Tales From the Perilous Realm

Image credit: tolkienlibrary.com

It’s been a week of very real experiences, growth, and adult functionality and I honestly don’t think I could have made it through in tact without the aid of my chosen read. When the realities of the world are banging at your door, sometimes the best method of relaxing after dealing with them is going into a very unreal world. Yay voyeurism! So this week, I conversed with dragons, travelled to Faery, watched a painter pain his afterlife, and followed a dog to the moon. This week’s book was Tales From the Perilous Realm by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Made up of five separate works, Tales From the Perilous Realm is a gorgeous array of bedtime stories filled with beauty, adventure, magic, and meaning. In Roverandom, a poor little dog gets made littler by a wizard and goes on all sorts of adventures in the hope of eventually getting back to his proper size. In Farmer Giles of Ham a simple farmer becomes a folk hero when he rids his town of a giant and then, later, a dragon. We get to travel all over Middle Earth with the poems that make up The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. In Smith of Wootton Major a child gets blessed with visits to Faery via the magic ingredients of a giant cake. And in Leaf by Niggle a kind-hearted painter gets put through his paces as he tries to paint the most magnificent tree, while also trying to aid his ‘friends and neighbours’.

Image credit: npg.org.uk

Tolkien’s simple prose is always a treat: accessible and digestible to a varying range of ages from eight to eighty. His stories are simple, sweet, and wholly immersive; the perfect thing for a spot of bedtime reading. The mixture of narrative and poetry is a particularly lovely part of this reading experience, as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil efficiently breaks up the strict, structural delight of narrative prose and covers a great expanse of ground in so short a space of time.

There’s not much more that can be said about a work of Tolkien’s that hasn’t been said already. Tales From the Perilous Realm is an enchanting and compelling bedtime read, perfect for any age and personality.

Author: J.R.R Tolkien

Published: Pictured edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers, Great Britain, 1997. Farmer Giles of Ham first published in 1949. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil first published in 1961. Leaf By Niggle first published in 1964. Smith of Wootton Major first published in 1967. Roverandom first published in 1998.

Illustrations by Alan Lee.