The Riddles of The Hobbit (26 page)

This is part of the appeal, but also of the strength, of Fantasy as a modern phenomenon. We prefer stories of Marvel superheroes to actual stories of ‘crime fighters’ (policemen, soldiers and so on) because we have lost faith in the latter, or more precisely lost faith that the latter can ever exhibit the kind of perfect heroism we want our stories to articulate. Hogwarts, being fictional, can apprehend something very important—school—without being tangled in the messy specificity of actual real-world schooling. A sequence of novels set in Eton would be noisome; although that is, in effect, what Rowling has written. The twentieth century has cured us of our attachment to a certain kind of ideology-text; and the cure we have chosen is: worldbuilt fiction. I could add lots of other examples, from West Wing to Westeros. But I have probably said enough.

I said at the beginning of this chapter that I intended to dodge what would be the onerous duty of listing all the figures who have written novels in the Tolkienian mode. But I do want to add, as a pendant, an observation about one writer of post-Tolkien fantasy, because she happens to be so very good—and because a
riddle
relevant to our purposes here is fashioned in her greatest novel. I am talking about Ursula Le Guin.

Le Guin’s
Earthsea
series, beginning with
The Wizard of Earthsea
(1968) is not only amongst the finest examples of post-Tolkien fantasy, it is explicitly and directly influenced by Tolkien himself. Le Guin creates a world of myriad islands located in a huge, perhaps endless, ocean. Each island has, in addition to its regular inhabitants, a resident wizard, and these individuals (all male) are trained at a wizard university in the central island of Roke.

The Wizard of Earthsea
tells of the early life of Earthsea’s greatest wizard, Ged; and the story is continued in Le Guin’s several sequels,
The Tombs of Atuan
(1972),
The Farthest Shore
(1974),
Tehanu
(1990) and
The
Other Wind
(2002). One of the things Le Guin borrows from Tolkien is his nominalism—which is to say, his belief that the world is ‘named’ into existence, and that words and languages therefore
have profound power. In Le Guin’s books, this is manifested by the convention that, where people from various cultures and various geographical locations speak various languages, there is underlying everything a ‘true speech’ that directly names reality. Magic is performed by invoking objects in this ur-language. To be more precise, the distinction is made early on in
The Wizard of Earthsea
between two kinds of magic, ‘true magic’ and ‘illusion’. The latter is a trick easily played, but the object conjured has the appearance but not the substance of reality. ‘Why do wizards get hungry then?’ one character asks Ged. ‘When it comes to suppertime at sea, why not say,
Meat-pie
and the meat-pie appears and you eat it?’ ‘Well’, Ged replies: ‘we could do so. But we don’t much wish to eat our words, as they say. Meat-pie is only a word after all … we can make it odorous, and savorous, and even filling, but it remains a word. If fools the stomach and gives no strength to the hungry man.’
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What is called in the book ‘true magic’, however, is the power to step outside the simulacra of ‘only words’. To know an object’s
true
name is to have actual power over it. Wizards, accordingly, frame their charms in the Old Speech.

The riddle of Earthsea has to do with this nominalist belief in the apprehending power of language. What (the riddle says) is Earthsea? We must look to the Old Speech, which Le Guin’s Ged starts to learn first at the Wizard University. The novel vouchsafes us a few examples of the true tongue. We discover, for instance, that the true word for ‘rock’ is
tolk
—this refers to ‘the dry land on which men live’. The word for ‘sea’ in the true speech, on the other hand, is
inien
. So the answer to the riddle can be found, neatly enough, by translating it into Le Guin’s true-tongue. What is Earth-sea? It is
tolk-inien
. The riddle is: what is Earthsea? Le Guin is far from the only writer of Fantasy who acknowledges that her creations are
Tolkinien
, of course.

C. S.
Lewis opens his study of the Psalms by declaring his relative incompetence for the task.

It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. When you took the problem to a master, as we all remember, he was very likely to explain what you understood already, to add a great deal of information which you didn’t want, and say nothing at all about the thing that was puzzling you. I have watched this from both sides of the net; for when, as a teacher myself, I have tried to answer questions brought me by pupils, I have sometimes, after a minute, seen that expression settle down on their faces that assured me that they were suffering exactly the same frustration which I had suffered from my teachers. The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren’t.

(C. S. Lewis,
Reflections on the Psalms
(Houghton Mifflin 1958), 1)

‘The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less’ looks like a riddling kind of observation, but in fact it touches on something important about riddles. In some of the riddles of
The Hobbit
we are given the answer; but others (what
is
a burrahobbit? What
does
Good Morning mean?) we are not. But having the answer
is less important than engaging with the process of thinking them through.

In the fourth chapter of the present study I took up John Rateliff’s suggestion that, as far as the enigmata that Gollum and Bilbo swap between them, ‘these riddles predate the book’.
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It is possible to imagine Tolkien (of course this is mere speculation) setting out at some point in the 30s to compose nine riddles, some adapted from existing sources, some invented from whole cloth, by way of constructing an acrostic meta-riddle to which the answer is, precisely, a famous riddle contest between a god and a dwarf, the
Alvíssmál
. If Tolkien engaged in this riddling game, he did not include the answer in
The Hobbit
itself. But perhaps he felt he did not need to.

