The Riddles of The Hobbit (2 page)

I speak this dialect myself, or at any rate a debased twenty-first century version of it (dialects, like languages, tend to change over time); and whilst it would be distorting to describe it as a
riddling
mode of speech it is certainly one in which the relationship between the said and the meant is not straightforward. We might say that it is a mode in which the gap between courtesy and unvarnished truth is closed with irony, of a sort. And irony is the currency of the riddle, just as ‘mimesis’ is the currency of realist discourse. And there, in a nutshell, is the argument I am making in this book.
The Hobbit
appears to be a straightforward childrens’ adventure tale; but it is actually much less simple, rather more ironic, than that. ‘Irony rather than mimesis’ also happens to be a fairly neat thumbnail for separating out the textual strategies of science fiction and fantasy from ‘realist’ works more generally conceived. That
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
are foundational texts for the modern genre of ‘Fantasy’ does not seem to me coincidental. It ought not to surprise us that riddles are more than just occasional diversions in a novel like
The Hobbit
.

In
fact,
The Hobbit
is a deeply riddling book. In saying so I am suggesting that ‘the riddle’ runs deeper through the novel than merely providing some of the matter for its fifth chapter ‘Riddles in the Dark’, in which Bilbo and Gollum swap riddles. There are, for one thing, other riddles in the book. When Bilbo encounters Smaug he talks to the beast in riddles, and the narrator assures us that riddling ‘is of course the way to talk to dragons … no dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk’. When Bilbo meets Gandalf for the first time, right at the start of the novel, the wizard treats the hobbit’s simple greeting of ‘Good Morning’
as
a riddle:

What do you mean? Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not, or that you feel good this morning, or that it is a morning to be good on?’

And throughout Tolkien styles his story as a series of problems to be solved, or riddles to be unriddled: obstacles, set-backs, mysteries and secrets structure the storytelling. This, I argue, is a way of embodying a larger vision; for it is not just that
The Hobbit
is a novel that
contains
riddles. It is a riddle in a larger, formal sense. It is a text that articulates a number of very big questions. In the pages that follow I try to unriddle some of these: the riddle of this novel’s relationship to Tolkien’s next novel,
The Lord of the Rings
(a more puzzling relationship than merely that of prequel and sequel); the riddle of the book’s relationship to the 1930s, the troubled decade out of which is was produced; and the riddle of its enduring popularity. The ubiquity of
The Hobbit
perhaps occludes the oddity that a book so profoundly (and designedly) old-fashioned could somehow manage to capture the zeitgeist of that rather un-nostalgic century designated ‘twentieth’. It has fed, as a river does an estuary, the profusion of ‘Tolkienesque’ books produced in the latter third of that century, and which continue being produced in this, our twenty-first (I touch on the riddle of Fantasy’s commercial success in the ninth chapter here). And there is the central riddle, to which I return in the final chapter, that perhaps looks more straightforward than it is: what is a
hobbit
?

Setting out, as I do here, to read Tolkien’s work under the aegis of ‘the riddle’ is, amongst other things, an attempt to explore something I take to be axiomatic of generic Fantasy, and of science fiction, too: that (to repeat myself) its relationship to reality is ironic rather
than mimetic; an art not of closure but disclosure, asking questions and playfully problematising our attitudes to the objects of our life. This, as the first chapter sets out to argue, is something Tolkien draws from the Anglo-Saxon culture he admired so greatly. But there is more to it than that.

One of the things implicit in my approach in this book is that ‘the riddle’ is a trope for reading itself. Of course not all texts present themselves as riddles, and not all critical interpretations are best viewed as ‘the right’ answer to the questions the texts pose. But there are several reasons for taking
The Hobbit
as more than just an entertainment. It is full of riddles, but it also constellates ‘riddling’ in a larger sense; and this is because of its roots in Tolkien’s understanding of, and love for, Anglo-Saxon culture, as well as his desire to story-forth lived-through solutions to the ‘riddles’ posed by fundamentally religious mystery.

