Master of Middle Earth (4 page)

Well, Tolkien does
not leave his audience, young or old, without some guidance. He comes right out
and says of Bard's claim when first uttered, "Now these were fair words
and true, if proudly and grimly spoken; and Bilbo thought that Thorin would at once
admit what justice was in them." Thorin's refusal is characterized as
dwarfish "lust" for gold fevered by brooding on the dragon's hoard.
The experienced reader of Tolkien's other writings recognizes here his usual
condemnation of the cardinal sin of "possessiveness," which besets
dwarves as a race and which indeed is at the core of all the evil underlying
the War of the Ring, and much other ill in the world besides. But Bard is a
little too eager to resort to arms, being himself somewhat afflicted by the same
curse. He has to be rebuked by the elf king, who contrives to conquer the same
inclination to greed in his own breast, "Long will I tarry, ere I begin
this war for gold . . . Let us hope still for something that will bring
reconciliation." Bilbo tries to break the deadlock by setting a moral
example, but one which, oddly, requires an initial act of theft. After hiding
in his pocket the great jeweled Arkenstone he steals from the recovered
treasure, on the theory that it represents the one-fourteenth share promised
him by the dwarves, Bilbo carries it secretly to Bard's camp by night, gives it
to him freely to use as a bargaining counter against Thorin, and returns to the
dwarves inside the mountain to face the music. For all this he is highly
praised by Gandalf, surely a spokesman for Tolkien. Bilbo's self-sacrifice does
not work out as planned, however, and open war between the contestants for
Smaug's gold is averted only by the unforeseen attack of an army of goblins,
which unites them against the common enemy. Tolkien's solution of the complex
problem of ownership is finally moral. It comes about through the dying
Thorin's repentance for his greed, which leads his followers to a generous
sharing of the hoard with their new friends. This strongly fortifies the moral
tone of the adventure, which began sordidly enough from motives of profit and
revenge. But a good deal of rather adult territory has to be traversed to reach
this consummation. One wonders what most child auditors would get out of it
beyond the general impression that it is wrong to fight over who owns what. In
this climactic spot the story really operates at two separate levels of
maturity.

A similar double
track seems to run through that other critical episode of Bilbo's encounter
with Gollum in the tunnels under the goblin mountain.
⁴
The riddle
game the two play would be fun for audiences of any age, as its prototype was
in Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature. But the case may well be otherwise when it
comes to the portrayal of Gollum's character, with its mixture of cruelty,
greed, and miserable loneliness, and Bilbo's response of horror, fear, and
pity. Taken alone, any one of these emotions is as familiar to a child as to
his parents, but their skillful blending as achieved by Tolkien requires some
sophistication of understanding, which comes only with years. Particularly the
pity that causes Bilbo to spare the life of a vile creature whom he hates and
fears seems a high moral quality of which Tolkien writes, over the heads of all
save a mature audience: "A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror,
welled up in Bilbo's heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or
hope of betterment ..."

Tolkien is already
looking ahead to that scene of revelation in
The Lord of the Rings
in
which Gandalf tells Frodo that Bilbo's compassion in sparing Gollum would later
save the world. However that may be, in
The Hobbit
the whole episode is
one more example of Tolkien's writing at the same time both for children and
for the parents who will often be reading them the tale. A fair enough
practice, provided it can be so managed as not to confuse or irritate both
parties.

