The Riddles of The Hobbit Read online

  We might then ask what this solution does. Among other things, the solution snaps the text into sudden focus and reveals the great wonder of a commonplace thing. This sense of the miraculous in the mundane is at the heart of Old English riddling.12

  This is very well put, and gains in insightfulness when we apply it (as Murphy does not) to Tolkien, because for him the category of ‘the miraculous’ is so profound, and so central to his art. Riddles stimulate and empower us, and they do more than that. In the largest sense they attempt to think the things thought cannot think.

  In what follows I quote from a variety of Old English texts, sometimes citing the Anglo-Saxon, more often, since my concern is only rarely specific to that language, in modern English translation. I have decided to quote from a variety of translations, including on occasion my own—Kevin Crossley Holland’s version of the Exeter Book riddles (Penguin, revised edition 1993) is a marvel of graceful precision and poetic effect, but although I do cite it in the pages that follow it did not seem fair to cite only him. It felt a little like I was picking on him. Accordingly, I quote a variety of other translations, of the riddles and of other OE texts. I have sometimes quoted Seamus Heaney’s celebrated translation of Beowulf; unattributed translations from the Old English (including Beowulf) are my own.

  A book about The Hobbit can hardly avoid quoting from Tolkien’s own works. The Tolkien estate is, quite properly, protective of its various copyrights, and one of the processes of revising this book during its various drafts has been the removal of too generous quotation from Tolkien’s own words, replacing some passages with paraphrase—not an ideal compromise, from my point of view, but necessary. I have tried to keep quotation from Tolkien to a minimum, and certainly to keep it within the bounds of the provision for scholarly and critical ‘fair use’. I would have liked to quote a lot more.

  Irony can be serious, but even at its most serious there is something playful—something crooked, something riddling—in the nature of it. The present book is written in that spirit. Most of its ironies are serious ones, and I am genuinely attempting to get to the bottom of what seem to me serious questions about Tolkien, about fantasy and about riddling. But sometimes that seriousness finds expression in more deliberately ingenious and playful mode than at others. The first two chapters aim to contextualise Tolkien’s own riddling practice by looking at the prevalence, and nature, of riddles in Anglo-Saxon culture. The two chapters that follow (‘Riddles in the Dark’ and ‘The Riddles of the All-Wise’) read the riddle-contest between Bilbo and Gollum from chapter 8 of The Hobbit in some detail. There follows a chapter on The Hobbit as a whole, and another that considers how puzzling it is that a character inhabiting a pre-modern, medieval or Dark-Age world has pockets. Chapters 7 and 8 (‘The Riddle of the Ring’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings and the Riddle of Writing’) move into a broader discussion of The Lord of the Rings; and Chapters 9 and 10 (‘The Volsung Riddle: Character in Tolkien’ and ‘The Enigma of Genre Fantasy’) range more widely still, looking at the genre of ‘Tolkienian’ fantasy as a whole in an attempt to suggest reasons why it has proved so popular and enduring. For the final chapter I return to The Hobbit, and suggest a new answer to the most obvious riddle of all: ‘what is a hobbit’?

  1

  The Anglo-Saxon Riddleworld

  Riddles are in origin a folk-art, ancient and worldwide … [Anglo-Saxon] riddles, therefore, enjoyable for their wit and its poetic expression, are also of crucial importance for the insight they offer into the intellectual structure of the Anglo-Saxon literary mind. The mentality that can engage with the sense of the literal statement and with the implicit and ‘truer’ import of the concealed meaning is a mentality alert to symbolism and allegory; and not surprisingly techniques of the riddle may be traced in poetry of other genres where ambiguity and systematic symbolism or allegory are deliberately cultivated.1

  Anglo-Saxon was a riddling culture. By this I do not just mean that the Norse, the Icelanders and the Old English loved riddles—although they certainly did. Old English culture was threaded through with riddles, cryptograms, gnomic verses, charms and riddling modes of speech such as litotes, just as Modern English culture is (if you will forgive me) riddled with jokes and catch-phrases, crosswords and quizzes, irony and sarcasm. But there is more to it than that. I mean that the orientation of the Anglo-Saxons towards their world was ironic, often wittily or sardonically so. They were more minded than moderns to view life as a puzzle and a mystery. Anglo-Saxons tended to prize a particular combination of strength and wit. It was good to be brave, to fight fiercely, to stay true to your friends and your lord; but it was better still to do all these things lightly, with humour, gaily. This is not a matter of modesty. On the contrary, boasting was a valued skill. Boasting, such as those contests in which warriors traded insults called ‘flytings’, were opportunities to show your cleverness as well as your forcefulness. What was particularly admired was good boasting—boasts that were witty and clever, as well as boasts you were prepared to expend your life, if necessary, making true. In all this there is something of the riddle, but on a grander, more existential scale. Riddles are more than mere pastimes; they speak to the puzzling circumstances in which we find ourselves. Threading through all this is the sense of the riddle, the joke, the ironic understatement, as all modes of extravagance of speech. They are, in modern parlance, the bling of words.

