The Riddles of The Hobbit (7 page)

Sea
is also where the
Exeter Book
starts, with three linked riddles that still puzzle scholars today. Here are the opening lines of the first:

Who is so clever and quick-witted

as to guess who goads me on my journey

when I get up, angry, at times awesome;

when I roar loudly and rampage over the land?
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The riddle goes on to talk about ‘I with my roof of water’, adding ‘I carry on my back what once covered / every man, body and soul submerged / together in the water’; although confusingly the riddle also claims ‘I burn houses and ransack palaces’. It concludes: ‘Say what conceals me / or what I, who bear this burden, am called.’ Scholars gloss this as ‘a storm on land’, but we cannot be sure, for none of the
Exeter Book
riddles include their own solution. Conceivably lightning from a storm might set light to buildings, although the situation described in the riddle is surely far too wet to permit the sort of conflagration described (‘smoke rises, ashen over roofs’).

The
riddle hinges, we could say, on the deliberate crashing together of two quantities (sea, land) more usually kept apart. One of Tolkien’s more eccentric views was that ‘the Atlantis tradition’ was ‘so fundamental to mythical history’ that it must have ‘some kind of basis in real history’; although this in turn (as he wrote to Christopher Bretherton, 16 July 1964) speaks more forcefully to some important component in Tolkien’s personal subconscious (‘what I might call my Atlantis-haunting’) than actual history. He tells Bretherton how the Atlantis myth, or some version of it, has given him nightmares throughout his life: a ‘dreadful dream’ of a great wave, emerging either from the still waters of the sea or else washing over the green landscape. He adds that converting this nightmare into stories has to some extent ‘exorcized’ the dream, but not to the point of banishing it altogether. ‘It always ends by surrender’, he writes; ‘and I awake by gasping out of deep water.’
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The temptation to psychoanalyse Tolkien for this vividly-recalled dream experience, though strong, is worth resisting—as an impertinence quite apart from anything else. And anyway there is a level on which this first
Exeter Book
riddle is not so puzzling: it means death, as with Christian passing finally to the city of Zion at the end of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
. Indeed, I suggest that constellating the first
Exeter Book
riddle with Tolkien’s imaginarium draws up another possible solution to the former. In Norse mythology the world-ocean was inhabited by, and to an extent identified with, a dragon called Jörmungandr. In the
Prose Edda
Thor goes fishing for this great serpent, rowing out in a boat and baiting his hook with an ox’s head. A great sea-dragon, rearing up apocalyptically over the land-habitations of humankind, could both blast with fire and drown with water; but what is most interesting about this is not its specific solution itself as the way it draws together (pentecostal) fire and (baptismal) water in a catastrophic overturning of the mortal world. Who
conceals
such a dragon? God, of course. More to the point, concealment, and unconcealment, are what riddles do, as do divine mysteries.

According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
(a project with which Tolkien was involved for a time, although I am not suggesting he worked on this particular entry) the English word ‘dragon’ derives from Greek δράκων, (
drákōn
), ‘dragon, serpent of huge size, water-snake’, which in turn probably comes from the verb δρακε
ν (
drakeîn
) ‘to see clearly’. The ironic force of this etymology is rather striking, for it names an imaginary, and therefore (strictly) invisible,
beast as precisely
the clearly seen one
. But it is right, of course. Dragons
are
clearly seen, in our cultural imaginary at any rate. And Tolkien’s own love for dragons is clearly connected with what can be seen and what cannot be seen, dramatised in
The Hobbit
with Bilbo’s first encounter with Smaug wearing a ring of invisibility. As with the larger fascination Tolkien’s work manifests with questions of visibility and invisibility, or seeing and blindness, this turns out to be a way of finding dramatic and emblematic mode of rendering the fundamentally evangelical truth—seeing past the epiphenomena of this world to the prime reality of God. ‘Because thou hast seen me’, Christ tells Thomas, ‘thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’ (John 20:29).