Plenty of other
passages of the same double character come readily to mind, frequently in the
form of sly hits by Tolkien at some favorite targets in modern life. He pokes
fun, for instance, at the stodgy respectability of hobbit (or human) society
which brands as "queer" any hobbit who travels to foreign parts or
has even mildly unusual experiences. The family of such a black sheep always
hastens to hush up the offense. Finding himself "no longer quite
respectable" on his return from his adventure, Bilbo "took to writing
poetry and visiting the elves." Whereupon his neighbors thought him mad.
Tolkien laughs at this same rationalistic rejection of fantasy again in the
Lake-town episode when he writes that "some young people in the town
openly doubted the existence of any dragon in the mountain, and laughed at the
greybeards and gammers who said that they had seen him flying in the sky in
their younger days"—this despite the fact that Smaug is snoring on his
hoard not many miles to the north. Or, another shaft at modern skeptical
materialism: ". . . one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when
there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and
prosperous . . ." Or, more plainly still, Tolkien's usual vendetta against
our machine age showing through his remarks about goblins, that they love
wheels and engines: "It is not unlikely that they invented some of the
machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices
for killing large numbers of people at once," but in Bilbo's day
"they had not advanced (as it is called) so far." Tolkien was
ecologist, champion of the extraordinary, hater of "progress," lover
of handicrafts, detester of war long before such attitudes became fashionable.

Besides the
paramount interest
The Hobbit
can claim in its own right as the earliest
specimen of Tolkien's fiction to be published and therefore as showing his art
in its infancy, it has also great interest as the immediate precursor—and, to
some extent, source— of the far more finished
Lord of the Rings.
In the
Foreword to the latter work Tolkien describes
The Hobbit
as being drawn
irresistibly toward the materials he had been assembling for several years past
to tell the history of the earlier Ages of Middle-earth. So much so that
glimpses crept into it "unbidden of things higher jar deeper or darker
than its surface: Durin, Moria,

Gandalf, the Necromancer,
the Ring." For the most part Tolkien manages to keep unobtrusive these
"unbidden" incursions of serious historical matter not properly
germane to a children's story, but they do color the tale and perhaps help to
account for those graver, more adult touches we have been discussing.
Contrariwise, the writing of
The Hobbit
may well have served to
crystallize Tolkien's thoughts about the historical materials, and particularly
seems to have supplied a number of ideas that found their way, transformed, into
his epic.

The theme for
The Return of the King,
for instance, which has a major place in
The
Lord of the Rings,
first appears in embryo toward the end of
The Hobbit.
Thorin is the rightful heir to Erebor by descent from his grandfather, King
Thror, but he and his companions set out with no intention of killing Smaug and
reclaiming the throne. Their purpose is simply to steal the treasure and
abscond fast. Only when he arrives destitute in Lake-town and hears its people
singing old legends about the golden age to ensue when a dwarf king comes back
to the mountain does Thorin announce, "I return!" From this point his
resolution to stay on as ruler develops naturally after he comes into
possession of the treasure in the halls of his forefathers.

When Tolkien
brought Strider into the plot of the epic at Bree without (by his own
confession) having yet the least "notion . . . who Strider was," he
could not have had in mind the possibility of revealing him later as heir to
the throne of Gondor.
⁵
It looks very much as if Tolkien's first
conception of the plot of
The Lord of the Rings
was solely of a
dangerous journey by Frodo and his companions into Mordor, similar to Bilbo's
mission to steal the dragon's treasure. Of this journey Strider was to be only
a forester guide. The new role for him as future king was a master stroke,
suggested by its prior use in
The Hobbit,
bringing in its train a far
richer and more varied conception to the epic. Obviously Strider-Aragorn is no
Thorin.

Character is
transmuted along with the role it serves, and his successive steps to the
throne are planned with great skill to assist Frodo and Sam in their
pilgrimage.

The eagles, too,
have prominent parts in both works. They save Bilbo and the dwarves from
goblins and wargs when even Gandalf is powerless, and carry the whole party on
their backs some distance eastward. At the Battle of the Five Armies their
attack on the goblin host with beak and wing is the decisive blow which turns
the tide against them. Tolkien remembered these eagles as he came to write the
epic. When Gandalf needs rescuing from the prison of Orthanc or from the cliff
on which his naked body lies after the fight with the Balrog, it is Gwaihir the
Windlord who bears him away on his broad back. The eagles do no fighting in the
final battle of Cormallen but they come flying to pluck Frodo and Sam off the
slopes of Mount Doom just before it erupts. They are even welcomed by the
beleaguered armies in both works with the identical cry, "The Eagles are
coming!"
⁶
Yet the birds in the epic are dignified by the more
stately context in which they operate. They no longer rend and tear, as in
The Hobbit,
but maintain an aloof lordliness as wings of rescue only.

