The Riddles of The Hobbit (10 page)

The company said the decision to produce a calcium water had been made after the US Health Department highlighted calcium deficiency as a major problem in the US. SWG claims to be the first US bottled water company to directly address the growing consumer awareness of the benefits of calcium for healthier bones and teeth.
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Or, if you prefer: ‘Milk, rich in calcium, builds strong bones!’ Now I would hazard that I would not find many Old English scholars who could so much as give either of the above ‘answers’ the time of day, much less a mention in a critical edition of the
Exeter Book
. As far as I can see, the unwritten rules of scholarly investigation into OE riddles goes something like this: the point of the exercise is not really,
ingeniously or otherwise,
to answer
these riddles
. Rather the point is one of imaginative entry into the mind of an Anglo-Saxon. That is to say, the modern-day scholar sets out to answer them in a way that is consistent with the world-view of an Anglo-Saxon mind. The first answer (ice) is the sort of answer a ninth-century Middlesaxon might think of. The second (the Thames seen from a hill under certain conditions of light) is an answer that, although it probably wouldn’t occur to Mr Ninth-Century, would at least be comprehensible to him. But the third answer (‘milk’) would make no sense to him at all. The fact that it makes perfect sense to a twenty-first-century dweller in Middlesex, like me, is not relevant. These, after all, are Anglo-Saxon, not modern English, riddles.
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But why do we conceive of riddles in this way? A ‘riddle’ (from
rædan
, to counsel, advise or teach), like a kenning, is a mode of knowing. Riddles are about giving the commonplace a conceptual shake to enable us to see it anew. Thinking of milk as a way in which water becomes bone is a perfectly good way of knowing. If Bilbo Baggins asks ‘what have I got in my pocket?’ and Gollum answers ‘molecules of air’, then Gollum has answered the question asked. Would it be fair for Bilbo to say ‘no … although I
do
have molecules of air on my pocket,
that’s not what was in my mind when I posed the question
’—? Surely, if Bilbo were minded to say such a thing, then he ought to have cut straight to the chase and asked a different question, along the lines of ‘I’m thinking of something: guess what it is’. But that sort of question would make a very poor riddle indeed. Or:

Surely it is legitimate to argue that the purpose of asking a question is not to try and guess what is in the mind of the questioner, but
to
answer the question
. Which is to say, the point of interpreting text is not to try and retrieve what was in the mind of the author but, you know, to read the text. So I am going to stick with
milk
.

Another way of putting this would be to stress the
playful
aspect of riddling. It is a game; stimulating as well as diverting, but of necessity open-ended, an art of disclosure rather than enclosure. The name for the sort of person who would close down the possibilities of the game is
kill-joy
. But perhaps that looks merely petulant; so I shall close this chapter with a quotation from one of the most respected contemporary academic scholars of the OE riddle-form, Patrick J. Murphy. Murphy is less interested in simple ‘solutions’ to riddles (although he is also interested in those) because he is more interested in the way riddles work. In a word he is intrigued by what they
do
. He insists, helpfully, upon ‘the distinction between a riddle’s solution and its interpretation’, and he is open to the role of play in riddling. Riddles, he argues, ‘draw intricate links between disparate things, as birds become letters, bright riders shift into suns and stars, and onions strip away layers of allusion and mordant metaphor’.
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Riddling is a bringing-together; and in the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter of
The Hobbit
, riddles bring together two creatures, seemingly very different, but (we eventually discover) very alike.

Bilbo, fleeing goblins through the subterranean chambers of the Misty Mountains, chances upon a golden ring. Later, groping about in the dark, he meets Gollum, a murky creature who dwells in the gloom catching fish in the underground lakes and eating them raw. The ring, it seems, is his. Bilbo needs a guide to help him out of the labyrinth of caves. Gollum wants to eat Bilbo. These desires, clearly, are incompatible. The two decide to settle the matter with a riddle contest.

This may, if we stop to think about it, strike us as a puzzling way of mediating their opposing needs. This is a serious matter: life-or-death to Bilbo, and staving off starvation to Gollum. A game of riddles seems, perhaps, an infantile mode of settling the dispute. But Tolkien was drawing on a rich Old English tradition that saw riddles not as infantile or trivial. Riddles were more than simple word-games; they had binding power. Riddles for the Anglo-Saxons were not any old word-game or puzzling question; they were rituals, poems, a canon of questions about the world and ways of seeing that world. This in turn has a bearing on the legitimacy of the last ‘riddle’ Bilbo asks (‘what have I got in my pocket’; this, as Gollum rightly notes, is ‘not fair’). But before we get there let us look at the contest itself.

