The Riddles of The Hobbit (28 page)

  
4
.  W. P. Ker,
The Dark Ages
(Oxford 1904), 64–5.

  
5
.  ‘I thought of you when some Kipling surfaced at Christmas dinner—“The Egg Shell”. My aunt recited it, “a nice piece of nonsense,” only for my ex-Naval dad to point out that it wasn’t nonsense at all, but a resonant description of naval warfare in WW1, the Whitehead being a torpedo. I found it interesting how one person’s metaphor, or nonsense, could be another’s highly specific depiction.’ Roger Peppe, private correspondence.

  
6
.  Paul O’Prey (ed.),
Robert Graves: Selected Poems
(London: Penguin 1986), 154.

  
7
.  Humphrey Carpenter (ed.),
The
Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
(London: HarperCollins 1995), 353. Tolkien attended the lectures Graves gave during his stint as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1964, finding them ‘ludicrously bad’.

  
8
.  The
omitted stanzas and other variants are recorded in Alan Jacobs (ed.),
Auden:
For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio
(Princeton: Princeton University Press 2013).

  
9
.  Tolkien,
The Lord of the Rings
(1954–55; 1 Vol. edition; London: HarperCollins 2012), 11.

10
.  It was a dislike he repeated in several places, although sometimes in more qualified form. In a letter to Milton Waldman (probably written in 1951) he wrote ‘I dislike Allegory—the conscious and intentional allegory—yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.’ An earlier letter to Stanley Unwin (31 July 1947), responding to Stanley’s son Rayner’s report on the first book of
The Lord of the Rings
, tempered anxiety that the book not be treated as an allegory—‘do not let Rayner suspect “Allegory” … the actors are individuals’—with a very general concession: ‘of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is real life’ (Carpenter,
Letters
, 145, 121).

11
.  Søren Kierkegaard,
Philosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy
(trans. David F. Swenson; Princeton: Princeton University Press 1962), 46.

12
.  Patrick J. Murphy,
Unriddling the Exeter Riddles
(Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press 2011), 7.

  
1
.  S. A. J. Bradley,
Anglo-Saxon Poetry
(London: Dent, Everyman 1982), 367–8.

  
2
.  
The Elder Edda: A Selection
(trans. Paul B. Taylor and W. H. Auden; Introduction by Peter H. Salus and Paul B. Taylor; London: Faber and Faber 1969), 20, 22. The volume’s dedication is: ‘for J. R. R. Tolkien’.

  
3
.  Carolyne Larrington,
A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry
(Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993), 86.

  
4
.  Sigmund Freud,
The Future of an Illusion
(trans. W. D. Robson-Scott; London: Hogarth Press 1927), 16.

  
5
.  Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson,
A Guide to Old English
(1986); quoted in John M. Hill,
The Anglo-Saxon Warrior Ethic: Reconstructing Lordship in Early English Literature
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press 2000), 8.

  
6
.  The translation is by Gavin Bone,
Anglo-Saxon Poetry
(Oxford 1943).

  
7
.  W. P. Ker,
The Dark Ages
(Oxford 1904), 44.

  
8
.  Humphrey Carpenter (ed.),
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
(1985; London: HarperCollins 1995), 172.

  
9
.  Della Hook’s
Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape
(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer 2010) exhaustively explores the many ways trees figured ‘life, death and rebirth’ in Anglo-Saxon culture.

10
.  ‘Ents had interested Tolkien since he first wrote on Roman roads in 1924 and identified them with the orþanc enta geweorc, the “skilful work of ents” mentioned in the poem
Maxims II
. Anglo-Saxons believed
in ents … what were they? Clearly they were very large, great builders, and clearly they didn’t exist any more. From such hints Tolkien created his fable of a race running down to extinction’ (Tom Shippey,
The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology
(2nd edn; London: HarperCollins 1992), 119). My reading is rather different to Shippey’s. After all, Tolkien’s ents have no interest in making roads.

