Perry-the-Winkle is a revision of a poem originally entitled The Bumpus, one of a series of works Tolkien wrote c. 1928, the ‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’, centred on an imaginary English coastal town and harbour. Six poems in this series are known, and of these, three so far have been published: The Dragon’s Visit, Glip, and Progress in Bimble Town (all are most conveniently found in the second edition (2002) of The Annotated Hobbit, edited by Douglas A. Anderson). Christopher Tolkien kindly sent us three versions of The Bumpus for comparison with Perry-the-Winkle, which has no earlier published text. Following is the second (manuscript) version, which closely follows the first but includes several new features, notably mentions of Bimble Bay (revised from ‘the beautiful land of Bong’) and of ‘Mountains Blue’, the Blue Mountains mentioned also in The Dragon’s Visit, ‘where dragons live’ (not to be confused with the Ered Luin of Middle-earth):
The Bumpus sat on an old grey stone
And sang his lonely lay:
‘O why, O why should I live all alone
In the hills of Bimble Bay?
The grass is green, the sky is blue,
The sun shines on the sea,
But the Dragons have crossed the Mountains Blue
And come no more to me.
No Trolls or Ogres are left at all,
But People slam the door
Whenever they hear my flat feet fall
Or my tail along the floor.’
He stroked his tail and looked at his feet,
And he said: ‘They may be long,
But my heart is kind, and my smile is sweet,
And sweet and soft my song.’
The Bumpus went out, and who did he meet
But old Mrs. Thomas and all
With umbrella and basket walking the street;
And softly he did call:
‘Dear Mrs. Thomas, good day to you?
I hope you are quite well?’
But she dropped her brolly and basket too
And yelled a frightful yell.
Policeman Pott was a-standing near;
When he heard that awful cry,
He turned all purple and pink with fear,
And swiftly turned to fly.
The Bumpus followed surprised and sad:
‘Don’t go!’ he gently said;
But old Mrs. Thomas ran home like mad,
And hid beneath her bed.
The Bumpus then came to the market-place
And looked up over the walls.
The sheep went wild when they saw his face;
The cows jumped out of their stalls.
Old Farmer Hogg he spilled his beer;
And the butcher threw his knives;
And Harry and his father howled with fear
And ran to save their lives.
The Bumpus sadly sat and wept
Outside the cottage door;
And William Winkle out he crept,
‘Why do you weep, you great big lump,
And wash the step like rain?’
The Bumpus gave his tail a thump,
And smiled a smile again.
‘O William Winkle, my lad,’ he said,
‘Come, you’re the boy for me,
And though you ought to be in bed
I’ll take you home to tea.
Jump on my back, and hold on tight!’
And off they went flop flap,
And William had a feast that night,
And sat on the Bumpus’ lap.
There was buttered toast, and pikelets too,
And jam and cream and cake;
And the Bumpus made some scrumptious Gloo,
And showed him how to bake —
To bake the beautiful Bumpus-bread,
And bannocks light and brown;
And then he tucked him up in a bed
Of feathers and thistle-down.
‘Bill Winkle, where have you been?’ they said.
‘I have been to a Bumpus-tea,
And I feel so fat, for I have fed
On Bumpus-bread,’ said he.
The People all knocked at the Bumpus’ door:
‘A beautiful Bumpus-cake
O bake for us, please!’ they all now roar,
‘O bake, O bake, O bake!’
Policeman Pott came puffing fast,
And made them form a queue,
And old Mrs. Thomas was late and last,
And her bonnet was all askew.
‘Go home! go home!’ the Bumpus said.
‘Too many there are of you!
Only on Thursdays I bake my bread,
And only for one or two.
Go home! go home, for goodness sake!
I did not expect a call.
I have no pikelets, toast or cake,
For William has eaten all.
Old Mrs. Thomas and Mr. Pott
I wish no more to see.
