Tolkien and Nevbosh: A Tale of limericks, Nonsense, and Literary Echoes

Tolkien and Nevbosh: A Tale of limericks, Nonsense, and Literary Echoes

Oronzo Cilli

 

The irregular frequency with which I publish articles is inversely proportional to the time I devote to researching the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien. In recent months, my investigations have significantly intensified across multiple fronts. Chief among them is the ongoing expansion of my project Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist, which now includes over a hundred newly identified primary sources and more than 350 additional books and works known to have been read or referenced by Tolkien.
 
It was during this most recent phase of research that I stumbled upon a curious episode related to Nevbosh. But let’s proceed step by step.
 
According to Humphrey Carpenter, it was Tolkien, in the early 1900s, who devised and developed Nevbosh together with his cousin Mary Incledon. He describes it as a “new and more sophisticated” language compared to their previous linguistic games (J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 56). However, Tolkien himself offers a more modest account. In The Monsters and the Critics (203), he clarifies that his contribution was limited to enriching the vocabulary and influencing the orthography—explicitly excluding himself from co-creator status.
 
Whatever Tolkien’s precise role, Nevbosh remains the first relatively sophisticated constructed language he engaged with. Still, he had already begun independently exploring invented languages, as he admits:
 
“Though I never confessed it, I was older in secret vice, if not in years, than the Nevbosh originator.”
(The Monsters and the Critics, 203)
 
Apart from a few isolated words mentioned by Tolkien, only one extended Nevbosh text has survived: a limerick preserved both in Carpenter’s Biography (56) and in the essay A Secret Vice, published by Christopher Tolkien in The Monsters and the Critics (203):
 
Dar fȳs ma vel gom co palt “hoc / Pys go iskili far maino woc? / Pro si go fys do roc de / Do cat ym maino bocte / De volt fac soc ma taimful gyróc!
 
Which Carpenter translated as:
 
There was an old man who said ‘How / Can I possibly carry my cow? / For if I were to ask it / To get in my basket / It would make such a terrible row!’
 
The term limerick refers to a short, playful, and often humorous poetic form composed of five lines in an AABBA rhyme scheme. Though it rose to popularity in the 18th century, it has roots in earlier oral traditions. One of its greatest champions in the Victorian era was Edward Lear (1812–1888), author of A Book of Nonsense (1846), a collection of illustrated limericks that helped define the genre as a form of nonsense poetry.
 
It is in Lear’s volume that we find the limerick Tolkien likely drew inspiration from:
 
There was an Old Man who said, “How / Shall I flee from this horrible Cow? / I will sit on the stile, / and continue to smile, / Which may soften the heart of that Cow.”
 
While Carpenter’s translation (to which I’ll return shortly) aligns with Lear’s version in its opening line, there’s no definitive evidence regarding Tolkien’s source. However, limiting our investigation to the period between 1846 (the first edition of Lear’s Book of Nonsense) and 1907 (the estimated year of Nevbosh’s invention), we find several intriguing and suggestive references.
 
For instance, in William Shepard Walsh’s Handy-book of Literary Curiosities (1893), Lear’s limerick appears in the chapter “Literary Curiosities” (810), immediately preceded by another well-known nonsense poem Tolkien knew and cited in his 1936 Beowulf lecture (8): Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking-Glass.
Another curious appearance is found in Amélie Rives (Princess Troubetszkoy)’s story The Mocking of the Gods, published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in December 1902. A philosophical tale of beauty, perception, love, and sacrifice, it contains a moment of emotional crisis in which the character Dr. Thurlow exclaims:
 
“There was an old man who said how | Shall I 'scape from this terrible cow...?” (129)
 
Finally, G.K. Chesterton includes Lear’s limerick in his essay Tolstoy and the Cult of Simplicity, published in Twelve Types (1902, 154) and Varied Types (1903, 136).
 
Returning to Carpenter’s version, it’s worth noting that only the first line is identical to Lear’s. Here is a comparison:
 
Carpenter/Tolkien:
There was an old man who said ‘How / Can I possibly carry my cow? / For if I were to ask it / To get in my basket / It would make such a terrible row!’
 
Lear:
There was an Old Man who said, ‘How / Shall I flee from this horrible Cow? / I will sit on the stile, and continue to smile / Which may soften the heart of that Cow.’
 