11
.  Similarly, the charm that protects Macbeth against ‘man of woman born’ ought surely to have been proof against Macduff. From his mother’s womb untimely ripped he may have been, but Caesarian section is still a mode of birth, and from a woman too. I once published a story in which Macbeth lives on for centuries, until twenty-second century reforestation expands the extent of Burnham Wood to encompass Macbeth’s castle, and a robot is finally able to kill him. This may strike you as a limiting pedantic literalism, of the sort that did not encumber Shakespeare’s imagination, and I would not disagree with you. But the point I am making is that there is a similarly concrete, precise streak in Tolkien’s imagination too.

12
.  Daisy Elizabeth Martin-Clarke,
Culture in Early Anglo-Saxon England
(1947; Johns Hopkins University Press Reprints 1979), 33.

13
.  Maria Artamonova, ‘Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles’, in David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (eds),
Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2000), 86.

  
1
.  Gwendolyn Morgan, ‘Religious and Allegorical Verse’, in Laura C. Lambdin and Robert T. Lambdin (eds),
A Companion to Old and Middle English Literature
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 2002), 26–36; 32.

  
2
.  Gregory K. Jember,
The Old English Riddles: A New Translation
(Denver, CO: Society for New Language Study 1972).

  
3
.  A. J. Hawkes, ‘Symbolic Lives: the Visual Evidence’, in John Hines (ed.),
The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century
(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer 1997), 339.

  
4
.  Frederick Tupper (ed.),
The Riddles of the Exeter Book
(Boston: 1910), lxxix. Reviewing this volume in the same year, R. W. Chambers commented: ‘in the meantime Professor Tupper has become convinced that the so-called First Riddle, which in his edition he passed over as “demanding no place here,” is in reality an enigma which conceals the name of Cynewulf, and so shows us who is the author of the Riddles. The lot of a convert is seldom an easy one, and Professor Tupper has been involved in a good deal of controversy, which is by no means over yet.’ I dwell on this as indicative of the sorts of debates about the
Exeter Book
riddles that were being aired amongst scholars during Tolkien’s own youthful study of the topic.

  
5
.  Humphrey Carpenter (ed.),
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
(London: HarperCollins 1995), 385.

  
6
.  Carpenter (ed.),
Letters
, 148.

  
7
.  In a letter
to his son of 7–8 November 1944 Tolkien described a vision he had whilst praying at mass: ‘I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it … And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized. And I do not mean “personified”, by a mere figure of speech according to the tendencies of human language, but a real (finite) person’ (Carpenter (ed.),
Letters
, 99). His vision folds the theology of incarnation into a mystic vision of God as light.

  
8
.  Kevin Crossley-Holland,
The Exeter Book of Riddles
(London: Penguin; revised edn 1993), 3.

  
9
.  Carpenter (ed.),
Letters
, 347.

10
.  Carpenter (ed.),
Letters
, 343.

11
.  Crossley-Holland,
Exeter Book of Riddles
, 85–6. He adds: ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ love and fear of the sea is conveyed as well in these lines as anywhere in Old English literature’.

12
.  ‘Roverandom’, in Tolkien,
Tales from the Perilous Realm
(London: HarperCollins 2008), 37, 83.

13
.  This is Carolyne Larrington’s translation, minimally adapted, from
The Poetic
Edda
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), 13.

14
.  To be clear—my proposed answers are: Jörmungandr; (F) Astitocalon; Niðhöggr (or perhaps Y Ddraig Goch).

15
.  Carpenter (ed.),
Letters
, 134, 389. ‘Brightman’ is the theological scholar F. E. Brightman (1856–1932).

16
.  See Ann Harleman Stewart, ‘Kenning and Riddle in Old English’,
Papers on Language and Literature
15 (1979), 115–36.

17
.  
Old English Poems and Riddles
(translated with an Introduction by Chris McCully; Manchester: Carcanet 2008), 27.

18
.  McCully,
Old English Poems and Riddles
, 45.

