Roverandom was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s story about a toy dog who has adventures after being enchanted.
Tolkien wrote Roverandom in 1925 after his young son Michael lost a small toy dog on a beach at Filey in Yorkshire. The story turned the missing toy into Rover, a dog transformed by a wizard and sent through a series of adventures involving the Moon, the sea, and a dragon. Tolkien told the tale to entertain his children.
Although Tolkien wrote the story in the 1920s, it was not published during his lifetime. It appeared in 1998, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. The book reveals Tolkien experimenting with motifs that also occur elsewhere in his fiction, including invented names, layered mythologies, and journeys between unusual realms.
Roverandom is sometimes confused with Mr. Bliss, another children’s story by Tolkien involving an eccentric central character. Both were published after Tolkien’s death, but Roverandom specifically grew from Michael’s lost toy dog.