Roverandom

Radaghast wrote:I've read this, but don't remember much of it, except that I was disappointed it wasn't part of the other mythology  

Not true.  It is part of the Mythology, just not the more recent and highly developed mythology you're familiar with - but rather the much older and archaic mythology of The Book of Lost Tales.  Uin (the Great Whale) is part of that older mythology as is the Man in the Moon (sort of).

It's a great read, Roverandom, but not a classic that way that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are.  It does not tie to that greater part of the Legendarium that we're all used to.  It does fit into things, tho, in its own odd way.  For example, when you read in The Hobbit that "...the hobbit turned and scuttled inside his round green door, and shut it as quickly as he dared, not to seem rude.  Wizards after all are wizards.", you know exactly why after encountering the much more volatile wizards in Roverandom!

The story really belongs to Tolkien's earliest stages of writing.  The myths there are more Victorian or Edwardian and the children's stories are much more children's stories and less the vast-mock-epic that The Hobbit is (and it really is vast when you compare it to older and more traditional "fairy tales").  The Father Christmas Letters are (kind of) in the same style but he's not yet the much more highly developed author that he becomes in his following phase (to which belong, in my mind, The Hobbit and The Lay of Leithian).

I think he tended to make everything he did part of his Universe in some way, however indirectly, whether it was originally created independently or not.

I think Tolkien loved Middle Earth as much as we do, he couldnt leave it so he wrote stories that lead like breadcrumbs back to home. Look at his headstone......?

You know, Azriel, sometimes I think Tolkien was more besotted by his world than I am. Amazing to think, really.

"...Once more he refers to his own mythology.  His eyes fix on some distant object, and he seems to have forgotten that I am there as he clutches his pipe and speaks through its stem.  It occurs to me that in all eternals he resembles the archetypal Oxford don, at times even the stage caricature of a don.  But that is exactly what he is not.  It is rather as if some strange spirit had taken on the guise of an elderly professor.  The body may be pacing this shabby little suburban room, but the mind is far away, roaming the plains and mountains of Middle-earth."

- Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A biorgraphy, Part One: A Visit

Just another reason why I love Tolkien!