The Riddles of The Hobbit (27 page)

So, ‘hole-builder’ and ‘hole-dweller’ are two possible cod-etymological roots for the word hobbit. I want to suggest a third.

Tolkien considered himself wholly English, but he was well aware that he bore a German surname. He knew too what his name meant—I mean, the semantic content of the elements of his name. The ‘tol’ part of ‘Tolkien’ means ‘foolish, stupid, rash’ (
Tölpel
is modern German for ‘fool’). The ‘kien’ part is a version of the German word
Kühn
which means ‘brave’ or ‘bold’. Indeed, Tolkien himself played on the meaning of his own name: he wrote a character called ‘John Jethro Rashbold’, a version of Tolkien himself, into his ‘The Notion
Club Papers’ (published posthumously in
Sauron Defeated
). ‘Rashbold’ is one way of articulating the—to Tolkien, pleasing—oxymoron of his surname. Another might be ‘Dull-keen’, which has the advantage of retaining much of the sound of the original. ‘Dull’, another linguistic descendent from the Old High German
tol
, ‘foolish’, originally meant ‘foolish’ or ‘stupid’, and later came to be applied to edges and blades, meaning blunt. ‘Keen’ is, in a way, more interesting. Originally this word meant ‘sharp’, as in sharp-witted, clever, skilled—and of course it still means
literally
sharp, having a sharp edge, for we still talk of a ‘keen blade’, just as Chaucer talked of ‘a knyfe as a rasour kene’ in 1385. But ‘keen’ also means eager, bold, brave. Indeed, the
OED
thinks the latter ‘sharp’ meaning precedes the ‘brave’ one (‘this ON sense [‘sharp’] is the original one, the connecting link with the other [‘bold, brave’] being the idea of “skilled in war” “expert in battle”.’)

Foolish-sharp. Dull-keen. Tolkien. In Old Norse (a language in which Tolkien was, of course, expert) the word for ‘sharp’ or ‘keen’ is:
bitr
. The modern English word ‘bitter’ retains a spectral sense of this; for something is bitter, originally—like a bitter wind, or a bitterly cold morning—because it
bites
; because it is sharp, because it is
keen
.
6
Similarly the Old English
bîtan
means ‘biting, cutting, sharp’.
Hob
, on the other hand, means originally ‘rustic’, ‘homely’, ‘clownish’. Spenser calls the simple-minded rustic peasant in his pastoral poem
The Shepheard’s Calender
(1579) ‘Hobinall’ with this meaning in mind; and clumsy, awkward, absurd fellows were called ‘hobbledehoys’ well into the nineteenth century. The dullness of the ‘hob’ is of a rural, homely sort; but it is a dullness for all that. And it would be as oxymoronic as linking ‘dull’ and ‘keen’ to put the two forms together into:
hob-bitr
.

It seems to me that this particular riddling answer (‘what is a hobbit?’ ‘he is dull-keen’—that is, ‘he is Tolkien’) accords with the larger logic of the tale. We connect to the story through the ordinariness of Bilbo; and Bilbo’s experiences are Tolkienian. More, this manner of etymological decoding, the reading through of modern words and names to get at their aboriginal significances, was meat and drink to Tolkien. To ask ‘what is a hobbit?’ is to ask both ‘what does the word hobbit mean?’ and to ask ‘what is the hobbit “about”? What does it signify in the largest sense?’ The answer to both questions is:
hob-bitr
is cognate with
Tol-kien
.

