The Riddles of The Hobbit Read online

  As far as it goes, and as a working theory, it is absolutely impregnable. It is the assertion of the individual freedom against all the terrors and temptations of the world. It is absolutely resistance, perfect because without hope. The Northern gods are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason; but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat is not refutation.7

  ‘What is a defeat that is not a refutation?’ takes the form of a riddle; and it has more than one answer. For Christians, like Tolkien himself, it is a description of the death of Christ, an individual extinction that is paradoxically eternal life for him and all his followers. Many critics have discussed the way Tolkien reconciled his own devoutly-held Catholic beliefs with this pre-Christian, very different answer to the puzzle. What is a defeat but not a refutation for the northmen? Ragnarök, ‘an allegory’ (to quote Ker again) ‘of the Teutonic self-will, carried to its noblest terms, deified by men for whom all religion was coming to be meaningless except “trust in one’s own might and main”—the creed of Kjartan Olafson (from the Laxdæla Saga) and Sigmundur Brestisson (in the Færeyinga Saga) before they accepted Christianity.’

  I suppose the danger is that this hefty, belligerent self-will may strike modern sensibilities as merely lunkish; or worse, as quasi-fascistic. What redeems it, I think, is the wit with which it is carried off: very far removed from the ponderous, deadening seriousness of those repellent twentieth-century political ideologies that styled themselves ‘Nordic’ in order to terrorise the world and destroy millions. A large part of the difference has precisely to do with the relationship of this ideology to truth. Truth for the fascist is something linear, forceful and strong. Truth in the sense this book discusses it is something more fundamentally oblique. Truth is not a swordstroke. Truth is a riddle.

  ‘The riddle’ also solves one of the problems of storytelling, what we could call the problem of fiction itself. It has occurred to many readers, as it certainly occurred to Tolkien—indeed, it has been one of the great ethical debates surrounding the novel in English since at least the eighteenth-century—that fiction is not true. I hardly need remind you that telling untruths, which we call ‘lying’, is a moral wrong. Storytelling is a special kind of lie, of course. It is marked, quite apart from anything else, by the reluctance of its auditors to call the teller on his or her mendacity. When a storyteller starts a story with ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome clever and rich … ’ we do not immediately shout out ‘there never was such a person! You just made her up!’

  A news report (assuming it be truthful) or a person relating the day’s events to a friend (assuming she has no desire to distort or mislead) are both stories that have a straightforward relationship to the reality they describe. Critics call this ‘mimetic’, a word with an rather complex semantic field, but which is the basis of the English words ‘imitation’, ‘mimic’ and ‘mimeograph’. It means that the stories copy reality, in much the way that a mimic copies somebody else, or a mimeograph copies whatever is written on a piece of paper. Mimesis does not mean that we are liable to confuse the imitation with reality. We are usually clever enough to tell that a mimic is only imitating somebody, not actually becoming that person; and we are almost always clever enough to know that we are hearing a story about the world, rather than somehow seeing the world itself through a magic casement. Irony, though, is different. An ironic story does not seek to reproduce or mimic the reality it represents; it goes about the business of representing reality in a more complicated, even a more twisted, manner. This, though, does not make the ironic worldview untrue. On the contrary, and for the reasons I discuss above, I tend to consider it a truer mode of art than simple mimesis.

  There are various sorts of ironic storytelling. One goes by the name Postmodernism, something with which I personally have a great deal of sympathy, but which we can be fairly sure that Tolkien himself (had he lived long enough to see its coming into vogue in the 1980s and 1990s) would have cordially disliked to an even greater degree than he disliked allegory. Then again there is another mode of ‘ironic’ art, more elegant and more widely celebrated than Postmodernism, although we might think equally removed from Tolkien’s own storytelling instincts. This is embodied in the novels of writers such as Jane Austen or Henry James, both of whom were fascinated by the ironies life throws up, and who framed their stories via a series of beautifully judged formal and stylistic ironic moves. Tolkien’s irony is of a different sort to this. His Catholicism was a genuine, deep part of his being. That meant that he thought of the world as simultaneously mundane and divine; as a realm in which all the ordinary obviousnesses obtain but also as an arena in which the sometimes puzzling grace of God works itself out.