To pick up the thread from that fourth chapter: what might have drawn Tolkien to the
Alvíssmál
? It is, obviously, a riddle-contest; and there is something nicely symmetrical in coding a riddle contest so that the riddles in it make reference to another riddle contest.
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But I wonder if there is something more. Recall that the story of the
Alvíssmál
is that the dwarf Alvíss has come to Thor’s house claiming that he was promised the god’s daughter in marriage. Thor tells the dwarf he may have the girl if he can answer all of the god’s riddles. This Alvíss does, drawing on a genuinely impressive knowledge-base—not for nothing does his name mean ‘all-wise’. But he has been tricked; like Gandalf with the trolls, Thor has distracted him long enough for the sun to come up and petrify him.

Why might Tolkien be drawn to this particular riddle contest? Why might he have repurposed his nine riddles for
The Hobbit
? What is at stake in the contest between Gollum and Bilbo is not a divine marriage, but a plain gold band with magical properties. In
Chapter 7
I explored the similarities between this (malign) gold ring and the example of the (good) wedding band, also magical in a religiously sacramental sense. Gollum, like Alvíss, can answer all the riddles Bilbo throws at him; save only the last one. But his knowledge does not save him.

Alvíss the dwarf is clever, but—despite his name—he is not
wise
. Indeed, his proud delight in his own cleverness and knowledge prevent him from seeing that he is being tricked. This in turn is an important distinction in Tolkien’s work. Saruman is very clever, and very knowledgeable, but he is not wise. Gandalf knows less, and is sometimes baffled, but he possesses wisdom. Tolkien understands
that it is better to be wise than clever. In this he is true to his religious beliefs; for one of the valences of Christ’s instruction that we ‘become as little children’ (Matthew 18:3) is the greatness of untutored faith over mere adult cleverness. And like C. S. Lewis’s schoolchildren, it is better for us to turn out hearts to the mysteries of life together than passively to take on board the intellectual knowledge of adults.
The Hobbit
is a book that lives in the heart before it exists in the head, howsoever ingeniously that head—in this case, mine—addresses the riddle:
what is a hobbit
?

What, then, is the solution? What is the answer to the riddle of
The Hobbit
? The intention, in framing the question this way, is not intend to suggest that there could be only one answer, only one way of decoding this beautifully entertaining, suggestive, playful novel. It is, rather, a matter of wondering to what extent it is possible to think of the novel
as
a riddle. It seems to present a straightforward adventure story; but the meat of the whole is much more debatable.

Bilbo the hobbit is a respectable, solid, middle-class fellow; familiarly English, and indeed (in the author’s own words) the sort of man who belongs to a community that is ‘more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee’. The hobbit, in other words, has the background and values of Tolkien himself, and the stature of Tolkien’s own youth—I mean, Bilbo, as an adult, is about as tall as Tolkien himself was as a child on the verge of adolescence. But Bilbo is more than this. He is pitched out of his comfortable, parochial hole, and forced to travel to a far country to fight a war. Something similar happened to Tolkien himself. John Garth’s study of Tolkien’s own experiences in World War One is cautiously suggestive:

It would be misleading to suggest that
The Hobbit
is Tolkien’s wartime experience in disguise; yet it is easy to see how some of his memories must have invigorated this take of an ennobling rite of passage past the fearful jaws of death. The middle-class hero is thrown in with proud but stolid companions … the company approaches the end of their quest across a desolation, a once green land with now ‘neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished.’ Scenes of sudden, violent ruin
ensue … we visit the camps of the sick and wounded and listen to wranglings over matters of command and strategy.
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It does not hazard anything too revolutionary to suggest that a ‘hobbit’ is, in a sense, a bit of Tolkien’s own youth—of his own home. What about the word, ‘hobbit’? Tolkien provides one etymology for it in the appendices with which
The Lord of the Rings
concludes:

Hobbit is an invention. In the Westron the word used, when this people was referred to at all, was
banakil
‘halfling’. But at this date the folk of the shire and of Bree used the word
kuduk
, which was not found elsewhere. Meriadoc, however, actually records that the King of Rohan used the word
kûd-dûkan
‘hole-dweller’. Since, as has been noted, the Hobbits had once spoken a language closely related to that of the Rohirrim, it seems likely that
kuduk
was a worn-down form of
kûd-dûkan
. The latter I have translated, for reasons explained, by
holbytla
; and
hobbit
provides a word that might be a worn-down form of
holbylta
[i.e. ‘hole builder’] if that name had occurred in our own ancient language.
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Tom Shippey discusses this invented etymology and suggests a different one:

Hol
, of course, means hole. A ‘bottle’, even now in some English place-names, means a dwelling, and Old English
bytlian
means to dwell, to live in. Holbytla then, = ‘hole-dweller, hole-liver’. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hole-liver.’ What could be more obvious than that?
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