The Riddles of The Hobbit (21 page)

Hands wear gloves, and rings, and do many things; but one particular thing hands do is
write
. And ‘writing’ is the whole of the larger horizon of Tolkien’s achievement: his world is written into existence, before anything else can be said of it. Tolkien was a dedicated handwriter, whose own beautifully formed calligraphy, especially in the runic and Elvish scripts mentioned above, is a thing of beauty in its own right. Not that he was averse to more modern modes of ‘writing’. Christopher Bretherton sent him a typed letter, apologising for not hand-writing his message. Tolkien replied (on 16 July 1964) ‘I do not regard typing as a discourtesy. Anyway, I usually type, since my “hand” tends to start fair and rapidly fall away into picturesque inscrutability. Also I like typewriters; and my dream is of suddenly finding myself rich enough to have an electric typewriter built to my
specifications, to type the Fëanorian script.’
1
For a writer supposedly opposed to modern technology and ‘the machine’ this love of typewriters might seem odd; unless we refer to that very unTolkienian authority Marx, and his distinction between tools and machines. A tool is an extension of the worker’s body and therefore of his/her labour; a machine stands apart for the worker, and indeed turns the worker into an adjunct of itself, tending to alienate him/her from his/her labour. A typewriter is clearly a tool, rather than a machine.

And at any rate, writing by hand, whether with one tool (a pen) or another (a typewriter), has its own magic, and its own puzzles. And this is perhaps truer in
The Lord of the Rings
than any other thing Tolkien wrote. It may be worth out while to consider, in this context, the riddle of writing.

I shall begin to address that large riddle by focusing on a specific moment in
The Fellowship of the Ring
: the Moria chapter, when Frodo and his companions are driven beneath the Misty Mountains. There are evident parallels between the construction of
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
, structurally speaking. In the former, Bilbo and his companions must cross the Misty Mountains to get where they are going, and do so beneath rather than over the peaks. In the latter the situation is exactly paralleled for Frodo and his companions. In both books the parties encounter orcs, and something larger and more evil: Gollum and the ring in the earlier novel, the Balrog and Gandalf’s death in the latter.

But what I am particularly interested in for the moment is that it is in the Moria chapter, and only there (I note one exception below), that Tolkien’s fellowship encounter written texts. Specifically the chapter includes two splendid examples of Tolkien’s own gorgeous calligraphy, inset into the text. The first (and how I wish UK copyright legislation permitted me to reproduce it) is the elvish writing inscribed onto the gate at Moria. The image is of two pillars, and beside them two trees, the branches of each tree intertwined with each pillar. In the space between them is a large star, just below the centre of the composition; above this is a crown, with a second larger crown above that topped by a constellation of seven smaller stars. Linking the two pillars, and arcing over these various elements, is a semi-circular arch, in which the elvish script is carefully written.

This of course is the occasion for one of the most memorable riddles in
The Lord of the Rings
, one that manages to trick even Gandalf.
The Elvish script says ‘speak friend and enter’. Gandalf takes this to mean he must divine the magical password, and he tried a number of possible charm-words in vain. In fact the riddle has fooled him—he needs only do what he is told, speak ‘friend’ (
mellon
, in Elvish) and the door opens.

The second image is the less decorative. It is a rectangular plaque upon a tomb, on which is written, in angular dwarf-runes, the legend: BALIN SON OF FUNDIN LORD OF MORIA. These two images in the main body of the book, and the charts of various Elvish and Dwarfish alphabets in the book’s appendices, stand testament to Tolkien’s interest in fine calligraphy. But they also pose a question: why are there so few
written texts
in the world of the
Lord of the Rings
? There are lots of oral texts, for the novel is littered with interpolated songs and verses and riddles that have been memorised and repeated by various characters. But tabulating all the written texts mentioned does not give us very much:

1. Moria-writing
   : Namely the two texts already mentioned, together with the written record the Fellowship discover inside Moria. They attract attention by virtue of being so splendidly, visually rendered.
   
2. Bilbo’s book
   : But this exists in the novel largely (until the very end) as unwritten; something Bilbo will get around to at some point. More, it exists in a complicated metatextual relationship with the novel we are reading, so I will put it on one side for a moment.
   
