stooping over a lily-pool
and twiddling the water green and cool
to see it sparkle round her hand:
once upon a time in elvish land.
Once upon a night in the cockshut light
the grass was grey but the dew was white;
shadows were dark, and the Sun was gone,
the earth-stars shut, but the high stars shone,
one to another winking their eyes
as they waited for the Moon to rise.
Up he came, and on leaf and grass
his white beams turned to twinkling glass,
and silver dripped from stem and stalk
down to where the lintips walk
through the grass-forests gathering dew.
Tom was there without boot or shoe,
with moonshine wetting his big brown toes:
once upon a time, the story goes.
Once upon a moon on the brink of June
a-dewing the lintips went too soon.
Tom stopped and listened, and down he knelt:
‘Ha! little lads! So it was you I smelt?
What a mousy smell! Well, the dew is sweet,
So drink it up, but mind my feet!’
The lintips laughed and stole away,
but old Tom said: ‘I wish they’d stay!
The only things that won’t talk to me,
say what they do or what they be.
I wonder what they have got to hide?
Down from the Moon maybe they slide,
or come in star-winks, I don’t know’:
Once upon a time and long ago.
Invited in 1964 to contribute to the first of a series of anthologies for children, Tolkien submitted three poems, of which two were published: Once upon a Time, and a revised version of The Dragon’s Visit (see our introduction). He may have composed Once upon a Time for this purpose, or not long before; at least, the poem seems to have been written after 1962, since there is no mention in correspondence of Tolkien considering it for the Bombadil collection.
Once upon a Time stands apart from the other two ‘Tom Bombadil’ poems also for other reasons. In those works (and in The Lord of the Rings), Tom is able to communicate with all living creatures, but here the lintips are ‘the only things that won’t talk to me’. Here too, unlike the other poems to feature them, Once upon a Time is concerned less with the adventures of Tom and Goldberry than with the natural world, as a riot of flowers by day gives way to the silent, night-time beauty of dew upon leaf and grass. Finally, Tom is named only as ‘Tom’, left to be identified by the reader with Tom Bombadil from Tolkien’s other writings, in particular because Goldberry is named in the same work.
Although ‘snow in summer’ in the first stanza could refer to the wildflower Summer snowflake, it seems more likely that the ‘snow’ is made of the fallen white blossoms of the Hawthorn, also known as May or Mayblossom (‘the fields of May’), from the typical month of its flowering. The ‘buttercups tall’ with a ‘steam of gold’ are presumably a variety of Ranunculus. The ‘earth-stars’ ‘opened in the green grass-skies’ – that is, in a green landscape echoing the heavens – may be one of the common fungi of the family geastraceae, commonly called ‘earth-stars’ for their star-like form when opened; Kris Swank in Tolkien Studies (2013), however, wonders if Tolkien meant the common daisy, which opens in the sun (the ‘day’s eye’) and closes at night, a ‘star of earth’ as the Sun is a star of the sky. Goldberry’s ‘lady-smock’ may be a protective overgarment – Tolkien uses smock in this sense elsewhere in his poems – but lady-smock is also a kind of wildflower. Finally, dandelion clock refers to the children’s game of blowing away dandelion seeds and counting the number of puffs, which is supposed to tell the time.
In the second stanza, Tolkien follows a folk-belief that dew is formed by the moon, its light ‘turned to twinkling glass, / and silver’. Here he also introduces the ‘lintips’, which despite much effort by scholars remain a mystery. They are small enough to ‘walk / through the grass-forests’, so perhaps (as Douglas A. Anderson, Kris Swank, and others have suggested) a kind of mouse or vole, or even an insect; and they are nocturnal, coming out in ‘the cockshut light’ (at twilight). A stronger possibility, as it seems to us, proposed in an unpublished paper by Rhona Beare, is that the lintips are the same tiny spirits of which Tolkien wrote in An Evening in Tavrobel, a poem of 1924 (published in Leeds University Verse 1914–24) which includes so many similarities with Once upon a Time that the latter poem could be seen as a development of the former:
’Tis the time when May first looks toward June,
With almond-scented hawthorn strewn.
The tremulous day at last has run
Down the gold stairways of the Sun,
Who brimmed the buttercups with light
Like a clear wine she spillèd bright;
And gleaming spirits there did dance
And sip those goblets’ radiance.
Now wane they all; now comes the moon;
Like crystal are the dewdrops strewn
Beneath the eve, and twinkling gems
Are hung on the leaves and slender stems.
Now in the grass lies many a pool,
Infinitesimal and cool,
Where tiny faces peer and laugh
At glassy fragments of the stars
About them mirrored, or from jars
Of unimagined frailty quaff
This essence of the plenilune,
Thirsty, perchance, from dancing all the noon.
Tavrobel figures in the early conception of Tolkien’s mythology, as the home of fairies, or elves; but this connection of the poem to ‘The Silmarillion’ does not appear to extend beyond its title.