Reading is inevitably an unriddling. It is just that sometimes the riddle is more obviously framed
as
a riddle. Since this is crucial to the argument I hope to go on to make in this book, and since an obvious objection presents itself, I shall say a little more about it. The obvious objection is that I am tendentiously eliding two only superficially similar things: the riddle as a specific, and minor, literary genre on the one hand, and ‘the riddle’ as a metaphorical mode of ‘questioning, interpreting and reading’ on the other. I hold up my hand. I am indeed doing this, not out of conceptual confusion but precisely because I believe the former takes force and life from the latter. The riddle in the strict sense focuses and intensifies the same impulses that inform literary studies and reading more generally.

To quote W. P. Ker, a scholar of the Dark Ages whose work directly influenced Tolkien’s own academic work, the riddle as ‘translation of ideas’ is

peculiarly fitted for literary exercises: it requires neatness, point, liveliness. Hence it is not surprising that enigmas of this sort, with nothing altered in their methods of fancy, should adapt themselves to all changes of literary expression.
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Ker’s argument is not as far-reaching (he might say: not as over-reaching) as is mine, here; he sees riddles as a minor part of the kingdom of letters, and is uninterested in their meta-textual or metaphorical
application to the larger matters of reading, believing in God and living. Nevertheless his statement here rather neatly encapsulates the thesis of this study.

It also, usefully, directs the spotlight on pre-Conquest culture, something with which this study must be largely (though not exclusively) concerned. Ker notes that ‘poetical riddles were produced in England more largely than anywhere else in the Dark Ages, both in Latin and the native tongue’. There is something in the riddling mode that the English find peculiarly fascinating. Indeed, insofar as riddles involve making familiar objects beautifully strange, describing things in de-familiarising ways, it is at the heart of ‘poetry’ in the largest sense.

To illustrate what I mean by this I am going to step away from Tolkien for a moment, and quote two poems by Rudyard Kipling, both written at the time Tolkien himself was a young man, and both concerning the war in which Tolkien fought (although, of course, Tolkien fought on land rather than at sea). The first is 1915’s ‘The Changelings’:

Or ever the battered liners sank

With their passengers to the dark

I was head of a Walworth Bank,

And you were a grocer’s clerk.

I was a dealer in stocks and shares,

And you in butters and teas;

And we both abandoned our own affairs

And took to the dreadful seas.

Wet and worry about our ways—

Panic, onset and flight—

Had us in charge for a thousand days

And thousand-year-long night.

We saw more than the nights could hide—

More than the waves could keep—

And—certain faces over the side

Which do not go from our sleep.

We were more tired than words can tell

While the pied craft fled by,

And
the swinging mounds of the Western swell

Hoisted us Heavens-high …

Now there is nothing—not even our rank—

To witness what we have been;

And I am returned to my Walworth Bank

And you to your margarine!

To read this poem is to understand not only its specific referents—that these two men left civilian jobs to serve in the Royal Navy, and afterwards went back to civilian life—but also to comprehend that as much as it celebrates the more traditional martial values of bravery, persistence, duty and so on, it also heroises something more specific, a mode of English (we could say; Old English)
reticence
, or
understatement
. The rhetorical term for this is litotes, something of which Anglo-Saxon poets were extremely fond. When a man achieves something very large, for example heroic feats of battle (or in Kipling’s case, heroic feats of sheer survival) it is not only more seemly, it is more rhetorically forceful and effective to understate rather than overstate the achievement. We could say: the banker and the clerk are no small heroes.

It would not be right to call this poem a riddle as such, of course, since it does not seek to hide its meaning, although
part
of its affect is generated in ways that are more riddling. I very much like, for instance, the way marine terminology haunts even the landlubber existences of these two characters: such that ‘Walworth Bank’ sounds like it belongs on a naval map alongside Dogger Bank, and ‘margarine’ sounds like a sea-y ‘mar’ word. Here is another Kipling poem, ‘The Egg Shell’ (originally written in 1904, but enlarged and republished in 1916):

The wind took off with the sunset—

The fog came up with the tide,

When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell

With a little Blue Devil inside.

