toad,
And through the wood of hanging trees and the gallows-weed,
You go to find the Mewlips — and the Mewlips feed.
Tolkien seems to have written Knocking at the Door in 1927, and revised it for publication ten years later. It appeared in the Oxford Magazine under a pseudonym, ‘Oxymore’, as in oxymoron, a joining of contradictory ideas. Its subtitle did not appear in the initial manuscript, only in an early, heavily emended typescript (both kindly supplied to us by Christopher Tolkien), and there read ‘Lines Induced by Sensations on Waiting for an Answer at the Door of a Reverend and Academic Person’. At some point, Tolkien struck thi
s through, then restored it, as if he could not decide if the poem was to be seen (if its subtitle were taken at face value) as a satire on university life.
In the typescript, among many revisions, the reading ‘Morlock mountains’ (sic) superseded ‘Mingol mountains’, where Mingol may have had no meaning other than as a name to alliterate with ‘mountains’. Later, Morlock became (the probably meaningless) Merlock, perhaps because the former is a name associated with The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895). The curiously incongruous reading ‘cased like armadilloes’, referring to the small mammal known for its bony armour plates, was also a change made in the typescript.
In a letter of 13 February 1963 to a Miss Allen, who had asked questions about The Mewlips, Tolkien explained (or perhaps invented at that moment) that Mewlips were merely legend to Hobbits, nor would Hobbit minds dwell only on comforts – implying, it seems, that from time to time they would turn to the macabre, to the likes of ‘grinning gargoyles’ (grotesque figures) and ‘noisome waters’ (with an offensive smell), in the way that fairy-stories by the Grimms or Andrew Lang, unexpurgated, can be (or are thought by some to be) the stuff of nightmares. Tolkien does not explain the name Mewlips, nor can the landmarks mentioned in the 1962 poem – the Merlock Mountains, the marsh of Tode (‘Toad’ in 1937) – be located reliably in Middle-earth. ‘Spider-shadows’ recalls the forest of Mirkwood in The Hobbit, or the darkness surrounding Ungoliant in ‘The Silmarillion’, and a stand of ‘drooping willows’ beside a ‘rotting river-strand’ might be found in the Old Forest in The Lord of the Rings; but such a connection should not be forced. The Mewlips in fact is the only poem in the Bombadil volume not mentioned by Tolkien in the preface, by number or allusion, not even among the ‘marginalia’ which include those works ‘often unintelligible even when legible’. It was one of the last of the poems Tolkien drew from his papers, and one which he felt would need ‘thorough re-handling’ for the collection (letter to Rayner Unwin, 5 February 1962, A&U archive).
Gorcrow (gore + crow) is a name for the carrion-crow. We cannot find gallows-weed in any dictionary, but it may be that Tolkien meant it as a variation on gallow-grass, or hemp (used to make ropes for hanging by a gallows).
OLIPHAUNT
Oliphaunt was first published in Book IV, Chapter 3 of The Lord of the Rings (The Two Towers, 1954), where it is recited by Sam Gamgee. ‘That’s a rhyme we have in the Shire,’ he explains. ‘Nonsense maybe, and maybe not. But we have our tales too, and news out of the South, you know.’ When Sam finally sees an ‘oliphaunt’ (elephant) in the flesh – the Mûmak of Harad, in Book IV, Chapter 4 – he finds it a far greater beast than the one in his poem: ‘a grey-clad moving hill’, the like of which ‘does not walk now in Middle-earth’, a mammoth or mastodon in all but name. The ‘facts’ Sam presents in his verse are found also in medieval bestiaries: the elephant’s enormous size (like a mountain), the snake-like appearance of its trunk, its ivory tusks, its longevity, its capacity to smash and squash.
Alongside and informing the bestiaries was a much earlier text known as Physiologus (‘Naturalist’). This lent its name, at least, as the ‘source’ of two poems that Tolkien published in the Stapeldon Magazine for June 1927, with the shared title ‘Adventures in Unnatural History and Medieval Metres, Being the Freaks of Fisiologus’: Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt, and Fastitocalon (see further below). (Two more ‘bestiary’ poems by Tolkien, like Iumbo and Fastitocalon written probably in the 1920s, remain unpublished: Reginhardus, the Fox and Monoceros, the Unicorn.) Iumbo, reprinted here, is divided in the bestiary manner, with the natural history of a creature (natura) followed by a Christian moral or spiritual meaning (significacio), but it departs almost at once from the medieval tradition into a modern world of flannel (cloth), rubber hoses, and vacuum cleaners.
Natura iumbonis.
The Indic oliphaunt’s a burly lump,
A moving mountain, a majestic mammal
(But those that fancy that he wears a hump
Confuse him incorrectly with the camel).
His pendulous ears they flap about like flannel;
He trails a supple elongated nose
That twixt his tusks of pearly-white enamel
Performs the functions of a rubber hose
Or vacuum cleaner as his needs impose,
Or on occasion serves in trumpet’s stead,
Whose fearful fanfares utterly surpass
In mighty music from his monstrous head
The hollow boom of bells or bands of brass.
Nor do these creatures quarrel (as alas!
