The Riddles of The Hobbit (6 page)

This unpacks into a larger thesis about Tolkien’s approach to his art. In the ents, Tolkien imaginatively gifts an inanimate object with life, motion and personality. At the heart of
The Lord of the Rings
is a
similar, though inverted and malign, process of reification: the ring itself—made of a substance more inert than the organic matter of arboreal life, yet somehow, mysteriously alive, possessed of volition and influence. ‘Mysteriously’, there, is meant in its fullest sense. How the One Ring is able to work its evil in the world is a riddle that is, in turn, one of the ways Tolkien articulates the riddle of evil more generally. In
The Hobbit
the Old English sense that treasure, though inanimate, can ‘possess’ living humans finds dramatic form in Smaug’s hoard. The ring, at this stage in the story, gifts invisibility and nothing more. As the story grew in Tolkien’s imagination, the heaps of treasure are replaced by a single golden ring.
The Hobbit
is a quest-narrative in which the object of the quest is to gain a quantity of golden treasure;
The Lord of the Rings
—this is one of the most frequently repeated critical aperçus about that novel—upends this venerable template, being the story of a quest not to find but specifically to
lose
one particular piece of golden treasure. But what links these two things is the quasi-animate power of the gold. When Saruman gives a kind of life to the inanimate by ‘industrialising’ the shire it entails the poisoning of the organic, and the scouring of the shire at the novel’s end is precisely the undoing of this wickedness. Underlying this is a very profound riddle about life and nature, the riddle: how may inanimate matter become animate? In various versions this asks ‘how can new life come into the world?’ and ‘from where did the first life come’ and similar questions that continue to give philosophers and scientists matter for their enquiries. A Biblical version of the question is Ezekiel’s ‘can these bones live?’ (Ezekiel 37:3)—a text read by Christians typologically as anticipating the resurrection. The inanimate object
is
brought alive. My point here, though, is that quite apart from its content the
form
of this conceit is riddling. In Daisy Elizabeth Martin-Clarke’s words, ‘the literary theme ascribing emotion to an inanimate object is characteristic of riddle literary traditions’.
12
The Lord of the Rings
takes this literary convention and literalises it, building a monumental imaginative edifice about it.

Like scholars of the Anglo-Saxon age, the needful thing for readers of Tolkien is the ability to hold his quasi-pagan ‘Old English’ values and his immanent Christianity in harmonious relation. And there is a sense in which Tolkien’s use of Anglo-Saxon models functions, formally—as it were, essentially—as a riddle. Maria Artamonova has
discussed the ways that Tolkien, not content with writing
Lord of the Rings
and
The Silmarillion
in English, also composed Old English
Annals
or
Chronicles
-style texts relating important events in his imagined history. Here is an example:

MMCCCCXCIX
Hér gefeaht Féanores fierd wiþ þam orcum / sige námon / þá orcas gefliemdon oþ Angband (þaet is Irenhelle); ac Goðmog, Morgoðes þegn, ofslóh Féanor, and Maegdros gewéold siþþan Féanores folc. Þis gefeoht hátte Tungolguð

Here Fëanor’s host fought with the Orcs and was victorious, and pursued them to Angband (that is Iron Hell); but Gothmog, servant of Morgoth, slew Fëanor, and Maedhros ruled Fëanor’s folk after that. This battle was called the Battle-under-the-Stars.
13

The composition of this kind of expert pastiche was more than a mere quirk or eccentricity on Tolkien’s part. Nor, more interestingly, was it the equivalent to a ‘method’ actor immersing himself in his role prior to stepping on stage. Instead, it is best read as Tolkien deliberately part-obscuring or riddling his fictional material as part of a deliberate aesthetic strategy. Stepping outside one’s linguistic comfort zone can have the effect of freshening or vivifying one’s apprehension. Artamonova quotes Tolkien that ‘seen through the distorting glass of our ignorance’ our ‘appreciation of the splendour of Homeric Greek in word-form is possibly keener, or more conscious, than it was to a Greek’. If our vernacular is deadened by the plainness born of over-familiarity, then learning—or better yet,
writing
—a language with which we are unfamiliar is a way of bringing alive the vividness inherent in poetry and story.

