The pocket Roverandom by J.R.R. Tolkien
Before Middle-earth was ever fully formed, Tolkien was already telling stories—improvised, playful, and deeply personal. Roverandom belongs to this earlier world: a tale born out of a father’s imagination to comfort a child, yet rich with the charm, humor, and inventiveness that would later define his greater works.
This new pocket edition offers a delightful way to rediscover one of Tolkien’s most endearing and lesser-known stories.
J.R.R.Tolkien was a prolific storyteller to his children, though few of his early stories survive. Roverandom was a particular favourite, so much so that Tolkien wrote it out and even illustrated it himself. But for over 70 years it remained unpublished. Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, authors of the acclaimed J.R.R.Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator, edited and introduced the book and so it was finally released in 1998. Now it is time for a new edition: a hardcover pocket Roverandom!
While on holiday in 1925, four-year-old Michael Tolkien lost his beloved toy dog on the beach at Filey in Yorkshire. To console him, his father, J.R.R.Tolkien, improvised a story about Rover, a real dog who is magically transformed into a toy and is forced to seek out the wizard who wronged him in order to be returned to normal.
This charming tale, peopled by a sand-sorcerer and a terrible dragon, by the king of the sea and the Man-in-the-Moon, was tolkien's first full-length children's book, written before The Hobbit.
Now, nearly 90 years later, the adventures of Rover - or, for reasons that become clear in the story, 'Roverandom' - are published in this delightful pocket hardback edition.
Rich in wit and wordplay, Roverandom is edited and introduced by Tolkien experts Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, and includes tolkien's own delightful illustrations.
Title: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Visual Companion
Publishers: HarperCollins
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
Editors: Christina Skull and Wayne G. Hammond
Publication Date: 26 Sep 2013
Type: hardcover, 144 pages
ISBN-10: 0007523289
ISBN-13: 978-0007523283
Related Articles
In a quiet gallery in Oslo, two weathered pine planks carry one of the North’s greatest legends. Their carved figures—dragon, hero, sword, smith—once framed the doorway of Hylestad Stave Church in Setesdal. Around the year 1200, a Norwegian carver told the tale of Sigurd Fáfnisbani in wood long before it was written in Icelandic vellum.
Centuries later, J.R.R. Tolkien drew from the same deep tradition. His lectures, his retellings, and the design of his books reveal how this medieval doorframe echoed through his imagination. The journey from Hylestad to Tolkien is one of craft, storytelling, and the northern imagination carried forward across eight hundred years.
How do two minds from opposite sides of belief — one a devout Catholic mythmaker, the other a Norwegian pessimist — arrive at the same understanding of consciousness as a wound?
In this long-form reflection, written from the northern coast of Norway, Pieter Collier explores the unexpected dialogue between J. R. R. Tolkien and Peter Wessel Zapffe.
Through the fading light of The Silmarillion, he traces how Tolkien’s Elves, Fëanor’s fire, and the “long defeat” echo Zapffe’s philosophy of tragic awareness — and how both writers, in their own ways, transform despair into endurance, and endurance into art.
After years of quiet work behind the scenes, Tolkien collector Pieter Collier shares the story behind his move to Norway — a journey of illness, silence, and renewal. From his new home in Trollbergvika overlooking the Skagerrak, he reflects on why he withdrew, why he returns, and what lies ahead for the Tolkien Library and the lifelong work that began more than three decades ago.