  Readers often note that Middle-earth, although rendered in extraordinarily vivid detail and breadth, contains no temples or churches, no priests or holy men. This was a deliberate choice by Tolkien, not because he wanted to repudiate his religious beliefs in his writing, but for exactly the opposite reason—because the whole world was intended to embody the religion. Tolkien wrote to a Jesuit friend in 1953 ‘The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work … that is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like “religion”, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.’8 To read Tolkien’s published letters is to be struck, time and again, how deeply he meditated the incarnation as the central mystery of Christianity. That God became man, that the immortal died (to be born again), that the divine realm and the material realm intersected in this unique occurrence—all this, for Tolkien, is a riddle of the profoundest and most reverent sort.

  I want to dilate upon this point for a moment by pointing to a particular riddle of incarnation that occurs in The Lord of the Rings. The ents, who appear in The Lord of the Rings, are one of many strange beings that populate Tolkien’s landscape, but they are also a riddle. ‘Ent’ is an Anglo-Saxon word. It occurs, for instance, several times in Beowulf where it means ‘giant’ in the particular sense of malign, pagan creatures stalking the wilds, a menace to men. Indeed, the Beowulf-poet suggests that ‘ents’ are descendants of the Biblical Cain—like Grendl himself:

  From Cain’s bloodline all wickedness was woken,

  all ents and elves and all of the orcs too,

  also those giants that grappled with God

  for a long time; but at last they were paid off!

  (Beowulf, 112–15)

  Tolkien takes orcs to be wicked creatures, of course; but he has different ideas regarding the moral alignment of elves and ents. And, although Tolkien appropriated the name ‘ent’, there is nothing in Old English or Norse culture to approximate walking, slow-talking trees of deep wisdom and majestic virtue. This, it seems, is Tolkien’s own invention, one that perhaps elaborates the important role trees played in Anglo-Saxon and Norse culture, from specific holy trees to the great cosmic Yggdrasil tree that structured the universe.9 Nonetheless, Tolkien’s ents are a riddle.10

  What are the ents? Commentators, wondering whence the idea might have come, sometimes pick up a clue from Tolkien’s own correspondence and cite Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a source. The wicked Macbeth is abandoned by his army but is safe in his tower (like Saruman in Orthanc). He falls back upon the magic charm that he believes will keep him safe. He cannot fall until Birnam wood should march against him. As Malcolm’s army passes through the forest, each man takes up a branch or sprig as a ruse to hide their numbers. Watching from the battlements, Macbeth can see the forest begin to come towards him. Speaking for myself, I have never been entirely happy with this turn of events, howsoever dramatically effective it is (and it is, of course, a famously effective coup de théâtre). The problem is its vagueness. One feature of magic spells and charms in old culture is how precise their terms are. The fact that a crowd of men have chopped the branches from a number of trees and carried them a certain di
stance does not mean that Birnam forest has moved. The trunk and roots of the trees, as well as such boughs and branches as remain, are still where they ever were—a mapmaker (say) would surely still put Birnam wood in the same place.11 If supernatural magic guaranteed me life until a forest actually came to my castle, then I should insist upon the terms of the agreement until the forest actually came.

  So, here we have one possible solution to the ‘riddle’ of Tolkien ents, a solution that contextualises them in terms of Macbeth’s famous charm. Like Macbeth, Saruman from his tower sees a forest literally moving against him, and his downfall is assured. But actually I want to argue that Tolkien’s ents literalise a deeper, older riddle than Shakespeare’s. I want to suggest their solution is to be found in the New Testament:

  He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, ‘Do you see anything?’ And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. (Mark 8:23–4)