The second and third riddles of the
Exeter Book
do similar work in elaborating a mysterious connection between destroying oceanic water and saving divine grace. Indeed, the riddles are so closely linked, thematically, that some scholars think we should read all three as one long riddle. Here, again in Crossley-Holland’s translation, is the opening of Riddle 2:

Sometimes I plunge through the press of the waves,

surprising men, delving into the earth,

the ocean bed. The waters ferment,

sea-horses foaming …

The whale-mere roars, fiercely rages,

waves beat upon the shore; stones

and sand, seaweed and saltspray, are flung

against the dunes when, wrestling

far beneath the waves, I disturb the earth,

the vast depths of the sea. Nor can I escape

my ocean bed before he permits me who is my pilot

on every journey.

The riddle concludes by asking ‘tell me, wise man: / who separates me from the sea’s embrace / when the waters become quiet once again?’ The answer provided by scholars is ‘an earthquake under the sea’, or perhaps ‘a storm at sea’. Either answer could be correct. I would suggest, though, that we can also read this riddle in the light of Tolkien’s own ‘Fastitocalon’, a poem he published in
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
. He took the peculiar name ‘Fastitocalon’ from an
Anglo-Saxon bestiary. He explained in a letter to Eileen Elgar (5 March 1964) that the name may have come from ‘
Aspido-chelone
’, which means a round-shield-shaped turtle. Of this proper name ‘
astitocalon
’ is a simple corruption, although the initial ‘f’, according to Tolkien, was an unwarranted addition to make the word alliterate with the rest of the line in which it appears ‘as was compulsory for poets in his day’.
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The actual line is:
þam is noma cenned / fyrnstreama geflotan Fastitocalon
, which means ‘he is given a name / the first-stream floating one, Fastitocalon’. Tolkien goes on to consider the widely-used trope of the treacherous location at which sailors moor thinking it an island, but which is actually a semi-submerged ocean monster. He thinks this myth derives ‘from the East’, and that it may embody some exaggerated memories of actual marine turtles. But when this legend comes to Europe, Tolkien notes, the monster becomes less turtle-ish and more whale-like. He hardly needs to add, but does for clarity, ‘in moralized bestiaries he is, of course, an allegory for the Devil, and is so used by Milton’. In amongst the many other things Tolkien’s own ‘Fastitocalon’ poem is, it can be taken as an answer to the question asked by
Exeter Book
Riddle 2 (‘who separates me from the sea’s embrace?’), the answer being ‘God’, the pilot who steers this destructive marine force for His own reasons, the mystery of his grace. And the Anglo-Saxon sense of the sea as a monster, magnificent and wonderful but also alarming and terrifying is picked up in Riddle 3:

Sometimes my Lord corners me;

then He imprisons all that I am

under fertile fields—He frustrates me,

condemns me in my might to darkness,

casts me in to a cave where my warden, earth,

sits on my back. I cannot break out

of that dungeon, but I shake halls

and houses; the gabled homes of men

tremble and totter; walls quake,

then overhang. Air floats above earth,

and the face of the ocean seems still

until I burst out from my cramped cell

at my Lord’s bidding, He who in anger

buried me before, so shackled me that I

could not escape my Guardian, my Guide.

Sometimes
I swoop to whip up waves, rouse

the water, drive the flint-grey rollers

to the shore. Spuming crests crash

against the cliff, dark precipice looming

over deep water.

The riddle continues for many lines in this vein, before concluding with the demand: ‘tell me my name, / and Who it is rouses me from my rest, / or Who restrains me when I remain silent.’ ‘God’ is a very good answer to these latter two questions, just as this and the two preceding riddles are, in the final analysis ‘about’ the combined grace and anger of God, the way he structures mortal existence on the largest scale via both giving and taking away (to quote the resonant line from Job 1:21). But the proper response to the first demand, ‘tell me my name’, must be more than simply ‘earthquake’ or ‘storm’—although that tends to be what the scholars offer by way of solution. Crossley-Holland notes that in line 50 of the riddle its subject is described as ‘
scripan
’, an Old English word ‘meaning a sinewy and sinister gliding movement; it is also used by the
Beowulf
-poet in describing both the monster Grendel and the dragon.’
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Is this also a riddle about a dragon?