Good bye! Don’t argue, it’s much too hot —
Bill Winkle’s the boy for me!’
Now William Winkle, he grew so fat
A-eating of Bumpus-bread,
His weskit bust, and never a hat
Would sit upon his head.
But Every Thursday he went to Tea
And sat on the kitchen mat;
And smaller the Bumpus seemed to be,
As he grew fat and fat.
And Bill a Baker great became:
From Bimble Bay to Bong,
From sea to sea there went the fame
Of his bread both short and long.
But it war’nt so good as Bumpus-bread;
No jam was like the Gloo
That Every Thursday the Bumpus spread,
And William used to chew!
The third version, a typescript entitled William and the Bumpus, includes a few more lines concerning the Bumpus teaching William the baker’s art, and in other respects begins to approach the poem of 1962 – here, for instance, the Bumpus complains that his ‘cooking [is] good enough’, though many further additions and changes were yet to be made.
The Bumpus is an outlandish creature. It has a tail long enough to ‘thump’, flat, flapping feet, and a lap in which William can sit. The words of the poem leave its form unclear; in the first manuscript, however, Tolkien drew a sketch of the Bumpus as a plump, smiling, lizard-like figure with an apron around its waist. Neither we nor Christopher Tolkien can say if Bumpus had any special significance to the author of the poem, except as the name of a well-known London bookseller of the day. In the transition to Perry-the-Winkle, the Bumpus became ‘the lonely troll’, but the place-name ‘Bumpus Head’ remained in The Dragon’s Visit.
An investigation of the name Winkle, an existing surname, could exhaust many pages; but the most promising connection, suggested by the title of the revised poem, seems to be with the shortened form of periwinkle, in the sense of an edible mollusc rather than of the trailing plant Vinca. Brolly in the third stanza of The Bumpus is slang for ‘umbrella’. Bong in the final stanza appears to have no more meaning than as a convenient, Edward Learian rhyme for ‘long’.
A pikelet is a small round teacake, and a bannock a round, flat loaf. We find no source for cramsome, and must suppose that it is a Tolkien coinage after the verb cram ‘overfeed, stuff, fill to satiety’ (Oxford English Dictionary) or the noun meaning ‘a dough or paste used in fattening poultry’ or more generally for any food used to fatten animals. In Perry-the-Winkle ‘cramsome’ replaced ‘Bumpus-’ as in ‘Bumpus-bread’, ‘Bumpus-cake’, while ‘a Bumpus-tea’ became ‘a fulsome tea’. The ingredients of the Bumpus’ or Troll’s prized baked goods, let alone of the ‘scrumptious Gloo’, unfortunately remain a mystery.
Moke, by which some People journey to the old Troll’s home in Perry-the-Winkle, is a dialect word for ‘donkey’. Weskit is a variation on waistcoat (American vest).
In the editorial fiction of the Bombadil preface, Tolkien says that Perry-the-Winkle (‘No. 8’) is marked in the Red Book ‘SG [Sam Gamgee], and the ascription may be accepted’. A typescript of the poem preserved in the Bodleian Library (MS Tolkien 19, f. 51) contains the heading ‘a children’s song in the Shire (attributed to Master Samwise)’. The main points of transition from The Bumpus to Perry-the-Winkle, besides the change to the kind of creature the ‘Winkle’ meets, involved placing the events of the poem firmly in Hobbit country rather than the region of Bimble Bay. Thus Tolkien included, as alterations to the earlier text or in added lines or stanzas, references to the Shire; to Delving, or Michel Delving, the chief township of the Shire, with its Lockholes or jail; to Bree, the settlement of Hobbits and Men east of the Shire; and to Weathertop, a hill north-east of Bree. Faraway, as in ‘hills of Faraway’, appears as a place-name nowhere else in the Middle-earth corpus; in Perry-the-Winkle the name replaces and achieves the same rhyme as ‘Bimble Bay’ in The Bumpus.