The Riddles of The Hobbit (8 page)

Tolkien’s imagination was strongly drawn to Dragons. ‘I find “dragons” a fascinating product of imagination’, he wrote to Naomi Mitchison in 1949. At the same time he noted that ‘the whole problem of the intrusion of the “dragon” into northern imagination’ was, in effect, a riddle to which he had not yet found a solution. