The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Christina Scull

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      Tolkien wrote to Stanley Unwin, the chairman of George Allen & Unwin, on 28 November that he was ‘agreeably surprised’ at reviews of the Bombadil volume in the Times Literary Supplement and The Listener. ‘I expected remarks far more snooty and patronizing. Also I was rather pleased, since it seemed that the reviewers had both started out not wanting to be amused, but had failed to maintain their Victorian dignity intact’ (Letters, p. 322). The Times Literary Supplement review of 23 November 1962 (attributed to Alfred Duggan) called Tolkien ‘a wordsmith, an ingenious versifier, rather than a discoverer of new insights’, while Anthony Thwaite in The Listener (22 November) contrasted the ‘heavy-footed donnish waggery’ of Tolkien’s preface with the poems, which were ‘by turns gay, prattling, melancholy, nonsensical, mysterious. And what is most exciting and attractive about them is their superb technical skill. Professor Tolkien revealed in the verses scattered through The Hobbit that he had a talent for songs, riddling rhymes, and a kind of balladry. In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil the talent can be seen to be something close to genius.’ In response to the latter, Tolkien wondered to Stanley Unwin ‘why if a “professor” shows any knowledge of his professional techniques it must be “waggery”, but if a writer shows, say, knowledge of law or law-courts it is held interesting and creditable’ (28 November, Letters, p. 322). It seems likely that Tolkien also saw the review by Christopher Derrick in the Roman Catholic journal The Tablet (15 December 1962), which defended the Bombadil volume from charges of ‘whimsy’. With only a few exceptions, the book received positive reviews.

      On 19 December, Tolkien was pleased to tell his son Michael that ‘“T.B.” sold nearly 8,000 copies before publication (caught on the hop they have had to reprint hastily), and that, even on a minute initial royalty, means more than is at all usual for anyone but [popular poet John] Betjeman to make on verse!’ (Letters, p. 322). On 23 December, he also wrote to Pauline Baynes that the collection was selling uncommonly well (for verse), and attributed its success in large part to her illustrations.

      In 1952, Tolkien had recited The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late, Oliphaunt, and The Stone Troll (the latter with variations) into a tape recorder owned by his friend George Sayer: these readings were issued first on a vinyl record in 1975, with other excerpts from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. In 1967, he made a commercial recording of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Hoard, The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon, The Mewlips, and Perry-the-Winkle for the album Poems and Songs of Middle Earth, which also featured Errantry performed by baritone William Elvin and composer Donald Swann, within Swann’s Tolkien song cycle The Road Goes Ever On. Tolkien also recorded at this session Errantry, Princess Mee, and The Sea-Bell, but these were issued only in 2001, with Tolkien’s other readings from 1967 and his recordings with George Sayer, as part of The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection.

      Although the preface and poems of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book have remained in print since 1962, they have not consistently appeared in a dedicated volume, rather than within a larger collection of shorter works. We are pleased to present them afresh, and to include for comparison earlier printed or manuscript versions (where earlier versions exist). It seems appropriate also to reprint another poem by Tolkien featuring Tom and Goldberry, Once upon a Time, first published three years after the Bombadil volume appeared, and a possible precursor, An Evening in Tavrobel.

      Throughout this book, we follow the convention of referring to Tolkien’s larger mythology as ‘The Silmarillion’, in quotation marks, and the edition of its component tales published in 1977 as The Silmarillion, italicized. We have assumed, as Tolkien himself did in the preface to the Bombadil collection, that the reader has a certain degree of familiarity with (at least) The Lord of the Rings.

      We are grateful to the Tolkien Estate for permission to reprint or newly publish writings by J.R.R. Tolkien; and for their assistance at many points in the making of this book, we are indebted to Christopher Tolkien, to Cathleen Blackburn of the solicitors Maier Blackburn, to the staff of the Bodleian Libraries, including Colin Harris, Catherine Parker, and Judith Priestman, and to the editors and production staff of HarperCollins, in particular David Brawn, Terence Caven, and Natasha Hughes. We also would like to thank Sr. Joan Breen and Sr. Barbara Jeffery of the Institute of Our Lady of Mercy, Bermondsey, for providing a copy of The Shadow Man from the Annual of Our Lady’s School, Abingdon, and Stephen Oliver of Our Lady’s School for facilitating this contact; and as always, Carl F. Hostetter and Arden R. Smith for helpful advice on Tolkien’s invented languages.

      Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond

      January 2014