Examples of this
sort might be multiplied. But of special import is the use Tolkien makes of the
Ring he first described in
The Hobbit
as a prize won by Bilbo from
Gollum in the riddle contest. Judging by the text of that story as a whole,
Tolkien originally thought of the Ring only as one of those rings of
invisibility that abound in fairy tales, wonder-working but harmless. Bilbo
puts it on his finger and takes it off frequently as a means of escape from
dangers that threaten him from time to time in caves, forests, dungeons, and
battles. Yet it does not enslave him or impair his moral outlook in the
slightest. On the contrary, he has become a stronger and better hobbit by the
time the story ends. After this first version had been completed Tolkien began
writing
The Lord of the Rings
as a sequel and only then, it seems,
conceived of the scheme of taking over Bilbo's Ring and turning it into the
potent instrument of evil around which swirls all the action of the epic.
Bilbo's finding of it, which in
The Hobbit
is merely a turning point in
his personal "career," was to be magnified into a turning point in
the history of Middle-earth. The Ring itself, which
The Hobbit
does not
report as belonging to the Necromancer or anybody else, was to be attributed to
Sauron as maker and master, in order to account for its malignant power over anyone
wearing it.

The Ring,
therefore, is the link that inseparably binds the later epic to the earlier
children's story. But how to explain the glaring differences between Bilbo's
harmless little gold band and Sauron's ruling Ring on which hung the fate of
the world? Tolkien does not really try to explain them in any detail, but he
does give some hints to pacify the curious reader. In the section of his
Prologue to the second (1965) edition of the epic, titled "Of the Finding
of the Ring," Tolkien remarks that Bilbo had not told his friends the true
story of how he obtained the Ring and that Gandalf had long suspected the
falsehood. Such a lapse on the part of a usually truthful hobbit struck Gandalf
as very "strange and suspicious" and made him begin to doubt that the
Ring was the innocent plaything it seemed on the surface. Of course, Gandalf
knew the story of Sauron's Ring. He was starting to wonder what the cause of
Bilbo's deceit could be and to connect it dimly with the Ring that had come so
mysteriously into his possession.

By this new
element prefacing
The Lord of the Rings,
as well as by some textual
modifications in the latter editions of
The Hobbit,
Tolkien provides for
the necessary transition from the latter's mere ring of invisibility to the
epic's great Ring of Power. Even so, of course, for the purposes of
The
Hobbit
Bilbo's ring continues to be only a toy, useful for escapes and
escapades, but having no deeper moral significance. No reader who had not
previously read the epic would sense anything malefic about it. The story of
The Hobbit
has its own kind of logic quite different from that of the epic.
To confuse them is to do a disservice to both tales. In sum, it is important to
see
The Hobbit
as essentially independent of the epic, though serving as
a quarry of important themes for the larger work.

To illustrate the
latter point further, consider how similar the two pieces are in their basic
structure. Both begin at Bilbo's home with a hobbit hero who is induced by
Gandalf to set out on a long journey into enemy country to accomplish an
apparently impossible quest. Each hobbit, with his companions, first finds
refuge at Rivendell, where Elrond helps forward them on their mission. After
overcoming many hostile creatures en route, varying much in the two cases but
having in common such antagonists as trolls, wargs, ores, and even spiders
(those in Mirkwood are descendents of Shelob), both groups traverse desolate
regions of terror. Bilbo's Desolation of Smaug parallels the Dead Marshes
outside Mordor's north gate.
The Hobbit
of course lacks the great
supporting scenes of
The Lord of the Rings
in Fangorn Forest, at Helm's
Deep, Edoras, the Paths of the Dead, and so on, but despite their rich
diversity that is all they are structurally, supporting scenes to the
all-important struggle of Frodo and Sam toward Mount Doom. Finally, both plots
crest in battles that pit against each other most of the persons and races
prominent in previous actions of the story, and subside in the end with a
return of the hobbits to the homes from which they set out.