19
.  Two Robin Chapman Stacey essays say a great deal more on this intriguing matter: ‘Instructional Riddles in Welsh Law’ (in Joseph Falaky Nagy and Leslie Ellen Jones (eds),
Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition: A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford
(Dublin: Four Courts Press 2005), 336–43) and ‘Speaking in Riddles’ (in Próinséas Ní Chatháin (ed.),
Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle Ages: Texts and Transmission
(Dublin: Four Courts Press 2002), 243–8).

20
.  Fergus Kelly, ‘An Old-Irish Text on Court Procedure’,
Peritia
5 (1986), 74–106.

21
.  Christopher Guy Yocum, ‘Wisdom Literature in Early Ireland’ (2010), 24:
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/v1cyocum/wisdom-literature.pdf
.

22
.  Robin Chapman Stacey,
Dark Speech: the Performance of Law in Early Ireland
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2007), 152. Radner is quoted from: J. N. Radner, ‘The Significance of the Threefold Death in Celtic Tradition’, in P. K. Ford (ed.),
Celtic Folklore and Christianity: Studies in Memory of William W. Heist
(Los Angeles: McNally and Loftin 1983), 180–99; 185.

23
.  Tom
Shippey, who edited and translated this poem in 1976, calls it ‘the best riddle-contest in Old English, and most like the Old Norse ones from the
Eldar Edda
and
The Saga of King Heidrek
’.

24
.  Dieter Bitterli,
Say What I Am Called: the Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2009), 112.

25
.  
The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise
(translated from the Icelandic with Introduction, Notes and Appendixes by Christopher Tolkien; Cheltenham: Thomas Nelson and Sons 1960). The translations of the riddles that follow in this chapter are my own.

26
.  Robin Chapman Stacey,
Dark Speech
, 153.

27
.  Tom Shippey,
J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
(London: HarperCollins 2000), 173.

28
.  This is quoted from the website
Europrogocontestovision
.

29
.  ‘Suntory launches calcium-enriched water’:
http://www.nutraingredients.com/Consumer-Trends/Suntory-launches-calcium-enriched-water.org

30
.  French writer Pierre Delalande, who is cited in the epigraph to the preface of the present volume, responded to ‘Riddle 69’ with a little rhyme of his own, ‘O’, composed in English:

Sometimes we sound the consonant;

Sometimes we mark its loss;

The water-becomes-a-bone riddle

When
eau
becomes an
os
.

31
.  Patrick J. Murphy,
Unriddling the Exeter Riddles
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011), 77; 26. Murphy also points up
AD
4th-century rhetorician Donatus’s ‘definition of riddling as revealing the
occultum similitudinem rerum
, the hidden similarity of things’ (26; quoting Donatus,
Ars Grammatica
, 3:6).

  
1
.  For a detailed discussion of the riddles, see Douglas Anderson’s impressively comprehensive
The Annotated Hobbit
(London: Unwin Hyman 1988).

  
2
.  Snorri Sturluson,
The Prose Edda
(translated by Jesse Byock; London: Penguin 2005), 40.

  
3
.  To go off at a slight tangent, we might want to make the argument that this section of the
Prose Edda
records a riddle to which the answer was originally not a fetter for holding a wolf, but a
horse
—a steed as swift, quiet and strong as all the items listed. The ‘-nir’ suffix in ‘Gleipnir’ means ‘horse’ (compare ‘Sleipnir’, “swift-horse”, Odin’s eight-legged mount, or Slungnir, King Adil’s horse.
Gleipnir
would mean something like ‘gripping horse’, or ‘steady-footed horse’.

  
4
.  This and the following two remedies are quoted from T. Anderson, ‘Dental treatment in Anglo-Saxon England’,
British Dental Journal
197 (2004), 273–4.

  
5
.  Vafthruthnismal
(
Poetic Edda
), stanzas 11–12. Translated by Craig Williamson in
A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011), 15.

  
6
.  John D. Rateliff,
The History of the Hobbit: Mr Baggins
(London: HarperCollins 2007), 169.