Tales from the Perilous Realm by JRR Tolkien
HarperCollins, £18.99
THE profitable repackaging of Tolkien continues apace. After his son Christopher dusted down notes consigned to the bottom drawer for the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-Earth the publishers are now picking over the bones of already published material and giving it a glossy new look.
This book, with a title which misleadingly suggests that it, too, might have something to do with Tolkien’s spellbinding epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings, is in fact a collection of four stories, some poems and an essay which have all been long available.
Farmer Giles of Ham was first published in 1949, 12 years after The Hobbit introduced us to Bilbo, Gandalf and Gollum. Smith of Wootton Major was published in 1967 after LotR began to take off on college campuses in the States. Leaf by Niggle was published as part of Tree and Leaf in 1964. Roverandom, another piece of grave-robbing, was written in the 1920s and published posthumously in 1998. The poems were published as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1961. The essay On Fairy Stories was first published in 1947 and, later, as the other half of Tree and Leaf.
It’s not so much Tolkien’s greatest hits as the very minor works and I can’t help thinking that if you’re a fan then you’ll already have ’em (and I do) and if you’re not, then this really isn’t the place to start.
Keith Richmond
About The Author