  Commentary upon this passage tends to stress its mimesis, its closeness to our sense of the way the world actually works. Cures for impaired sight take time to work. The blind man’s sight does not return immediately, but rather by a process of indistinct strengthening and gradual improvement (the next verse is: ‘once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.’) In other words the passage might mean ‘I see men; for I see [them] as trees [except that, unlike trees, they are] walking’. The man miraculously cured could distinguish them from trees only by their motion. On the other hand it is clear enough that a typological reading is available to us here too. For Christ is the tree of life; the dead wood of his cross, and his own dead body, become vivid and full of motion again at the resurrection, to spread across the world. It is characteristic of Tolkien’s literalising creative imagination—what we might think of as his mode of sub-incarnating—that he feeds this miraculous moment into his own writing as actual walking tree creatures. The passage in Mark is all about blindness and sight, about visibility and invisibility. It is about (to be a little more theologically specific) the way we can only see truly through Christ. It is easy to imagine that Tolkien, arbophile as he was, found peculiar resonance in the notion that the new sight of divine grace magically transforms ordinary men into fantastical walking trees. The destruction of Sauron’s ring, at the end of The Lord of the Rings, is a way of destroying invisibility itself; in terms of a Christian logic, it is the global overcoming of ‘blindness’, of not-seeing; the making plain of God’s grace in the world. It is in this, I think, that a solution to ‘the ents’ is to be found.

  This unpacks into a larger thesis about Tolkien’s approach to his art. In the ents, Tolkien imaginatively gifts an inanimate object with life, motion and personality. At the heart of The Lord of the Rings is a similar, though inverted and malign, process of reification: the ring itself—made of a substance more inert than the organic matter of arboreal life, yet somehow, mysteriously alive, possessed of volition and influence. ‘Mysteriously’, there, is meant in its fullest sense. How the One Ring is able to work its evil in the world is a riddle that is, in turn, one of the ways Tolkien articulates the riddle of evil more generally. In The Hobbit the Old English sense that treasure, though inanimate, can ‘possess’ living humans finds dramatic form in Smaug’s hoard. The ring, at this stage in the story, gifts invisibility and nothing more. As the story grew in Tolkien’s imagination, the heaps of treasure are replaced by a single golden ring. The Hobbit is a quest-narrative in which the object of the quest is to gain a quantity of golden treasure; The Lord of the Rings—this is one of the most frequently repeated critical aperçus about that novel—upends this venerable template, being the story of a quest not to find but specifically to lose one particular piece of golden treasure. But what links these two things is the quasi-animate power of the gold. When Saruman gives a kind of life to the inanimate by ‘industrialising’ the shire it entails the poisoning of the organic, and the scouring of the shire at the novel’s end is precisely the undoing of this wickedness. Underlying this is a very profound riddle about life and nature, the riddle: how may inanimate matter become animate? In various versions this asks ‘how can new life come into the world?’ and ‘from where did the first life come’ and similar questions that continue to give philosophers and scientists matter for their enquiries. A Biblical version of the question is Ezekiel’s ‘can these bones live?’ (Ezekiel 37:3)—a text read by Christians typologically as anticipating the resurrection. The inanimate object is brought alive. My point here, though, is that quite apart from its content the form of this conceit is riddling. In Daisy Elizabeth Martin-Clarke’s words, ‘the literary theme ascribing emotion to an inanimate object is characteristic of riddle literary traditions’.12 The Lord of the Rings takes this literary convention and literalises it, building a monumental imaginative edifice about it.

  Like scholars of the Anglo-Saxon age, the needful thing for readers of Tolkien is the ability to hold his quasi-pagan ‘Old English’ values and his immanent Christianity in harmonious relation. And there is a sense in which Tolkien’s use of Anglo-Saxon models functions, formally—as it were, essentially—as a riddle. Maria Artamonova has discussed the ways that Tolkien, not content with writing Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in English, also composed Old English Annals or Chronicles-style texts relating important events in his imagined history. Here is an example:

