Roverandom

It may seem extraordinary that a complete, illustrated children's story by J R R Tolkien should have remained unpublished until now; three factors probably caused its initial rejection by Allen and Unwin in 1937 as a successor to The Hobbit. First, it was set in the real world, not Middle-earth; second, it had a typical, Blytonesque theme of a dog enchanted into a toy who has adventures in Fairyland and is finally reunited with his master; third, Roverandom's Good Fairy is a sand-sorcerer or Psamathist, obviously the literary property of one E Nesbit. These elements, entirely appropriate to a private family story developed to console Tolkien's son Michael for the loss of his toy dog at the seaside in 1925, did not suit commercial publication. However, now that Tolkien's own epics have been thoroughly pillaged by the fantasists and wargames, we may forgive the Psamathos and admire firstly the direct, loving way in which Tolkien writes from the trapped dog's point of view; then the magical scenes on the Moon, with their echoes of Peter Pan as sleeping Earth children spend their dreamtime at play there; and the Mer-king's palace (shades of Hans Andersen and The Water Babies). There is a vision of Elvenhome from Tolkien's own Silmarillion; and two menacing monsters, a moon-dragon and the great Sea-serpent. This is a collector's item for personal and school libraries; or you could wait for a paperback edition where perhaps the scholarly and most useful introduction could be located after the text, so that child-readers could get straight into the story - a jolly good traditional children's tale.