In the end, like the creatures in The Mewlips, the lintips cannot be defined or, beyond a point, described, and absent any further explanation by Tolkien, no one can say ‘what they do or what they be’. Nor has a satisfactory source been agreed for the name lintips, in English or in one of Tolkien’s invented languages (a search inspired by the words ‘elvish land’ at the end of the first stanza). It may be that he adopted lintips for no more reason than it gave him pleasure, just as he once was pleased (as he wrote in his essay A Secret Vice, on the invention of private languages) to combine the sound of lint with the meaning ‘quick, clever, nimble’ (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 205).
Footnotes
Preface
1 Lefnui, Morthond-Kiril-Ringló, Gilrain-Serni, and Anduin.
2 The name was borne by a princess of Gondor, through whom Aragorn claimed descent from the Southern line. It was also the name of a daughter of Elanor, daughter of Sam, but her name, if connected with the rhyme, must be derived from it; it could not have arisen in Westmarch.
3 Grindwall was a small hythe on the north bank of the Withywindle; it was outside the Hay, and so was well watched and protected by a grind or fence extended into the water. Breredon (Briar Hill) was a little village on rising ground behind the hythe, in the narrow tongue between the end of the High Hay and the Brandywine. At the Mithe, the outflow of the Shirebourn, was a landing-stage, from which a lane ran to Deephallow and so on to the Causeway road that went through Rushey and Stock.
4 Indeed they probably gave him this name (it is Bucklandish in form) to add to his many older ones.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Previously published poems by Tolkien printed or quoted, excepting those in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), were taken from the following sources:
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Oxford Magazine (Oxford) 52, no. 13 (15 February 1934), pp. 464–5.
The Cat and the Fiddle. Yorkshire Poetry (Leeds) 2, no. 19 (October–November 1924), pp. 1–3.
Errantry. Oxford Magazine (Oxford) 52, no. 5 (9 November 1933), p. 180.
An Evening in Tavrobel. Leeds University Verse 1914–24. Comp. and ed. the English School Association. Leeds: At the Swan Press, 1924. p.
56.
Fastitocalon. Stapeldon Magazine (Exeter College, Oxford) 7, no. 40 (June 1927), pp. 123–5.
Firiel. Chronicle of the Convents of the Sacred Heart (Roehampton), no. 4 (1934), pp. 30–2.
Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt. Stapeldon Magazine (Exeter College, Oxford) 7, no. 40 (June 1927), pp. 125–7.
Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden. The Gryphon (Leeds), new series 4, no. 4 (January 1923), p. 130.
Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden. Oxford Magazine (Oxford) 55, no. 15 (4 March 1937), p. 473.
Knocking at the Door. Oxford Magazine (Oxford) 55, no. 13 (18 February 1937), p. 403.
Looney. Oxford Magazine (Oxford) 52, no. 9 (18 January 1934), p. 340.
Once upon a Time. Winter’s Tales for Children 1. Ed. Caroline Hillier. Illustrated by Hugh Marshall. London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965. pp. 44–5.
Princess Ní. Leeds University Verse 1914–24. Comp. and ed. the English School Association. Leeds: Swan Press, 1924. p. 58.
The Root of the Boot. Songs for the Philologists. London: Privately printed in the Department of English at University College, 1936. pp. 20–1.
The Shadow Man. The ‘Annual’ of Our Lady’s School, Abingdon, no. 12 (1936), p. 9.
Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon. A Northern Venture: Verses by Members of the Leeds University English School Association. Leeds: Swan Press, 1923. pp. 17–19.
Bombadil Goes Boating, Perry-the-Winkle, and Cat had no earlier published versions. The Bumpus, predecessor of Perry-the-Winkle, has been transcribed from a manuscript provided by Christopher Tolkien. We have also referred to manuscript and typescript versions of Knocking at the Door (later The Mewlips) furnished by Christopher Tolkien, to the Tolkien archive in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and to the Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive of correspondence now held by HarperCollins. When part of a quotation from the Allen & Unwin archive has been published already in Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien or The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, we have cited the latter as well. Other works consulted include:
Anderson, Douglas A. ‘The Mystery of Lintips’. Tolkien and Fantasy (blog), 22 July 2013. http://tolkienandfantasy.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-mystery-of-lintips.html.
Beare, Rhona. ‘The Trumpets of Dawn’. Typescript of unpublished lecture.
Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977.
Christie’s. 20th Century Books and Manuscripts. Auction catalogue. London (St James’s), 2 December 2003.
Clark, Willene B. A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second-Family Bestiary. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2006.
Coward, T.A. The Birds of the British Isles and Their Eggs. 5th edn. London: Frederick Warne, 1936.
Derrick, Christopher. ‘From an Antique Land’. The Tablet, 15 December 1962, p. 1227.
Duggan, Alfred. ‘Middle Earth Verse’. Times Literary Supplement, 23 November 1962, p. 892.
Eilmann, Julian, and Allan Turner. Tolkien’s Poetry. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2013. Three of the included essays are concerned variously with Errantry, The Hoard, The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon, and The Sea-Bell.