I have started by arguing that riddles were important to Anglo-Saxon culture, important to Tolkien and that they remain important today. It is worth qualifying that judgement by noting that scholarship has not always seen things this way. For many people riddles are trivial and disposable, of only glancing relevance to larger questions of culture and art. Gwendolyn Morgan notes that the study of riddles and wisdom literature was ‘almost entirely neglected through the 1800s. Late in that century and into the first quarter of the twentieth a flurry of interest in solving riddles occurred … [but] this interest soon petered out.’ She adds that ‘the same tends to hold true up to the present’, although she does note that ‘Gregory Jember has defended the riddles as essential expressions of Anglo-Saxon culture and its world view.’
1
This study thinks Jember is right.
2
In this chapter I will try to say something about specific Anglo-Saxon riddles themselves, and the significance of riddling more generally.

Many hundreds of riddles have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon times. How many hundreds remains unclear, for I do not believe there has ever been a complete tabulation. A good number of these riddles were written in the vernacular, and many more were written in Latin. Indeed, to a large extent these represent distinct riddling traditions.

The collection of riddles which exerted the largest influence … was that by Symphosius (an African writer of the fourth/fifth century), who was the author of one hundred
enigmata
, each one consisting of three hexameters. Aldheim, Eusebius, Tatwine and the authors of the Old English riddles of the
Exeter Book
all drew
from Symphosius. The Anglo-Latin riddles are ‘literary’ riddles and are quite different from the ‘popular’ ones; they are provided with a title which gives the solution to the riddle, hence spoiling the ludic side of riddling and highlighting the erudite aspect of the compositions.
3

It is the ‘ludic’ aspect that is relevant to my purposes here, and I shall have little to say about Latin riddles. The
Exeter Book
is a different matter.

One of the most celebrated collections of riddles, the
Exeter Book
is so called not because it is about Exeter, but because it lives there. It was bequeathed to the library of Exeter by Bishop Leofric after his death in 1072, ‘
.i. mycel englisc boc be gehwilcum pingum on leoðwisan geworht
’, ‘one big book written in English containing verse about many things’. Bound into this codex are various allegorical poems on Christian themes, some of the most famous elegies in Old English literature (amongst them
The Wanderer
and
The Seafarer
)—and ninety-six riddles. Some of the
Exeter Book
’s pages are missing, and scholars believe the original collection comprised a nice, round 100 riddles. It used to be thought that these riddles were written by the eighth-century poet Cynewulf. Modern scholarship considers this unlikely for a number of reasons, arguing instead that the riddles were originally written by various people or garnered from a wider folk tradition. This, in fact, has been the consensus for over a hundred years now. In 1910 Frederick Tupper wrote:

The Riddles were not written by Cynewulf: all evidence of the least value speaks against his claim. It seems fairly certain that they are products of the North. Their place as literary compositions (not as folk-riddles) in one collection, and their homogeneous artistry, which finds abundant vindication in a hundred common traits, argue strongly for a single author, though a small group of problems brings convincing evidence against complete unity. That their period was the beginning of the eighth century, the hey-day of Anglo-Latin riddle-poetry, is an inviting surmise unsustained by proof.
4

Cynewulf is most famous for two lines, riddle-like though not technically a riddle (in fact the lines are extracted from his poem
Crist
).
These lines, as it happens, had the most prodigious effect upon the imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien:

éala éarendel engla beorhtast

ofer middangeard monnum sended

Hail! Earendel of angels the brightest

Over Middle-earth to men sent down.

Tolkien wrote ‘there was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English’. The openness of his phrasing here is in its own way indicative of something important, as if it would miss the point to reframe the lines as a riddle posed in terms of content—for instance, ‘who or what is Earendel?’ Nonetheless, Cynewulf’s powerful lines do riddle us, and they certainly riddled Tolkien. His proposed solution to this question was
The Silmarillion
, his earliest attempt at a systematic articulation of his fantasy legendarium, that in turn led to
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
.