‘Sink,’ she said, ‘or swim,’ she said,

‘It’s all you will get from me.

And that is the finish of him!’ she said

And the Egg-shell went to sea.

The
wind fell dead with the midnight—

The fog shut down like a sheet,

When the Witch of the North heard the Egg-shell

Feeling by hand for a fleet.

‘Get!’ she said, ‘or you’re gone,’ she said.

But the little Blue Devil said ‘No!’

‘The sights are just coming on,’ he said,

And he let the Whitehead go.

The wind got up with the morning—

The fog blew off with the rain,

When the Witch of the North saw the Egg-shell

And the little Blue Devil again.

‘Did you swim?’ she said. ‘Did you sink?’ she said,

And the little Blue Devil replied:

‘For myself I swam, but I think,’ he said,

‘There’s somebody sinking outside.’

Roger Peppe recalls a family recital of this poem in which the poem was read both as ‘a nice piece of nonsense’ and a technically specific piece of naval realism.
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The latter reading, I would suggest, enhances rather than annihilates the former. That is how riddles work. A ‘whitehead’ is a naval torpedo (named after its inventor, Robert Whitehead) and this is a poem that tropes the World War I war at sea as a sort of dark fairy tale. The eggshell submarine is a particularly nice notion; not just its fragility but the sense of it as
hatching something out
—death, in this case. Also neatly worked is the way the submarine’s captain’s name suggests not only his diabolic purpose, but some sense of his depression: his mood mimicking his physical descent through the waters. It can not be a jolly business, lurking through the waters and killing civilians. It is the sensitivity of Kipling’s touch here that is the really remarkable thing; the way he balances the poem between a surface-meaning akin to the phantasmagoria of fairy tale and a deeper meaning tied to actual naval operations. It is something that gains force from precisely the tension between ships on the surface of the water and submarines below that surface.

It does this powerful poem no disservice to read it as a riddle. On the contrary, it is a literary work that points up how expressive and potent
riddling can be as a textual strategy. Some poetry is more straightforwardly riddle-like than others. John Donne’s ‘A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning’ (written 1611) tropes the situation of the lovers as like the two spars of a hinged compass or divider. Four centuries later Craig Raine wrote a poem called ‘The Onion, Memory’ (1978). In a sense both poems are built straightforwardly around riddles: ‘how is love like the two limbs of a divider?’; ‘why is memory an onion?’ Donne’s poem gains force from the oddity and novelty of its conceit, where Raine goes a step further, with a conceit that is not only strikingly odd and novel but cleverly wrongfooting too. My experience of teaching Raine’s poems to students is that readers asked ‘why is memory like an onion?’ will tend to focus upon the physicality of the vegetable and say things like ‘because it is layered?’ or ‘because it grows as it is buried?’ Raine’s solution to his own riddle is neater, and more moving (memory is like an onion because it makes me cry).

I should add that not all poetry works this way; perhaps not most poetry. Metaphysical and Martian poetry both tend to foreground riddling conceits, but I do not want to limit myself to those two modes only. If I tell you that ‘any poem requires a sort of unriddling, even if it is merely the construction of a context that makes sense of the direct’, you might object that this dilutes the meaning of the word ‘riddling’ to the point where it loses purchase. But to argue that is, tacitly, to imply that most poetry
can
be simply decoded—that the world itself is simple. This is not right. The world is not simple, at least in the things that matter the most. By troping reading as ‘unriddling’ I am talking about more than simply solving certain clues, or slotting a particular solution into place. I am, on the contrary, thinking of ‘the riddle’ as the idiom of all epistemological
process
. Here is a poem that can neither be described as ‘Metaphysical’ nor ‘Martian’, but which is nonetheless (I think) a kind of riddle.

She tells her love while half asleep,

In the dark hours,

With half-words whispered low:

As Earth stirs in her winter sleep.

And puts out grass and flowers.