Record Added: 8/23/2009  A Favorite Book Setting  England Topic Fantasy Animal Characters Publisher Houghton Mifflin Company ISBN 0395898714 Year 1998 Age 9-12 Pages 128 Description Light green dustjacket
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Here, at last, two Tolkien scholars present it, with five illustrations by the author sandwiched between a long, minutely detailed introduction and padded but sometimes illuminating endnotes. Changed from a live dog into a toy after incautiously biting a wizard, Rover is dropped on the beach by his young owner, where he meets a second wizard who sends him on a gull's back to the Man-in-the-Moon.
Sporting wings and a new name, "Roverandom" irritates the Great White Dragon that causes lunar eclipses and visits a valley where sleeping children gather for pleasant dreams, among other places, then returns to Earth to beg the first wizard, a bumbling sort who has since married a mermaid and moved under the ocean, to make him a real dog again. |
Notes
In 1925, while on vacation with his family on the Yorkshire coast, four-year-old Michael Tolkien lost his favorite toy, a little lead dog he was reluctant to put down even to dig in the sand. To console and distract him, his father, J. R. R. Tolkien, improvised a story - the story of Rover, a real dog magically transformed into a toy, who, after many fantastic adventures in search of the wizard who wronged him, at last wins back his life.
This charming tale, peopled by a wise old whale and a terrible dragon, by the king of the sea and the Man-in-the-Moon, was a Tolkien family favorite, going through several typewritten drafts over many years. In 1936, Tolkien submitted it to his British publishers as a possible follow-up to The Hobbit. What his publishers really wanted, however, was another story about Middle-earth, and so he set aside this little book to begin his masterwork, The Lord of the Rings. |
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