In
The
Silmarillion
‘Eärendil’ is a mariner descended from both elvish and mannish stock and therefore an individual who, in mythic form, mediates the ‘immortal’ and ‘mortal’ valences of Tolkien’s own world-view. In 1967 Tolkien drafted a lengthy account of his reaction to Cynewulf’s lines (and the role they played in sparking his own imaginative creativity). He wrote this as a letter to be sent to a man called Rang who had contacted Tolkien with queries about his invented nomenclature; although in the event the letter was never sent. In the letter he describes the Eärendil name as having an important connection with his own creative imagination. He notes how greatly he was struck, when studying Anglo-Saxon before the First World War, by ‘the great beauty of this word (or name)’. It was consonant with conventional Anglo-Saxon, but also struck Tolkien’s ear, he says, with unusual sweetness and euphony. In the letter he goes on to elaborate his theory that ‘
éarendel
’, the OE original, is a name rather than a word, and that it referred to ‘what we now call
Venus
: the morning star’.
5
His argument spills into a footnote, as Tolkien develops a thesis about Cynewulf’s semantic signification:
éarendel
meaning ‘ray of light’ is etymologically connected with ‘aurora’, and also appears in the
Bickling Homilies
(a tenth-century collection
of religious writing whose author or authors are unknown to us). Tolkien seems sure that Cynewulf’s lines ‘refer to a herald, a divine messenger’, the morning star as ‘herald of the rise of the true Sun in Christ’. Finally, and with a rather beautifully deflating final turn, he adds that this notion was ‘completely alien to my use’ in writing
The Hobbit
and
the Lord of the Rings
.

In adapting and re-appropriating, as he very often did, Old English words and names, Tolkien nonetheless insists ‘the borrowing when it occurs’ is ‘simply that of sounds, that are then integrated into a new construction; and only in the one case of Eärendil will reference to its source cast any light on the legends or their “meaning”.’ The use of what we now call scare-quotes around ‘meaning’ in that quotation is revealing. The casting of light, on a name that
means
light, in a mythology whose deep past is about the holiness of light, may explain why Eärendil is excepted in this way from all the other names Tolkien coined. ‘Light’, he noted in 1951, ‘is such a primeval symbol in the nature of the Universe, that it can hardly be analysed’, although he makes the effort at least as far as his own invented mythology goes:

The Light of Valinor (derived from light before any fall) is the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically (or philosophically) and imaginatively (or subcreatively) and ‘says that they are good’—as beautiful.
6

Tolkien hardly needs to make specific allusion to the opening of Genesis to make his point. ‘Let there be light!’ is, in one sense, behind the whole of Tolkien’s imaginative enterprise. And a yearning to heal the breach between reason and imagination, between the auroral beauty of spiritual life and the practical necessity of the mundane, is exactly the role a figure such as Eärendil embodies. That God permits such a division to enter into existence—that he divided the light from the darkness before even creating human beings and giving them the power to choose the one or the other—is itself a very deep riddle.
7
Tolkien’s appropriation of Eärendil’s name to his made-up Elvish linguistic world, and his styling of his creation as specifically a
mariner
, takes us back, as it were, before the Genesis
fiat lux
to the primal waters of the deep. As he explains in his unsent letter to Rang, characteristically enclosing the word
poem
within the quotation marks of (I suppose) distancing modesty: ‘before 1914
I wrote a “poem” upon Earendil who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun.’ He notes that he adopted him into his personal mythology as ‘a prime figure’: a sailor, a guiding star and a ‘sign’ of mortal hope, adding that ‘the name could not be adopted just like that: it had to be accommodated to the Elvish linguistic situation’, something accomplished via a notional Elvish stem ‘*AYAR’ meaning ‘Sea’, referring both to the great Western sea of Middle-earth and (‘
Aman
’) to the Blessed Realm of the Valar.

‘Earendil who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun … ’ Heaven/haven is a linguistic riddle that fascinated Gerard Manley Hopkins, and which (of course) predates him as a word-quibble. More relevant to our purposes here is the sense in which it is the spiritual function ‘Ayar’. For this is a word presented as meaning both sea and (Aiya!) ‘hail’ or ‘greeting’; and as specifically intervening between the immortal and the mortal realm. In all this we are being given the answer to a riddle—‘who is Eärendil’?—that reveals itself to be another riddle: broadly ‘how is there a divide between the divine and the mortal?’ and more practically speaking ‘how can the breach be overcome?’ The sea greets us; it welcomes us. But Middle-earth is bordered by a western, not an eastern ocean: a place of sunsets not sunrises.