  MMCCCCXCIX Hér gefeaht Féanores fierd wiþ þam orcum / sige námon / þá orcas gefliemdon oþ Angband (þaet is Irenhelle); ac Goðmog, Morgoðes þegn, ofslóh Féanor, and Maegdros gewéold siþþan Féanores folc. Þis gefeoht hátte Tungolguð

  Here Fëanor’s host fought with the Orcs and was victorious, and pursued them to Angband (that is Iron Hell); but Gothmog, servant of Morgoth, slew Fëanor, and Maedhros ruled Fëanor’s folk after that. This battle was called the Battle-under-the-Stars.13

  The composition of this kind of expert pastiche was more than a mere quirk or eccentricity on Tolkien’s part. Nor, more interestingly, was it the equivalent to a ‘method’ actor immersing himself in his role prior to stepping on stage. Instead, it is best read as Tolkien deliberately part-obscuring or riddling his fictional material as part of a deliberate aesthetic strategy. Stepping outside one’s linguistic comfort zone can have the effect of freshening or vivifying one’s apprehension. Artamonova quotes Tolkien that ‘seen through the distorting glass of our ignorance’ our ‘appreciation of the splendour of Homeric Greek in word-form is possibly keener, or more conscious, than it was to a Greek’. If our vernacular is deadened by the plainness born of over-familiarity, then learning—or better yet, writing—a language with which we are unfamiliar is a way of bringing alive the vividness inherent in poetry and story.

  2

  Cynewulf and the Exeter Book

  I have started by arguing that riddles were important to Anglo-Saxon culture, important to Tolkien and that they remain important today. It is worth qualifying that judgement by noting that scholarship has not always seen things this way. For many people riddles are trivial and disposable, of only glancing relevance to larger questions of culture and art. Gwendolyn Morgan notes that the study of riddles and wisdom literature was ‘almost entirely neglected through the 1800s. Late in that century and into the first quarter of the twentieth a flurry of interest in solving riddles occurred … [but] this interest soon petered out.’ She adds that ‘the same tends to hold true up to the present’, although she does note that ‘Gregory Jember has defended the riddles as essential expressions of Anglo-Saxon culture and its world view.’1 This study thinks Jember is right.2 In this chapter I will try to say something about specific Anglo-Saxon riddles themselves, and the significance of riddling more generally.

  Many hundreds of riddles have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon times. How many hundreds remains unclear, for I do not believe there has ever been a complete tabulation.
A good number of these riddles were written in the vernacular, and many more were written in Latin. Indeed, to a large extent these represent distinct riddling traditions.

  The collection of riddles which exerted the largest influence … was that by Symphosius (an African writer of the fourth/fifth century), who was the author of one hundred enigmata, each one consisting of three hexameters. Aldheim, Eusebius, Tatwine and the authors of the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book all drew from Symphosius. The Anglo-Latin riddles are ‘literary’ riddles and are quite different from the ‘popular’ ones; they are provided with a title which gives the solution to the riddle, hence spoiling the ludic side of riddling and highlighting the erudite aspect of the compositions.3

  It is the ‘ludic’ aspect that is relevant to my purposes here, and I shall have little to say about Latin riddles. The Exeter Book is a different matter.

  One of the most celebrated collections of riddles, the Exeter Book is so called not because it is about Exeter, but because it lives there. It was bequeathed to the library of Exeter by Bishop Leofric after his death in 1072, ‘.i. mycel englisc boc be gehwilcum pingum on leoðwisan geworht’, ‘one big book written in English containing verse about many things’. Bound into this codex are various allegorical poems on Christian themes, some of the most famous elegies in Old English literature (amongst them The Wanderer and The Seafarer)—and ninety-six riddles. Some of the Exeter Book’s pages are missing, and scholars believe the original collection comprised a nice, round 100 riddles. It used to be thought that these riddles were written by the eighth-century poet Cynewulf. Modern scholarship considers this unlikely for a number of reasons, arguing instead that the riddles were originally written by various people or garnered from a wider folk tradition. This, in fact, has been the consensus for over a hundred years now. In 1910 Frederick Tupper wrote: