Prior to The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book, Tolkien had adopted the pose of an editor or translator of an old manuscript in his foreword to Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), in his prefatory note to the second edition of The Hobbit (1951), and in The Lord of the Rings (1954–5), in which he ‘explained’ that both that work and The Hobbit were drawn from the same source, the ‘Red Book of Westmarch’. The title of the Red Book echoes those of medieval collections such as the ‘Red Book of Hergest’ and the ‘Black Book of Carmarthen’; in the context of Tolkien’s stories, it refers to the volumes mentioned in narrative near the end of The Lord of the Rings (bk. VI, ch. 9), one of which was given the title The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King. In the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, the Red Book is described as containing much besides the narrative of The Lord of the Rings proper.
Thus, in turn, the preface to the Adventures of Tom Bombadil collection mentions ‘attached stories and chronicles’, and poems ‘on loose leaves’ or ‘written carelessly in margins and blank spaces’; and through this enlargement of an editorial fiction, the poems Tolkien wrote or revised for the 1962 book were given a history within the matter of Middle-earth, while the matter itself was enlarged through comments on Hobbit culture and notes on names and characters. The preface also serves, as Randel Helms said in Tolkien’s World (1974), as a parody of textual scholarship, as self-parodying ‘protection’ against charges of bad poetry – because the verses are presented as the work of hobbits, not Tolkien’s own – and as a means of establishing, if less seriously than in The Lord of the Rings, what Tolkien called Secondary Belief, in which the reader is brought willingly into the frame of a story.
We mention some of Tolkien’s fictional points about specific poems in our discussions below, such as that the fifth selection, The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late, is said to have been composed by Bilbo Baggins, hero of The Hobbit. Others are said to be by Sam Gamgee, or ‘SG’, or by Frodo Baggins, from The Lord of the Rings. The only poem in the collection not cited in the preface, for whatever reason there may have been, is The Mewlips.
Tolkien touches briefly in the preface on the ‘strange words’ and ‘rhyming and metrical tricks’ of some of the poems (‘of hobbit origin’). In our discussions, we have glossed the more unusual or less common words, as they seem to us, while the reader, especially if the poems are read aloud, will easily detect many different rhyme patterns with occasional clever variations. Some, like the title poem, have straightforward rhyming couplets (AABB), while others are more elaborate; some (such as Errantry) have internal as well as external rhyme, and occasional alliteration; The Hoard makes use of caesura, a pause between each half-line, in the manner of Anglo-Saxon verse. The attributes of poetry of which Hobbits are said to be fond, and the act of verse-making, were entertaining to Tolkien himself. As he remarked to Margaret Carroux, translator of The Lord of the Rings into German, he was ‘pleased by metrical devices and verbal skill (now out of fashion), and … amused by representing my imaginary historical period [of Middle-earth, in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings] as one in which these arts were delightful to poets and singers, and their audiences’ (29 September 1968, Scull and Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide (2006), p. 768).
In Bilbo’s ‘scribble’ near the beginning of the preface, a weathercock is the familiar wind-direction indicator in the shape of a bird (or weathervane, hence Tolkien’s pun ‘all is vane [vain]’). Throstlecock, or throstle for short, is an old-fashioned name for a song thrush.
The river-name Serni included in the first footnote of the preface was spelled Sernui in all earlier editions of this work; and in some printings, Kiril has been misspelled Kirl. Serni, however, is so spelled in all editions of The Lord of the Rings, and in later writings such as a 1969 letter by Tolkien to Pauline Baynes, advising her about names on her 1970 Map of Middle-earth; this spelling therefore is also used here. (And yet, as Carl F. Hostetter informs us, Sernui would be possible as an unattested adjectival formation *‘stony’ from sarn ‘stone’ in Tolkien’s invented language Sindarin, on the model of lithui ‘ashen’. In his late work The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor, Tolkien names Serni with the same derivation.). In the text of The Lord of the Rings, Kiril is spelled Ciril, following Tolkien’s late decision to spell Elvish names and words throughout with C rather than K (though still pronounced K), but it remained Kiril on the original Lord of the Rings maps, themselves produced late in the publishing process. In the Bombadil preface, Kiril perhaps should be Ciril, Tolkien’s final preferred spelling and that used in most later versions or printings of the Lord of the Rings maps; but whereas Sernui is very likely a typographic error for Serni, for the preface Tolkien seems to have chosen to follow the Lord of the Rings map, as it stood in 1962, and it seemed right (if maybe inconsistent) to retain Kiril in the footnote.
In other respects, the preface as printed in this volume, and in all editions of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book since the second George Allen & Unwin printing in 1962, contains two errors, strictly speaking. In the first printing, Cat and Fastitocalon appeared in that order, but with the second printing, this order was reversed. References in the preface to these poems, numbers 11 and 12, however, were not altered (see further below, notes for Fastitocalon). Tolkien approved the change of order, but nowhere in his correspondence with Allen & Unwin is there discussion of whether to emend the preface to suit. In the absence of such evidence, and since Tolkien’s prefatory comments on poems 11 and 12 apply (if not as aptly) even with the revised order, the original text has been allowed to stand.