  If this sounds as if I am granting riddles a more profound significance than mere word-games and children’s rhymes might merit, then indeed I am. In the introduction to their translation of the riddling legend-poetry of The Elder Edda, (itself a key source for Tolkien’s own imaginarium) Peter Salus and Paul Taylor begin with scholarly circumspection:

  Poetic composition of riddles was principally an exercise of scholastic wit throughout the Middle Ages. Hundreds of Latin riddles in poetic form have survived. In general they are puzzles in which some object of phenomenon is described; the reader or listener is expected to ‘solve’ the puzzle and state the object. Riddle making was equally popular in the vernacular. In Old English, for example, almost a hundred survive.

  But they go on to suggest that, for the Norse mind, riddles were much more than just this:

  Riddles suggest the Nordic fascination with the apparent relationship between the structure of language and the structure of the cosmos. For the Scandinavians the wisest man—he who knows most of the structure of the cosmos—is also the most skilful poet … there is in the Nordic mind a subtle relationship, and a necessary one, between an event and the language with which it is described or anticipated. 2

  That the nature of this relationship is ironic in a profound way is one of the starting premises of this book. I aim to trace the place of ‘the riddle’ in Tolkien’s fiction not just for the sake of it, and not because I consider such riddles as appear in The Hobbit to be diverting entertainments, but rather because it seems to me that riddling in this existential sense is crucial to Tolkien’s whole artistic project. In a nutshell we could put it like this: for Tolkien the connection between words and the world is a deep one, not to be gainsaid or ignored. Riddles are a truer representation of the nature of reality than simple declarative statements. This is because, putting it simply, the world is not a simple or transparent business, but a mystery to be plumbed. Riddles themselves talk about ordinary objects or phenomena in an ironic way: they are sly, allusive, misleading. ‘The point’, in Carolyne Larrington’s words, ‘is not what is being said, but what is being concealed.’3 And this in turn embodies the subtle, necessary link, between anything in-the-world and the language with which it is described.

  This speaks, in the largest way, to the way the Old Northmen lived their lives. Irony is a way of expressing a sense that there is a gap between oneself and one’s world, a mismatch between will and thing. This idea shaped Norse culture in ways from small to large. Take, for example, death. The Old English approach to this existential universal was a grim sort of acceptance that we
must inevitably die, combined with a wry sense of the ironic mismatch between how much life we have in our doomed hearts. For the Anglo-Saxons the crucial thing was that death be met bravely. Their gods were capricious, puzzling creatures, because life is often that way; and those same Norse gods were themselves doomed to die (at the impending apocalypse the Northmen called Ragnarokr) because human life is so doomed. The question as to why that is poses one of the most profound riddles of all.

  Take Tolkien’s posthumously published tale The Children of Húrin (2006), perhaps the most uncompromisingly tragic thing he ever wrote. The story is set in the First Age of Middle Earth, thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings. There are no hobbits, wizards, ents or Tom Bombadils in this book, although there are elves, men and orcs. Sauron appears as a minor character, for at this point in Tolkien’s imaginary history Sauron was only the lieutenant of a far greater evil, Morgoth (also known as Melkor), a character of positively Satanic scope and wickedness. The tale opens with Húrin, a man from Mithrim, who fights in the battle of Nirnaeth Arnoediad, in which elves and men confront Morgoth, a very large number of orcs, and various assorted meanies such as Balrogs. The bad guys win. Captured by Morgoth Húrin is tormented by having his whole family cursed, and then being placed in a magic chair that not only preserves him from death but compels him to watch as this curse works its malign influence over his wife, son and daughter. This functions as a prologue to the rest of the tale; the bulk of the book is given over to Húrin’s son Túrin, with a little bit to his daughter Niënor. In fact, Tolkien adapts his narrative from two celebrated mythic precedents—the story of Kullervo from the Finnish epic cycle known as the Kalevala on the one hand, and the better known Sigfried legend from the Nibilungen epic on the other.

  That story traces the increasingly terrible lives of Húrin’s children under the withering curse of Morgoth. Túrin is high-minded, noble, taciturn, and darkly charismatic. His sister Niënor is beautiful and virtuous and nothing more (something that does little to counter the idea that Tolkien was not skilled at portraying complex women in his writing). Túrin flees his northern home and takes refuge for a time with the elves, who love him; but his haughty manner and his disinclination to speak up for himself leads to him being—unjustly—banished. Armed with a terrible and magical black sword he takes up with some outlaws, leads men, becomes a prince of the hidden city of Nargothrond, and finally, in some very powerful chapters given added heft by the sheer density and momentum accumulated by Tolkien’s lean prose, fights and kills the terrible dragon Glaurung.

  But despite his strength and bravery, Túrin’s destiny is consistently infelicitous. His pride contributes to the fall of the city of which he is prince; he inadvertently kills his best friend (who had just rescued him from orcs); and later he inadvertently marries and impregnates his sister who, when she learns what has happened, drowns herself in remorse. At various moments in the narrative Túrin comprehends what he has done, and is driven from his wits; but he always recovers them, propelled as he is by the ferocity of his will-to-revenge against Morgoth. But this last incestuous transgression is too great for him. The dragon Glaurung, dying, reveals Túrin’s incest to him, and Túrin can bear no more. He draws his sword, addressing it (‘what lord or loyalty do you know, save the hand that wields you? Will you slay me swiftly?’) and the sword replies with cold certainty: ‘yes’. Then Túrin sets the hilt of the sword upon the ground and throws himself upon the blade.