Further investigation led me to a striking discovery that I have not seen noted either in A Secret Vice, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins (45, n. 38), or in The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide by Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond.
I found that the translation of Tolkien’s limerick, published by Carpenter in 1977, is nearly identical to a version that had already appeared in earlier publications:
 
Anonymous version:
There once was a man who said ‘How / Shall I manage to carry my cow? / For if I should ask it / To get in my basket, / It would make such a terrible row.’
 
This version is found in The Dolphin Book of Limericks by Robert Olsborn (1963, 42) and in The Little Limerick Book by Henry Martin (1955, 39). More surprisingly, it appears as early as 1902 in A Nonsense Anthology edited by Carolyn Wells (263):
 
There once was a man who said, “How / Shall I manage to carry my cow? / For if I should ask it / To get in my basket, / ’T would make such a terrible row.”
 
This raises a pressing question: why does Carpenter’s 1977 translation of Tolkien’s limerick match versions already circulating in 1902, 1955, and 1963? Could the substitution of “pocket” (which corresponds to Nevbosh bocte, a distortion of the English word) with “basket” have been borrowed from one of these earlier renditions? Could Carpenter have been familiar with these sources and consciously or unconsciously included the version in Tolkien’s biography, attributing it to him?
At present, I don’t have the answer—but the question is certainly intriguing and, I suspect, will interest many of you as well.
 
The research continues…

 

Post scriptum
Speaking of limericks and Tolkien—another curiosity.
In the minutes of the Debating Society held on April 2, 1912, signed by inkling R.Q. Gilson and published in the King Edward’s School Chronicle (Vol. XXVII, No. 193, June 1912, 36–39), we read:
 
The Bailiff of the past year, COUNCILLOR A. G. ELLAWAY, was kind enough to take the Chair, and C. L. WISEMAN was called upon to bring forward the motion “That it is better to be Eccentric than Orthodox.” The lion, member’s speech was among his best, but displayed his usual and rather dangerous fondness for combining” the serious and the comic. The house was first treated to a frivolous limerick, and was then seriously warned against the dangers of “Chestertonian” paradox, and requesting to assign some meaning to the English language. The hon. member then explained his own interpretation of the motion. “Orthodox” implies an attitude of reverence, “Eccentric” one of non-reverence (not necessarily irreverence) for accepted conventions. These are essentially opposed. The peculiar position of the eccentric man is that he makes his own conventions, and in doing so considers his personal convenience, and not the prejudices of society. The result is that he possesses a remarkable freedom, which most men deny themselves. The only drawback of eccentricity is the abuse it calls down upon its devotees, abuse such as Wagner and Mr. Lloyd George have suffered. Some parallel examples of the eccentric and orthodox were then given: the carriage and pair instead of the motor car; the study of Italian history rather than that of Greece; and a further instance which the hon.
[…]
[V. H. WHITTAKER] He was followed by Mr. J. R. R. TOLKIEN (Neg.) who seemed chiefly determined to disregard the hon. opener’s warning, as lie began by denying the true opposition between the orthodox and the eccentric, and maintained the possibility of a man’s being both at the same time. He made, however, a number of interesting points; in particular, the parallel to the rules which govern Society which he drew from a game of cricket, where eccentricity would be obviously intolerable.
[…]
 
 

Bibliography

 
CARPENTER, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977.
CARROLL, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. London: Macmillan and Co., 1872.
CHESTERTON, G. K. Twelve Types. London: Arthur L. Humpreys, 1902.
—. Varied types. New York, Dodd, Mead and company, 1903.
LEAR, Edward [under the pseudonym “Old Derry down Derry”] A Book of Nonsense. London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1846.
MARTIN, Henry. The little limerick book. Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1955.
OSBORN, Robert. The dolphin book of limericks. New York: Dlphin books Doubleday & company, inc., 1963.
RIVES, Amélie (Princess Troubetszkoy). ‘The Mocking of the Goods’ in HARPER'S Monthly Magazine, v. CVI n. DCXXXI, December 1902, 122-133.
SCULL, Christina & HAMMOND, Wayne G. The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, vols. 3. London: HarperCollins, 2017.
TOLKIEN, J. R. R. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. London: Proceedings of the British Academy, 1937.
—. A Secret Vice in The Monsters and the Critics. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1893.
—. A Secret Vice. Edited by Dimitra Fimi & Andrew Higgins. London: HarperCollins, 2016.
WALSH, William Shepard. Handy-book of literary curiosities. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1893.
WELLS, Carolyn (Collected). A Nonsense Anthology. New York Scribner’s Sons, 1902.