There is a celebrated story about dragons that exists in a number of variants. Two dragons, one red and one white, are engaged in a titantic struggle underground. It is possible these stories began as folk-explanations for earth tremors into which nationalistic significance was later read—as, for instance, that the Red Dragon was Wales and the White England. In the
Mabinogion
tale ‘Lludd and Llefelys’, the hero Lludd is faced with three riddling afflictions to the land, the second of which is a terrifying scream that comes every first of May and makes all the women in the kingdom miscarry. The solution to this conundrum is two battling dragons; and Lludd solves it by putting them both to sleep with mead and burying them in Dinas Emrys, in North Wales. Nennius’
Historia Brittonum
(written sometime in the 820s) takes up the story centuries later. King Vortigern’s attempts to build a castle at Dinas Emrys are thwarted, for the earth shakes his structures to pieces every time he tries. Eventually a soothsayer (according to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s retelling in his
Historia Regum Britanniae
(c.1140), this soothsayer is Merlin himself) reveals that these earthquakes are being caused by the subterranean battling dragons, and shows how to subdue them.

Tolkien
had some light-hearted fun with this myth himself, combining it with stories of the Norse world-girdling ocean-dragon Jörmungandr, in
Roverandom
(written 1925, though not published until 1998). This story is set at the seaside at Foley, but also encompasses the light side of the moon, where the Man in the Moon lives in a fine tower, and the dark side where sleeping children frolic in the valley of dreams and the undersea kingdom of the mer-king. The protagonist is a dog called Rover, who takes the name Roverandom to distinguish himself from two other dogs in the story (a moon-dog and mer-dog) also called Rover. These dogs get up to various larks, including teasing the Great White Dragon of the moon (‘white with green eyes and leaking green fire at every joint, and snorting black smoke like a steamer … the mountains rocked and echoed, and the snow dried up; avalanches tumbled down’) and rousing up the undersea serpent (‘when he undid a curl or two [of his tail] in his sleep, the water heaved and shook and bent people’s houses and spoilt their repose for miles and miles around.’)
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It is certainly possible that Tolkien had the
Exeter Book
riddles at the back of his mind when writing this.

Dragons are huge and destructive forces, as likely to appear on land as at sea. But which dragon? One possible answer to Riddle 3 is Niðhöggr, the vast dragon who lies under the ground gnawing at the roots of the world tree and making the earth and oceans shake. The creature’s name means either ‘malice-striker’ or ‘striker in the dark’ and he is controlled by one figure only, the Norse god Hel, who rules the underworld. In the
Poetic Edda
Niðhöggr is described devouring the corpses of the dead, but also as coming out from time to time into the open air:

There comes the dark dragon flying,

the shining serpent, up from Niðafjöll

Niðhöggr flies over the plain, in his wings

he carries corpses.
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‘Niðafjöll’ means ‘the Mountains of the Dark of the Moon’; another detail which feeds into Tolkien’s
Roverandom
story.

To take stock for a moment: we have, then, three possible solutions for these famous Anglo-Saxon riddles. In setting out these three I am following a Tolkienian lead—not in the specific answers I propose, for as far as I know he himself offered no solutions to these riddles, but in a
broader sense, the one outlined in his celebrated lecture ‘The Monsters and the Critics’. In that work Tolkien insisted that although scholarship tends to want to downplay the fantastical and monstrous aspect of Old English literature in favour of rationalised, historical or social explanations, in fact the heart and soul of the literature is
in
the monsters. (I discuss Tolkien’s lecture in more detail below). So: let’s entertain the possibility that the answers to all three riddles are ‘dragon’.
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