3. The odd single rune
   : Gandalf marks his fireworks with a G-rune, for instance; and scratches a ‘G’-rune on a stone at Weathertop.
   
4. One ‘scroll’
   : mentioned and quoted in the ‘Council of Elrond’ chapter, in which Isildur writes down what the ring looks like, records its inscription, and declares it is ‘precious’ to him. Which leads me, of course, to:
   
5. The ring
   : Sauron’s ring has writing upon it, of course, although it is writing only visible when heated in Frodo’s fire. The writing, reproduced in the novel, is in the elvish script; although the language is the ‘black tongue’ of Mordor. It identifies the ring as the ‘one ring’ that rules all the others. Now, obviously, this is writing of the profoundest and most penetrating significance for the novel. More, it is evil. It precedes, and determines, all the (actual) writing that constitutes Tolkien’s novel. Can we say, taking things
   a little further, that it in some sense
   stains
   written text with some malign mark or quality? The ring-writing itself, and Isildur’s scroll, are permanent records of the wickedness of the ring in action, after all.
   

This might start us thinking about the way written marks can be misinterpreted. Strider and the hobbits do not understand Gandalf’s ‘G’ rune at Weathertop. Gandalf himself misses the true meaning of the Moria-Gate inscription. Writing, perhaps, is a riddle in this sense: that it tends to mislead or wrongfoot us, to distract us from the answer.

But actually I want to argue a position almost the reverse of this. Gandalf’s problem with the Moria-gate inscription is that he
over
-reads; he assumes a level of complexity that is not there. When he sees how straightforward the instruction is he laughs. Something similar is the case with ‘the remains of a book’ they find at the beginning of book 2,
chapter 5
. Initially it looks as though this, with an almost facetious literalness, is going to be ‘difficult to decode’, in this case because it is so materially damaged.

‘
We drove the orcs from the great gate and guard
—I think; the next word is blurred and burned: probably
room—we slew many in the bright
—I think
sun in the dale.
’

And so on. But in fact, the reading of this text reveals a near-fatal facility, a slippage between text and world. They read the words ‘
We cannot get out. The end comes, drums drums in the deep … they are coming’
and without intermission these words becomes their reality.

There was a hurrying sound of many feet.

‘They are coming!’ cried Legolas.

‘We cannot get out,’ said Gimli. (
LotR
, 341)

In other words, the thing with written language is not that it is too obscure, or ambiguous, or slippery; but
on the contrary
, that
it is too plain
. It does exactly what it says (you speak ‘friend’ and enter). It bridges the gap between text and world too immediately, and renders itself real with a dangerous completion. This is at the heart of the power of the ring. The whole novel is a written-textual articulation of that fact.

Writing
in this sense is prior; foundational. If we wanted to invoke Derrida, we could say:
Lord of the Rings
is a logocentric text. It is what you find when you excavate down, below the surface logic of the represented, past the oral traditions and remembered songs. Which is why Moria is the precisely the right place for these two fine calligraphic interpolations, and why no such writing (I mean: samples of actual Middle-earth calligraphy, inserted into the text) is found anywhere else in the novel, the ring excepted. The symbolic logic of Moria is: dig down deep enough, and you free a terrible, destructive evil. This evil is literalised as ‘Balrog’, a fiery agent of destruction. But the novel has already established the crucial fiery agent of destruction in the literal letters of the One Ring (‘“I cannot read the fiery letters,” said Frodo, in a quavery voice.’) Oral literature connects you with a living tradition of other people; but written literature short-circuits community and conducts a spark of terrible danger directly into reality.

There is a larger irony here, and it is one that recalls the idiom of riddles themselves. Indeed, it is almost too obvious to need pointing out—a meta-textual observation about how this potential-for-evil danger of written language inflects a text that is itself embodied in written language. But rather than getting diverted into that, I want to say something, briefly, about a different sort of ‘writing’: the writing with moving images of cinema.

