Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Tolkien John Ronald Reuel
Title : Tales from the perilous realm
Year : 1997

Link download : Tolkien_John_Ronald_Reuel_-_Tales_from_the_perilous_realm.zip

Introduction. We do not know when Tolkien began to turn his thoughts to the Perilous Realm of Faërie. In his essay “On Fairystories”, to be found at the end of this book, he admits that he took no particular interest in tales of that kind as a child: they were just one of many interests. A “real taste” for them, he says, “was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war”. This seems to be strictly accurate. The first of his works to take an interest in fairies, that we know of, is a poem called “Wood-sunshine”, written in 1910, when Tolkien was eighteen and still at King Edward’s School in Birmingham. By the end of 1915, the year in which he took his Oxford degree and immediately joined the army to fight in the Great War, he had written several more, some of them containing major elements of what would be his developed Faërie mythology. By the end of 1917, most of which he spent in military hospital or waiting to be passed fit for active service once more, he had written the first draft of tales which would sixty years later be published in The Silmarillion, and much of Middle-earth, as also of Elvenhome beyond it, had taken shape in his mind. What happened then is a long story, about which we now know a great deal more than we did, but once again it was summed up concisely and suggestively by Tolkien himself, in the story “Leaf by Niggle”. It is generally accepted that this has a strong element of self-portrait about it, with Tolkien the writer—a confirmed “niggler”, as he said himself—transposed as Niggle the painter. Niggle, the story tells us, was busy on all kinds of pictures, but one in particular started to grow on him. It began as just a single leaf, but then it became a tree, and the tree grew to be a Tree, and behind it a whole country started to open out, with “glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow”. Niggle, Tolkien wrote, “lost interest in his other pictures; or else he took them and tacked them on to the edges of his great picture”. Once again this is an accurate account of what Tolkien can be seen doing in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. During those thirty years he kept working at variants of “Silmarillion” stories, writing occasional poems, often anonymously, and making up other stories, not always written down and sometimes told initially only to his children. The Hobbit started life as one of these, set in Middleearth, but to begin with connected only tangentially with the Elvish history of the Silmarils: it was, to use the modern term, a spinoff. The Lord of the Rings was a further spin-off, this time from The Hobbit, and initially motivated by Tolkien’s publisher’s strong desire for a Hobbit-sequel. But what Tolkien started to do, just like Niggle, was to take things he had written before and start “tacking them on to the edges”. Tom Bombadil, who had begun as the name for a child’s toy, got into print in 1934 as the hero of a poem, and then became perhaps the most mysterious figure in the world of The Lord of the Rings. That work also drew in other poems, some of them comic, like Sam Gamgee’s “Oliphaunt” rhyme, first published in 1927, others grave and sad, like the version Strider gives on Weathertop of the tale of Beren and Lúthien, again going back to a poem published in 1925, and based on a story written even earlier. ...