Ekwall, Eilert. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names. 4th edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.
Fisher, Jason. ‘The Origins of Tolkien’s “Errantry”’ (parts 1 and 2). Lingwë: Musings of a Fish (blog), 25 September and 1 October 2008. http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2008/09/origins-of-tolkiens-errantry-part-1.html, http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2008/10/origins-of-tolkiens-errantry-part-2.html.
Flieger, Verlyn. A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997.
—— Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. Rev. edn. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002.
Gilliver, Peter M., Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Hammond, Wayne G. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography. With the assistance of Douglas A. Anderson. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies; New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Books, 1993.
—— and Christina Scull. J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
—— The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. London: HarperCollins, 2005.
Helms, Randel. Tolkien’s World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
Hiley, Margaret, and Frank Weinreich, eds. Tolkien’s Shorter Works: Proceedings of the 4th Seminar of the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft & Walking Tree Publishers Decennial Conference. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2008. Several of the included essays are concerned with poems from the Bombadil volume, especially The Sea-Bell.
Honegger, Thomas. ‘The Man in the Moon: Structural Depth in Tolkien’. In Root and Branch: Approaches towards Understanding Tolkien. Ed. Thomas Honegger. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 1999. pp. 9–76.
Johnston, George Burke. ‘The Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien’. Mankato State University Studies 2, no. 1 (February 1967), pp. 63–75.
Kocher, Paul H. Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
MacDonald, George. At the Back of the North Wind. 1870; rpt. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1956.
MacKillop, James. Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
O’Donaghue, Denis. Lives and Legends of Saint Brendan the Voyager. Felinfach: Llanerch Publishers, 1994. Facsimile of the edn. first published at Dublin, 1893.
Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.
—— The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. New edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Rateliff, John D. The History of The Hobbit. London: HarperCollins, 2007. 2 vols.
—— ‘J.R.R. Tolkien: Sir Topas Revisited’. Notes and Queries 29, no. 4 (August 1982), p. 348.
—— ‘The New Arrival: Winter’s Tales for Children’. Sacnoth’s Scriptorium (blog), 13 July 2009. http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2009/07/new-arrival-winters-tales-for-children.html.
Scull, Christina. ‘Tom Bombadil and The Lord of the Rings’. Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction. London: Tolkien Society, 1991. pp. 73–7.
—— and Wayne G. Hammond. The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. London: HarperCollins, 2006. 2 vols.: Chronology, Reader’s Guide.
Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins, 2005.
—— ‘The Versions of “The Hoard”’. Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien. Zollikofen: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007. pp. 341–9.
Michael Silverman. Manuscripts, Autograph Letters & Historical Documents: Recent Acquisitions. London, 1995.
Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Smith, A.H. English Place-name Elements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956. 2 vols.
Sotheby’s. English Literature and English History. Auction catalogue. London, 6–7 December 1984.
Swank, Kris. ‘Tom Bombadil’s Last Song: Tolkien’s “Once upon a Time”’. Tolkien Studies 10 (2013), pp. 185–97.
Thwaite, Anthony. ‘Hobbitry’. The Listener, 22 November 1962, p. 831.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962. The second printing, with revised order of poems, was also published in 1962.
—— The Annotated Hobbit. Rev. and expanded edn. Annotated by Douglas A. Anderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
—— Beowulf and the Critics. Rev. 2nd edn. Ed. Michael D.C. Drout. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011.
—— The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983.
—— Farmer Giles of Ham. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949.
—— The J.R.R. To
lkien Audio Collection. London: HarperCollins, 2001.
——. J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings His The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. New York: Caedmon Records, 1975.
—— J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings His The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers/The Return of the King. New York: Caedmon Records, 1975.
—— The Lays of Beleriand. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985.
—— The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2009.
—— Letters from Father Christmas. Ed. Baillie Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 1999.
—— Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2000.
—— The Lord of the Rings. 50th anniversary edn. London: HarperCollins, 2005.
—— The Lost Road and Other Writings: Language and Legend before ‘The Lord of the Rings’. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: Unwin Hyman, 1987.
—— The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983. Includes On Fairy-Stories and A Secret Vice, etc.
—— Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion, Part One: The Legends of Aman. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 1993.
—— Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien. Foreword and notes by Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979.
—— Poems and Songs of Middle Earth. New York: Caedmon Records, 1967. Recording of readings by Tolkien from the Bombadil collection, and of the song cycle The Road Goes Ever On by Donald Swann, including Errantry.
—— Poems and Stories. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980.
—— The Qenya Alphabet. Ed. Arden R. Smith. Parma Eldalamberon 20. Mountain View, California: Parma Eldalamberon, 2012. Includes analysis of excerpts from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Errantry written in an ‘Elvish’ script.
—— The Return of the Shadow: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part One. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
—— The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor. Ed. Carl F. Hostetter, with additional commentary by Christopher Tolkien. Vinyar Tengwar 42 (July 2001), pp. 5–34.
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