Here
is a related speculation. Amongst other things, hobbits are humpty-dumpty. I do not mean that they are eggs (although, to go right back to the beginning of this book: ‘a box without hinges key or lid / yet golden treasure inside is hid’ describes Bilbo pretty well, provided only we read the ‘treasure’ not as actually descriptive of yolk but metaphorically descriptive of the courage and endurance our hero discovers locked away within himself). No, I mean an earlier meaning of the term: for, to quote the
OED
again, a ‘humpty-dumpty’ is ‘a short, dumpy person’; and means, as an adjective, ‘short and fat’. Nowadays ‘humpty dumpty’ is most likely to make us think of the famous nursery rhyme; but as we have been exploring in this book, nursery rhymes are very often riddles. Indeed, to quote from Iona and Peter Opie’s
Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
, the very familiarity of this verse tends to occlude it.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king’s horses,

And all the king’s men,

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

‘Humpty Dumpty has become so popular a nursery figure and is pictured so frequently that few people today think of the verse as containing a riddle.’ Of course it does: it is just that the solution—‘egg’—is, as the Opies note, ‘known to everyone’.
7
Alternate answers to the riddle have been proposed: Richard III is one, on account of his hump-back and his defeat at the Battle of Bosworth. Another popular answer is a large cannon, allegedly so-called, used during the English Civil War. In the spirit of Tolkien’s own
Lord of the Rings
appendices I would like to suggest another solution to this familiar riddle, and it goes like this: etymologically ‘humpty’ is distantly related, via the forms ‘Humphrey’ and ‘Humbert’, to ‘hobbity’. Describing somebody as ‘hombetty’ or ‘hobbety’ was to call them short and stout; and the early medieval Romance
Ringe
describes its hero as ‘ane hubbity-duppety fellowe yclepit Fraodo, þat wiþ greete heorte did þi Ringe of powre destrowe’.
8

At
the end of the novel, Balin reports that the new prosperity at Laketown means ‘they are making songs which say the rivers run with gold’. ‘Rivers run with gold’ is a riddle to which the answer is: ‘sunset’, when the setting sun turns the waterways golden with its light. And sunset is the appropriate note on which to end any novel, just as dawn (we recall the first meeting in
The Hobbit
between its titular hero and Gandalf: ‘“Good morning!” said Bilbo’) is the appropriate note on which to begin one. Indeed, it is worth going back for a moment to the little-noticed riddle with which
The Hobbit
opens:

‘Good morning!’ said Bilbo, and he meant it….

‘What do you mean?’ [Gandalf] said. ‘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?’

Bilbo’s answer (‘all of them at once!’) is not really a very satisfactory answer to what is, in fact, a rather profound question. How do our words mean? How—for instance—do those strings of words, bound between boards, that we call books manage to generate specific reactions, images and emotions in the minds of readers? Gandalf suggests four ways of understanding words—his example is ‘good morning’, but his approach can be expanded to include any and all verbal communications. He suggests that we can interpret words intersubjectively, descriptively, personally or ethically. The first case is subjunctive, in the sense that when I say something I am expressing an unfulfilled wish or condition about your state of being. The second and third are indicative, descriptions either of outer reality or inner mood. The fourth is the least idiomatic of all. To greet somebody with ‘good morning’ and thereby to mean ‘I wish you to take the opportunity of
this
morning to do good, not evil, in the world’ would be a strange way of proceeding. Which is to say, addressing somebody as ‘good morning’ is not usually a riddle, and even if we take it as one it is poorly answered by saying ‘Intersubjective! Descriptive! Personal! Ethical!’ But all these things apply to the novel. The novel (the novel called
The Hobbit
for example) establishes a specific relationship with its reader—indeed the narrator of
The Hobbit
actually addresses the reader directly at various places in the text. The novel describes the world through which its character move, and the state
of minds of those characters themselves. And most importantly of all, for Tolkien and writers like him, novels have a moral imperative. It is the business of novels to make the world better, not worse; to give people paradigms for good behaviour not wicked. To show that even ordinary people can, if they persevere and tap their reservoirs of bravery and duty, prevail against crushing circumstances. That they can be heroes.

The Old English for Good Morning would be
Gód Morwe
(Chaucer’s Miller says brightly ‘Hayl, maister Nicholay! Good Morwe!’); or else
godne dæie
(‘good day’). Indeed, the word ‘morn’ is the occasion for one of those interesting mini-essays with which the
OED
is so well supplied. The OE is ‘morgen’; the ON ‘myrginn’.

