My copy of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, Hammond and Scull, eds., arrived today. So if you don’t see me for a while, you know where I’ll be.
Looking through the table of contents, I saw there were limericks on page 1365 . Naturally, I turned there first. Turns out, the old Professor wasn’t very good at them, and one of them is, shall we say, familiar.
Limerick [C] is
There was an old monk of Algeria
Who of fasting grew wearier and wearier,
Till at last with a yell
He jumped out of his cell
And ate up the Father Superior.
Google has been kind enough to provide me with a bound archive of Life Magazine, 1902, which contains this passage:
A NUMBER of our alleged literary journals, in their reminiscences of the late Mr. Stockton, have been ascribing to him the following “Limerick”:
“There was an old monk of Siberia
Whose life it grew drearier and drearier
Till he broke from his cell
With a hell of a yell
And eloped with the Mother Superior.”This poem had its origin at Trinity College, Dublin, and has been well known in university circles here and abroad for generations. The Stockton version is simply an adaptation for the drawing-room.- Evening Sun.
Tolkien’s seems more of a bowdlerization than a composition.
That issue of Life also contained a Charles Dana Gibson cartoon I’d never seen before, voici:
“Where did you go on your honeymoon?”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering.”
tom hillman
this should go in there errata and corrigenda