An even more immediate mode of linking audience to story than written script, of course, is the motion picture. It is a handicap, if only a small one, that this book on
The Hobbit
was written before the author had the opportunity to see the three films recently made out of this book. Certainly it would be hard to discuss
The Lord of the Rings
today without also discussing the trilogy of films, directed by Peter Jackson, that were made out of the books by New Line cinema. It is a trivial observation that ‘films are not the same as books’—no film ever is, and actually I would say that Jackson did, by and large, a good job with an extremely difficult brief. There are moments when the divergence between written text and visual text is more marked, however. I do not mean the absence of Tom Bombadil, or the lack of any ‘Scouring of the Shire’: script-writing decisions made for at least arguably valid reasons. But to re-read—say—
The Two Towers
, after watching the second movie is an interesting experience.

Even at their best, motion picture adaptations of books (indeed
especially
the best examples of the form) are insidious and plaguey things,
liable to overwrite one’s memory of the source text. I had read
Lord of the Rings
many times before seeing the films, and have re-read the books since; and I find myself surprised by how different the emphasis is between this book and that film. There is the fact that the movie braided-together the stories of Frodo and Sam on the one hand, and Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli on the other, where Tolkien’s novel is scrupulous about separating them out. But more to the point is the treatment of the latter. Broadly this amounts to (I mean, in Jackson’s
Two Towers
): Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli pursuing the abducted hobbits; Pippin and Merry meeting ents, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli meeting the Rohirrim, and finally
a lengthy climactic hour-long battle sequence at Helm’s Deep
. To re-read the novel after seeing the film is to be struck by how localised and, in a way, low-key the Helm’s Deep material is—just the one chapter—and how elongated and emphasised, by comparison, is all the stuff on Fangorn and the ents. As if Tolkien loves trees more than battles; where Hollywood loves battles more than trees.

Of course, put it like that, and it seems obvious: of
course
Tolkien loves trees more than battles! Of course Hollywood takes the exact contrary view! But I think something else is going on here; something that almost a riddle. This is the question concerning the referent of the title:
which
two towers? Tolkien himself is not entirely helpful as far as this riddle goes. ‘The Two Towers’, he conceded, warily, ‘gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books 3 & 4; and can be left ambiguous.’ Initially he planned to call Book III
The Treason of Isengard
and Book IV
The Journey of the Ringbearers
, or else
The Ring Goes East
. He had several possible suggestions for an overarching name for the two together, an arrangement forced upon him by the exigencies of postwar publishing and not one with which he was happy.

The riddle, then, is: which two towers? Tolkien’s own illustration of the towers, and a note at the end of
The Fellowship of the Ring
suggests the towers are Minas Morgul and Orthanc. But in a letter to Rayner Unwin Tolkien instead specifies Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol. And as far as Tolkienian scholarship goes, a case has been made for pretty much any permutation of the five towers that appear in the story: the tower of Cirith Ungol, Orthanc, Minas Tirith, Barad-dûr and Minas Morgul. The motion picture, of course, plumps unambiguously for: Barad-dûr in Mordor and Orthanc in Isengard. I will come back to the towers in a moment.

I
ask myself, as any critic ought, howsoever few actually do: does my proximity to this novel make it impossible for me to get the requisite critical distance upon it? Take for example, the matter of Gandalf’s return from seeming death in the mines of Moria. This is a narrative development that seems to me (on my umpteenth, or perhaps umpty-first, reading) perfectly natural and logical. But I know some who did not know the story, and who, watching the movies for the first time, groaned mightily when Ian McEllen popped up again, thinking it a cheesy and ridiculous plot-twist.

Gandalf’s return is not gratuitous, or out of context. Indeed, the whole of the third book (
Two Towers
1) is
about
this—about, that is to say, rebirth. It is the return from death; or more precisely it is about the vivification of the inert. So on the one hand characters are presumed dead and then discovered alive: Merry and Pippin, for instance, as well as Gandalf himself. Of course the case with Gandalf is more than that the others thought him dead but actually he was alive. Gandalf actually does die, becomes a corpse, and then is reborn, ‘sent back’ in his word, although he does not vouchsafe by whom. What was it like being dead? That is a riddle worth answering. ‘I lay staring upward while the stars wheeled over, and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth.’
2
‘Wandered’, with its hint of ‘wondered’, is particularly nice.