J.R.R. Tolkien had a cat called Grimalkin:
"J.R.R. Tolkien had a cat called Grimalkin:" is the first line of a clerihew written by J.R.R. Tolkien as part of a letter to Amy Ronald on 2 January of 1969.
Poem
Background
On 2 January, 1969, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a clerihew about himself at the end of a letter sent to Amy Ronald. The clerihew, along with the letter, was published for the first time in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien in 1981. In 1995, the clerihew was reprinted in the article "J.R.R. Tolkien and the Clerihew", where Joe R. Christopher notes that it violates the rule that each line should begin with a capital letter. Christopher also notes that "the rhyme of the first two lines is not perfect". He explains that Tolkien's use of the name Grimalkin is interesting in that it After giving an example of "one version of the four lines", Christopher describes "the major stresses…and the rhythms" as being "equally varied", that "mal- and -mil-" in "the second and third lines" are tied together by "a consonance", and that "Herr and him" in "the third and fourth lines" connect through "alliteration". He also notes that "the gr of Grimalkin echoes the sound in the stressed syllable Grimm", which is significant because it "connects two of the important terms". Christopher adds that "the verse…is perhaps too mysterious to be a good clerihew, but the play with Grimm's law produces a surprising shift from witchcraft to philology and in that sense may be humorous". In September of 2024, the poem was reprinted in Appendix I in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, where Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull suggest in their commentary that Tolkien's use of the name Grimalkin could also mean "friend, associate".
Inspiration
Joe R. Christopher comments "that the first discovered use of a form of grimalkin is in Shakespeare's Macbeth" in 1605 where the name "Gray-Malkin refers to a Fiend". Christopher further notes that "the dotty or whimsical aspect of this clerihew" is that Tolkien "does not mean anything serous by saying that he and Jakob Grimm…had the same familiar". In using the name Grimalkin, Tolkien may possibly have been inspired by "John Masefield's The Midnight Folk, a children's book of 1927", where Greymalkin is the name of an evil cat. Since Tolkien spelled the name as Grimalkin:
Referencias
1. Esta ficha se ha importado inicialmente de TolkienGateway.net el día 26/05/2026.
