Here is another piece, drafted long ago, for which I
never sought publication because of its short length.
The Mystery of Lintips
In 1964, J.R.R. Tolkien was invited to contribute to a
children’s anthology, the first of a proposed annual series, being edited by
Caroline Hillier. Tolkien sent the editor three possible poems in early
December 1964, two of which were accepted.
The three poems included one written for an American girl named Rosalind
Ramage who had written Tolkien a fan letter in October 1964;
a new poem written in early December 1964
entitled “Once Upon a Time”; and a revised version of Tolkien’s poem “The
Dragon’s Visit”, originally published in
The
Oxford Magazine in 1937.
The poem
for Rosalind Ramage was not accepted for reasons of space (it remains
unpublished), and Hillier was torn about accepting the other two, also because
of space limitations, but in the end she took both.
The revised version of “The Dragon’s Visit” and
“Once Upon a Time” appeared in
Winter’s
Tales for Children: I, published in October 1965.
Both poems were reprinted in
The Young Magicians (1969), edited by
Lin Carter.
Winter’s Tales for
Children: 1 was the first of a series that lasted for four volumes from
1965 through 1968.
Caroline Hillier
edited only the first two volumes; the third volume was edited by Kevin
Crossley-Holland, and the fourth, by Ted Hughes. Besides the Tolkien poems in
the first volume, there are contributions by Ted Hughes (one poem), Rosemary
Sutcliff (one story); Philippa Pearce (a story); Kevin Crossley-Holland (one
story and three Old English riddles translated into modern English); and
Elizabeth Jennings (two poems), who was coincidentally a friend of the Tolkien
family for many years.
The volume is
illustrated by Hugh Marshall.
Tolkien’s poem “Once Upon a Time” is especially interesting
because it is a poem about Tom Bombadil written two years after the collection
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other
Verses from The Red Book was published, and, more importantly, because
there is a mystery to the poem itself with regard to some creatures described
in it called
lintips.
“Once Upon a Time” is comprised of three stanzas of fourteen
lines, each stanza beginning with the phrase “once upon a –”; and the final
line of each stanza starting with “once upon a time”. The rhyme-scheme runs
aabbccddeeffgg, but the opening line of
each stanza also has an internal rhyme—e.g., for stanza one, “Once upon a day
on the fields of May”.
The first stanza
centers on Goldberry, and she is stooping over a lily-pool and blowing away
dandelion clock (i.e., the white seeds that form after flowering).
It is interesting to note the description of
“earth-stars” that have opened in the green-grass, whose steady eyes watch the
sun climb up and down.
The “earth-stars”
are presumably
geastrales, an order
of various types of fungus commonly called “earth-stars” that are related to
puffballs.
In the second stanza, which begins “Once upon a night in the
cockshut light”, the earth-stars are closed, and Tom—the Bombadil surname is
never given in the poem—is wandering in the wet grass under the stars.
Most interestingly, in lines 9-11, the Moon
rises and under his white beams silver drips from stem and stalk of the grass
“down to where the lintips walk / though the grass-forests gathering dew”.
Here the lintips are introduced, and they are
apparently very small, for they move about near the ground in “grass-forests”
where they gather dew.
Lintips become the central focus of the third and final
stanza, which begins “Once upon a moon on the brink of June /a-dewing the
lintips went too soon.” Tom notices them and kneels down, saying:
“ ‘Ha! little lads! So it was you I smelt? /
What a mousy smell!’” (l. 4-5) Tom tells them to drink the sweet dew, but to
mind his feet.
The lintips laugh and
move away, leaving Tom to comment that they are the only things that won’t talk
to him, or “say what they do or what they be” (l.10). The lintips are as much a
mystery to Tom, as they are to the reader of the poem.
Basically, lintips are small creatures that move in the
grass during the night and drink dew, and they have a mousy smell. They could
be mice, voles, or insects of some sort.
The name
lintip/lintips may be
an invented word of Tolkien’s like
mewlips,
some creatures who also feature in a single poem. Additionally, one turns to the
O.E.D. without finding any real-world analogues. With the hint in line fourteen
of the first stanza, that the poem is set in “an elvish land”, one wonders if
lintip might be of elvish construction.
The stem
lint/lin could be
interpreted in elvish in a number of ways (the better of several possible stems
include Q
lint fluff, down, soft
stuff; Q
linte swift, quickly nimble)*,
but the ending
–ip/–tip is not of
normal elvish construction, and seems to point
lintip away from being an elvish word.
It seems that whatever lintips are, they will remain as much
a mystery to us as they were to Tom.
When
I queried Christopher Tolkien on this point, he replied “On
lintips I fear I am a total blank” (letter dated 3 September
2005).
Thanks go to Christopher Tolkien, Alan Reynolds, Carl
Hostetter, John Garth, and Eileen Moore, for comments on lintips sent to me over the years.
* I note also that in “A Secret Vice” Tolkien wrote: “I can also remember the word lint ‘quick, clever, nimble’, and it is
interesting, because I know it was adopted because the relation between the
sounds lint and the idea proposed for
association with them gave pleasure.” (The
Monsters and The Critics, p. 205).