  The Children of Húrin is a tragedy not in the Aristotelian sense, for there is precious little catharsis here; but rather in the northern-European sense of humans encountering an overwhelming fate with unyielding defiance. And that is at the heart of Tolkien’s conception of heroism: precisely not achievement, but a particular and noble-hearted encounter with failure. Success in Túrin’s world is always local and short-term, and always happens within the larger context of inevitable failure. What matters is not how one triumphs, but the spirit with which one resists the terrible fate one knows to be unavoidable. The mismatch between will and thing is, here, at its most biting. Death cannot be avoided, or bought off, or conquered; it can only be defied. And defiance is the properly heroic response to that inevitability. This is a dramatisation of Freud’s famous ‘riddle’, ‘the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found, nor probably will be’.4

  In his fiction Tolkien proposes two complementary solutions to Freud’s deep riddle. The Children of Húrin embodies what we could call an Anglo-Saxon solution—that defiance in the teeth of an inevitable doom is the strength give to humans. But there is a Christian answer to this riddle too, that the riddle of death is ‘solved’ in Christ. Indeed, the extent to which Tolkien was able to constellate his deep fellow-feeling for the Anglo-Saxon code with his heartfelt Christianity is perhaps the key index to the success of his art overall. The Tolkienian notion of the eucatastrophe attaches a last-minute-reprieve happy-ending to the darker, older trajectory of inevitable loss heroically encountered; and, more, takes force and unexpectedness precisely from the fact that the preceding tale so unremittingly follows its Anglo-Saxon trajectory.

  There are riddles in Christianity too, although communicants usually refer to them by the less trivial-sounding term ‘mysteries’. I discuss some of those below as well; but for the moment I am interested in the pre-Christian, or early-Christian, ground upon which Tolkien’s fantasies erect their eventual moments of consolation.

  Not everybody shares Tolkien’s view of the Anglo-Saxons. John M. Hill deplores (though courteously) the sense of Old English culture found in the work of scholars such as Ker, Raymond Wilson Chambers (a friend of Tolkien) and Tolkien himself, with their stress upon ‘the angst of Germanic heroes caught in the chains of circumstance or their own character, torn between duties equally sacred, dying with their backs to the wall’. These perspectives, Hill suggests, ‘endure without apparent half-life … well into the last decades of the twentieth-century’, and quotes Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson by way of illustration:

  A pagan warrior brought up in this tradition would show a reckless disregard for his life. When he was doomed or not, courage was best, for the brave man could win lof [‘glory’] whilst the coward might die before his time. This is the spirit which inspired the code of the comitatus. While his lord lived, the warrior owed him loyalty unto death. If his lord were killed, the warrior had to avenge him or die in the attempt (and in extreme cases, perhaps, die with him). The lord had in his turn the duty of protecting his warriors. He had to be a great fighter to attract men, a man of noble character and a generous giver of feasts and treasures to hold them.5

  Hill’s point is not that this view is false, but that there is more ‘artful variation’ and ‘situational irony’ in the way it actually manifested; that the Anglo-Saxon warrior lived through the riddle of matching pagan belligerence with Christian pacifism in a way more than merely self-contradictory. This strikes me as right; but it also strikes me that Tolkien’s own fiction advances a much more ironic ethos than is sometimes thought.

  The Anglo-Saxon view of life is that it is a riddle not because it can be in some sense ‘solved’, but because there is an ironic relationship between what is presented and what is meant—between what is to-hand and how things really are. ‘Riddling’ is the best way to apprehend this irony, because the mismatch is something to be encountered playfully, joyfully, not surlily or resentfully. When you have fought bravely in battle and still lost, when your army is smashed and your lord killed beside you, the obvious (we might say: the logical) thing to do would be to concede defeat and surrender oneself to grief and despair. But the Anglo-Saxon response to such a situation is to celebrate, to fight harder. At the end of ‘The Battle of Maldon’, Byrhtwold addresses his exhausted comrades in some of the most famous words in the entire Anglo-Saxon canon (words Tolkien adapted for the speech of Theoden before the battle of Minas Tirith, in The Return of the King):

  The will shall b
e harder, the courage shall be keener

  Spirit shall grow great, as our strength falls away.6

  On a cosmic scale, this exultant irony, this counter-intuitive, riddling manner of being-in-the-world, finds expression in the Norse myth of ragnarök—the twilight of the gods. According to this story the impending end of the world will not be a righteous last judgement that shall reward the virtuous and punish the wicked, as in Christian traditions, but rather a glorious defeat in the battle between the gods and the forces of chaos. W. P. Ker thought ragnarök a kind of answer, proposed by the Anglo-Saxons to themselves, to the riddle of existence: ‘their last independent guess at the secret of the universe’.