Do neighbours musical in Western lands);
In congregations do they tramp the grass,
And munch the juicy shoots in friendly bands,
Till not a leaf unmasticated stands.
This social soul one unconvivial flaw
Has nonetheless: he’s poor in repartee,
His jests are heavy, for Mohammed’s law
He loves, and though he has the thirst of three,
His vast interior he fills with tea.
Not thus do water-drinkers vice escape,
And weighty authors state that privily
He takes a drug, more deadly than the grape,
Compared with which cocaine’s a harmless jape.
The dark mandragora’s unwholesome root
He chews with relish secret and unholy,
Despising other pharmaceutic loot
(As terebinth, athansie, or moly).
Those diabolic juices coursing slowly
Do fill his sluggish veins with sudden madness,
Changing his grave and simple nature wholly
To a lamb titanic capering in gladness,
A brobdingnagian basilisk in badness.
The vacuous spaces of his empty head
Are filled with fires of fell intoxication;
His legs endure no longer to be led,
But wander free in strange emancipation.
Then frightful fear amid his exaltation
Awakes within him lest he tumble flat,
For apparatus none for levitation
Has he, who falling down must feebly bat
The air with legs inadequate and fat.
Then does he haste, if he can coax his limbs,
To some deep silent water or dark pool
(Where no reptilian mugger lurks or swims)
And there he stands — no! not his brow to cool,
But thinking that he cannot fall, the fool,
Buoyed by his belly adipose and round.
Yet if he find no water, as a rule,
He blindly blunders thumping o’er the ground,
And villages invades with thunderous sound.
If any house oppose his brutish bump,
Then woe betide — it crumples in a heap,
Its inmates jumbled in a jellied lump
Pulped unexpecting in imprudent sleep.
When tired at last, as tame as any sheep
Or jaded nag, he longs for sweet repose,
In Ind a tree, whose roots like serpents creep,
Of girth gigantic opportunely grows,
Whereon to lean his weary bulk and doze.
Thus will his dreams not end in sudden jerk,
He thinks. What hopes! For hunters all too well
Acquainted with his little habits lurk
Beneath the Upus’ shade; a nasty sell
For Oliphas they plan, his funeral knell.
With saws they wellnigh sever all the bole,
Then cunning prop it, that he may not tell,
Until thereto he trusts his weight, poor soul —
It all gives way and lands him in a hole.
Significacio.
The doctrine that these mournful facts propound
Needs scarcely pointing, yet we cannot blink
The fact that some still follow base Mahound,
Though Christian people universally think
That water neat is hardly fit to d
rink.
Not music nor fat feeding make a feast
But wine, and plenty of it. Good men wink
At fun and frolic (though too well policed)
When mildly canned or innocently greased;
But those whose frenzy’s root is drugs not drink
Should promptly be suppressed and popped in clink.
The word oliphaunt is merely an archaic or ‘rustic’ form of elephant, and a common medieval spelling. The name Iumbo is ‘Jumbo’ in the classical Latin alphabet, which did not have the letter J, and a nod to the famed zoo and circus elephant Jumbo of the later nineteenth century. That Jumbo, however, was an African elephant, rather than the Indic (‘Indian’) variety featured in the poem.
There appears to be no description in medieval literature of the elephant abstaining from alcohol (‘Mohammed’s law’, a prohibition in Islam) or drinking tea. But the elephant is said by the bestiary authors to be so inherently chaste that when it wants to conceive, it must eat mandragora, or mandrake, a reputed fertility drug and aphrodisiac, compared by Tolkien to cocaine (in degree ‘a harmless jape’ or joke) and to three more benign items from the medieval pharmacopeia: terebinth, a tree which yields turpentine; athanasie, or tansy; and moly or ‘sorcerer’s garlic’, the herb given by Hermes to Odysseus as a charm against Circe. Under the ‘diabolic’ influence of mandrake, taken privily (privately) and ‘more dangerous than the grape’ (wine), the elephant’s ‘grave and simple nature’ becomes that of the basilisk, the most terrible of all bestiary creatures, with a lethal gaze or breath. Moreover, the elephant’s ‘badness’ is then brobdingnagian in degree (after Brobdingnag, a land in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) where everything is enormous relative to Gulliver).
According to the bestiaries, the elephant lives in fear of falling down – its legs were thought to have no joints – and to prevent this, he often stands in water, where he is ‘buoyed by his belly adipose [fat] and round’. ‘Where no reptilian mugger lurks or swims’ presumably refers to the mugger or broad-nosed crocodile of India. In the bestiaries, a traditional enemy of the elephant is said to be the dragon, but (it seems relevant to note) in ‘The Elephant’s Child’, one of the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1902), the elephant gains its long nose through an encounter with a crocodile.
The bestiaries note as well that because the elephant (they say) has a habit of sleeping while leaning against a tree, hunters would set a trap by cutting a favoured tree in half, so that it would collapse under the elephant’s weight and leave the creature defenceless, unable to rise. The ‘tree, whose roots like serpents creep’ is the Upas, which appears in travellers’ tales, and most notably in Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789–91):
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Page 11