It seems uncontentious to call the ‘riddles in the dark’ chapter one of the best loved sections of the novel. This reflects both the intrinsic appeal of riddles, and the brilliant characterisation of Gollum himself, one of Tolkien’s—and Fantasy’s—most iconic figures. It is worth reflecting for a moment on this, for in this first iteration there is very little
to
Gollum. We know he is a hobbit-sized creature, who lives in the dark. His gulping throat-noise (from which he gets his name)
speaks to a degree of de-socialisation that combines the intimation of horrible appetites—after all, he does hope to eat Bilbo—with a kind of internalised nervousness or uncertainty. He has his habit of referring to himself both in the first and third person (‘I’ and ‘my precious’) which suggests the mild schizophrenia of the long isolated. More strikingly he also refers to himself in the second person plural, as ‘us’, as if folding both halves of his split personality into one. The first thing he says upon seeing Bilbo is a self-address to ‘us’: ‘bless us and splash us, my precioussss!’—a nice oath: clean (for a family audience) and with plenty of opportunity to show off the hissing sibilance of Gollum’s trademark phrasing. More, it hovers nicely between a positive, even pious sense—the baptismal splashing of water, the religious blessing—and something darker: ‘bless’ also means wound, and the splashing might be blood.

The conversation between Bilbo and Gollum that follows is predicated upon that ancient courtesy by which not even a troll, or a sphinx, will devour a person until a riddle has been asked and answered. (The courtesy of this circumstance is helped by the fact that Bilbo has a sword, which he does not forget to brandish.) The riddles themselves are presented to the reader as a series of poems, the verse in each case being Tolkien’s own.
1
We are given the answer to each riddle immediately. The first riddle is Gollum’s:

What has roots as nobody sees,

Is taller than trees,

Up, up it goes,

And yet never grows?

Bilbo announces this one to be easy. And since the answer is literally all around them, so it is:
mountain
. Nonetheless, it is in the nature of riddles to encourage a pedantic, even legalistic frame of mind in the riddled. Is the answer correct in all its particulars? For if not it will be straightforwardly misleading. The geological knowledge that tectonic activity results in mountains
actually
growing (Mount Everest is growing at a rate of several centimetres a year) postdates Tolkien’s novel, and certainly postdates the Anglo-Saxon culture out of which these riddles are drawn; so we can perhaps forgive the riddle for that inaccuracy. But in what sense, even for the Anglo-Saxons, do mountains have ‘roots’?

This
answer may perhaps puzzle us, for of course, unlike trees, mountains are not rooted in the earth. I used to assume that it was a common Norse belief that mountains were supplied with stony roots; that, in other words, the subterranea of mountain ranges (which, after all, nobody can see) were
like
the subterranea of forests. In fact the truth is otherwise. In the
Prose Edda
, an anthology of Norse myths composed (probably) by Icelandic king Snorri Sturluson we find the story of the terrible wolf Fenrir, a beast so powerful and monstrous it threatens the whole world. The gods try to restrain this being with increasingly strong fetters, but Fenrir breaks them easily. Finally though they manage to trap the beast with ‘a fetter called Gleipnir’.

It was constructed from six elements: the noise of a cat’s footsteps, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird.
2

This fetter, being both insubstantial as a fish’s breath and strong as a bear’s sinews, is beyond the power of Fenrir to break. What of the other four elements? One section of the ‘prose Edda’ (the
Gylfaginning
, or ‘the Gulling of Gylfi’) is styled as a conversation between a mortal called Gangleri and the god Odin. Having told him the story of the fetter called Gleipnir, Odin tells Gangleri: ‘though previously you had no knowledge of these matters, you now can quickly see the proof that you were not deluded. You must have noticed that a woman has no beard, a cat’s movement makes no loud noise and mountains have no roots.’ So there we have it; straight from the Norse’s mouth—the roots of mountains do not exist.
3
Whether we prefer to take ‘
as nobody sees
’ to be periphrasis for ‘
as do not exist
’, or whether we would rather take the riddle at face value and come up with an alternate answer (‘Yggdrasil’, for example) is up to us. Gollum, at any rate, is satisfied with the answer Bilbo gives him.

The second riddle is asked by Bilbo of Gollum:

Thirty white horses on a red hill,

    
First they champ,

    
Then they stamp,

Then they stand still.

When I was a boy, not yet a decade old, I received for a birthday present an audio-book version of
The Hobbit
, on four cassette tapes,
read by the great Scots actor Nicol Williamson. I listened to those tapes over and over. Indeed, I listened to this recording so many times that, even today as I read
The Hobbit
, Williamson’s lovely, cawing cadences still hover over my sense of the words. The audiobook text was abridged, and indeed would hardly have fitted onto only four cassette tapes otherwise. Mostly the abridgement was sensitively done, but at one point in the book—this one—the anonymous abridger made a mistake. The answer to this riddle is ‘teeth’; but the exchange that precedes the answer goes as follows: