The Riddles of The Hobbit (16 page)

The titular hobbit happens to have picked up a magic ring during the course of his travels. Ownership of this ring, and a rather shallow
learning curve, gradually make Bilbo better at thieving and sneaking about. When, against the odds, the party reaches the dragon’s mountain, the quest
is
achieved, much more by luck than judgement. Bilbo uses the magic ring to creep into the dragon’s lair and to steal one cup from the great hillocks of piled pelf; but that is as much as he can do. Luckily for all of them, the loss of this single piece happens to enrage the dragon, causing him to leave the mountain with the furious intention of burning up the local town of men. One of the defenders there, warned by a talking bird, shoots a lucky arrow that kills the beast. After this there is a big battle: armies converging on the mountain and its now undragoned hoard. The leader of the dwarf-band is killed, but otherwise things work out well for everybody. Finally, having spent almost all the novel adumbrating the ‘there’ of the novel’s subtitle, the story sprints through the ‘and back again’, hurrying the materially enriched Bilbo home in a few pages.

I stress the ‘incompetence’ angle in this retelling because, really, that is what characterises the main players. It is an endearing incompetence, used partly for comedy, partly for dramatic purposes (by way of racketing up the narrative tension and keeping things interesting) and partly to facilitate the readers’—our—engagement. Because we can be honest; we would be rubbish on a dangerous quest. We are hobbitish types ourselves, and
our
idea of fun is snuggling into the sofa with a cup of cocoa and a good book, not fighting gigantic spiders with a sword. Or more precisely, we enjoy fighting giant spiders with a sword—in our imaginations only.
The Hobbit
has been as commercially successful as it has in part because the hobbits are able (textually-speaking) so brilliantly to mediate our modern, cosseted perspectives and the rather forbidding antique warrior code and the pitiless Northern-European Folk Tale world.

That there is something haphazard about the larger conception of this adventure is part of its point. Obviously, it makes for a jollier tale if a clearly unsuitable comic-foil is sent on a dangerous quest, and a less jolly tale if that protagonist is some super-competent swordsman alpha-male. The bumbling, homely qualities of Bilbo, and the pinball-ball bouncing trajectory from frying pan to fire to bigger fire of the narrative, are loveable aspects of the whole. It also expresses a larger truth. The motor of the story is the idea that
adventure will come and find you
, and winkle you out of your comfortable hidey-hole. It is a beguiling idea, in part because it literalises the action of story itself.
We settle ourselves to read, in physical comfort; but the story itself transports us imaginatively out of our cosy cubby and away, upon all manner of precarious, exciting, absorbing and diverting journeys.

This is
The Hobbit
that appeared in 1937, to both acclaim and commercial success. But there is another
The Hobbit
; a second
The Hobbit
written by Tolkien, comprising revisions to this first edition, additional material written for the
Lord of the Rings
and the appendices of
The Lord of the Rings
, plus other material. The most significant of these latter are two separate prose pieces, both called ‘The Quest for Erebor’ first collected in the posthumously-published
Unfinished Tales
(1980). Tolkien’s first revisions were confined to the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter. After writing the first
Hobbit
Tolkien came to the conclusion that ‘the Ring’ was more than just a magic ring conferring invisibility on its wearer—that it was indeed the most powerful artefact in the whole world, one with which people could become so besotted as to lose their souls. Gollum, he reasoned, would not freely give up such an item. So he rewrote the scene, and all subsequent editions of the novel treat the encounter in a less light-hearted manner. This is symptomatic of something larger, a reconceptualising (Tolkien purists might say: a distillation or focusing) of his now-celebrated legendarium. No longer a folk-story, it now becomes a grand sacramental drama of incarnation, atonement and redemption.

This is not a random observation. Tolkien’s 1939 essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ celebrates two distinct modes of Fantasy, the homely and the transcendental. The former is epitomised by traditional fairy tales, which Tolkien sees as beautiful and profound narratives of escape and resacralisation. The latter is the New Testament, which Tolkien thinks shares those key qualities with fairy stories but which he also thinks exists on a higher, truer and more important plane. This is how he puts it:

The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending.’ The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.
1

My
beef, if I may slip into a nonvegetarian idiom for a moment, is not with Tolkien’s religious beliefs, which (although I do not share them) are clearly essential to the dynamic of his art. My beef is with the notion that
all our bents and faculties
have a purpose
. In Tolkien’s second version of
The Hobbit
, it is precisely the haphazardness, the intimations of glorious, human, comic incompetence, that must be sanded, smoothed and filed away. It is no longer enough for Gandalf to turn up on the doorstep of the world’s least likely adventurer merely because that is the sort of thing batty old wizards do. Now he must do so because he has a larger plan. In the first version of the story it does not really matter why Gandalf chooses a hobbit, of all people; or more precisely, his whylessness of choice is actually the point of the story. (‘I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging’, Gandalf says, with what could easily be read as desperation, ‘and it’s very difficult to find anyone.’) This is because the novel is not about Gandalf’s whys, it is about Bilbo’s adventure. Why he is chosen matters less than the way he acquits himself on his journey, and the extent to which he sheds his unheroism to become a better fellow. That is what matters because we are he. That is how the reading experience goes.

But in Tolkien’s second version of
The Hobbit
everything has to happen for a reason. Gandalf was not idly arranging an adventure; he was setting in motion one crucial play in a larger strategy of the grand war against Evil.

I knew that Sauron had arisen again and would soon declare himself, and I knew that he was preparing for a great war…. The state of things in the North was very bad. The Kingdom under the Mountain and the strong Men of Dale were no more. To resist any force Sauron might send to regain the northern passes in the mountain and the old lands of Angmar there were only the Dwarves of the Iron Hills, and behind them lay a desolation and a Dragon. The Dragon Sauron might use with terrible effect. Often I said to myself: ‘I must find some means of dealing with Smaug.’
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Just to be clear: I have no problem with what SF and Fantasy fans call ‘retconning’, the retrospective rewriting of a text to make it more coherent with the later iterations of that textual world. Not in the least, for I take ‘text’ to be fundamentally fluid and adaptable.
I can go further, and say that one of the things that gives Tolkien’s art depth and resonance is precisely the way he layers medium and deep historical pasts into his present-set tale; and having this secondary perspective on the material of
The Hobbit
adds echoey, plangent splendour to the whole. But that is not to say that this particular piece of retconning makes sense. On the contrary: it compels us to believe that Gandalf, deciding that it was a strategic priority that Smaug be eliminated, thinks not of sending an army, and certainly not of going himself and tackling the dragon with his, you know,
magic
. Rather he thinks: ‘I’ll go to the
extreme other end of the continent
, recruit a number of dwarves, some of them manifestly not up to the task (Bombur?), plus a hobbit
without any experience or aptitude for a mission of this sort whatsoever
, and send them off travelling halfway across the world past unnumbered perils, most of the way unchaperoned, in the hope that somehow
they’ll
do the old worm in.’ Why the dwarves? Well, I suppose they can at least be persuaded to go, since they regard Erebor as rightfully theirs; although you have to wonder whether a competent military strategist might not think first of approaching the men of Dale. But there is no reason in this scenario why Bilbo would be anyone’s first, or thousand-and-first choice. Actually, in this second version of the story Tolkien comes up with three reasons why it is a good idea to wager the entire success of the operation on Bilbo, a figure of whom Thorin rightly says ‘he is soft, soft as the mud of the Shire, and silly’, a judgement with which Gandalf concurs.
3
Those three reasons are:

1. That hobbits do not wear shoes, where Dwarfs do (‘suddenly in my mind [I pictured] the sturdy, heavy-booted Dwarves … the quick, soft-footed hobbit’), a consideration, certainly, since Dragons have good hearing; although you might think that advising the Dwarves to
   take off
   their boots might be less precarious than hanging the success of the enterprise around the neck of a sort of Middle-earth fur-footed Homer Simpson.
   
2. That Smaug would not know Bilbo’s scent, where he would recognise the smell of Dwarves, although apparently Tolkien added this as an afterthought to his MS (it is written in pencil: ‘a scent that cannot be placed, at least not by Smaug, the enemy of Dwarves’). A scent that cannot be smelt
   at all
   by Smaug would make more sense, but fair enough. The fact that he smells a thief in his lair but
   can not immediately place the thief’s provenance might confuse him for … oh, six seconds or so. The third reason is the most arbitrary of all–
   
3. Gandalf just feels in his water that it would be a good idea: ‘listen to me Thorin Oakenshield … if this hobbit goes with you, you will succeed. If not you will fail. A foresight is on me.’ Hard not to see this as code for ‘I’ve already written this story and know how it turns out’, which in turn comes dangerously close to a cheat.
   

The story of
The Lord of the Rings
is that even ‘the little people’ (which is to say: people like you and me) have their part to play in the great historical and martial dramas of the age; and it is a potent and truthful story, well told. But
The Hobbit
is that story only in its second iteration. In its first
The Hobbit
is not about the great dramas of the age; it is about us-sized dramas of people being taken out of their comfort zone and whisked away by Story.

I am happy that there are two versions of
The Hobbit
, and feel no desire to try and force them into some notional procrustean ‘coherence’. Only narrative fundamentalists, the textual Taliban, believe that all stories must be brought into that sort of rigid alignment. But of the two stories, really I prefer the one (homely, funny, a little bit slapstick and a little bit wondrous) over the other (grand-verging-on-grandiose, theological, epic and strenuously, to coin a phrase,
eutragic
). Although I do love them both. And I love the Dwarves vastly more than any number of elves. I love precisely their lack of graceful elegance. Thorin Oakenshield has some noble speeches in
The Hobbit
it is true; but his Dwarves are better at stuffing themselves with food and drink, and getting (with endearing incompetence) into ridiculous scrapes.

‘What’,
Bilbo asks Gollum, ‘have I got in my pocket?’ The answer turns out to be an item with the most profound importance for Tolkien’s larger invented world. But for a moment I want to think about the content of this riddle rather than its solution.

‘Pockets’—hand-sized pouches of cloth sewn inside trousers near the waist band and connected to the outside world via slits cut into the fabric of those trousers—are features of modern life. No mythic of Dark Age hero has them. Given how handy they are for keeping things in—money, keys, rings—they are a surprisingly recent development in the history of couture.
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The Anglo-Saxon, and the medieval, way of keeping your portable property about as you travelled was to cache it in a separate bag or pouch, which you then either carried in your hand or else tied to the outside of your clothes. The old term for what we would nowadays call ‘a pickpocket’ was
cut-purse
: a perfectly straightforward descriptive name, for this sort of thief would use a surreptitiously held knife to sever the cord that attached the purse to the victim’s clothes. Having your valuables dangling externally is clearly less secure than keeping the purse
inside
your clothes; although the best modern-day pickpockets are worryingly adept at getting hold of your stuff anyway.

We might expect, in a pre-Industrial, fundamentally ‘medieval’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, for pockets to be unknown. That they are not is a feature of the creative
anachronism
that characterises the novel. Tolkien’s hobbits, as many critics and readers have noted, are in effect nineteenth-century types. They wear waistcoats, smoke pipes, possess steam kettles and pop-guns,
all of which are items unknown in the medieval world of Gondor or the more archaic Dark Age world of the Rohirrim. It is, after all, hard to imagine Beorn playing with a pop-gun, or Bard the Bowman wearing a three-piece suit. We might want to object that no Europe-sized world (as I take Middle-earth to be, or at least that portion of it portrayed in the
Lord of the Rings
map) could include such wide divergences of cultural development. But to insist upon this would be to miss the point. The relative modernity of the hobbits is one of Tolkien’s ways of bridging the gap between our own, necessarily modern readerly sensibilities and the pre-modern matter that constitutes the bulk of his story.