The affinities outside Teut. are doubtful. Some refer the word to the pre-Teut. root *
merk
- to be dark; but the absence of consonant-ablaut, as well as the inappropriateness of the sense, seems to render this view less probable than the alternative hypothesis that the root is *
mergh
-, represented by the Lith.
mirgu
, to twinkle,
margas
parti-coloured. (OED 9:1086)

Also relevant is the entry on ‘Morrow’, a word (now archaic) that comes via the ME ‘morwe’ or ‘moru’, both shortened forms of
morwen
, ‘the morn’. Morning as ‘the time of darkness’, in the sense that it is the time when darkness dwindles, ‘darkloss’, does not seem so farfetched to me. But like the anonymous
OED
etymologist, I am rather struck as the morning as twinkletime, howsoever twee that makes me. And perhaps there is a deeper riddle here. It looks counterintuitive to think of ‘morning’ as
the time of dwindling
, because we think of dawn as the opposite of this: the time when the sunlight grows stronger, and the day begins. But in a larger sense we are all always dwindling, and time is chasing away. The strong streak of plangent beauty that runs through both
The Hobbit
and (especially)
The Lord of the Rings
has to do the inevitable passing away of the old times. It is this above all that makes both novels
Losingsromans
. Even the immortal elves diminish, and go into the west; mortals fade and die, ages pass, and whole ways of life trace out an elegiac diminuendo. It was Tolkien’s sense of himself as untimely, as born into an inhospitable modernity of machines, haste and noise, that informed his acute sense of both the poignancy and the beauty of this sense
of dwindling. It is simultaneously dull
and
keen, both an infuriating stubbornness in the grain of existence (
hob
) and something that sharply pierces through mere appearance to reveal a keenly shining truth beyond the veil of life (
bitr
). It gives his novels a plangency that raise them far above the usual Fantasy fare, and it—Tolkien’s unique vision, his sense of himself as both a mortal man, doomed to die, and a spirit promised hidden, mysterious glory—addresses, in the most profound sense, the riddle that is
The Hobbit
.

  
1
.  I can think of almost no exceptions to this convention, actually—I mean, crime novels that do not include the solution to their own riddle—except amongst the postmodern experimentalists of novel writing. For example, there is Roberto Bolaño’s masterful
2666
(2004); a profound meditation upon crime and mystery that deliberately withholds the satisfactions of solution and closure.

  
2
.  F. E. Hardy,
The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928
(1930), 54. Jules Renard’s
Journal
for 1906 contains a similar, though more exasperated, reaction to the notion that the universe is a riddle: ‘our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane. Less merciful than man, God never opens the window’; (‘Notre rêve se heurte au mystère comme la guêpe à la vitre. Moins pitoyable que l’homme,
Dieu
n’ouvre jamais la croisée’; Léon Guichard and Gilbert Sigaux (eds),
Jules Renard, Journal 1887–1910
(Paris: Gallimard 1982), 1067).

  
3
.  Tom Shippey,
The Road to Middle Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created A New Mythology
(2nd edition; London: HarperCollins 1992), xv. Ellipses in original. Shippey goes on to, as it were, ‘solve’ the riddle of Tolkien’s polite expression of thanks and admiration: ‘the Professor’s letter had invisible italics in it, which I now supply. “I am in agreement with
nearly
all that you say, and I only regret that I have not the time to talk more about your paper: especially about design as it appears
or may be found
in a large
finished
work, and the
actual
events or experiences as seen or felt by the
waking
mind
in the course of actual composition”.’
One advantage of the politeness-language of Old Western Man is that it enables the speaker to express a genuine ambiguity, neither falsely praising nor discourteously dispraising, in a way that is creatively riddling rather than hypocritically dissembling.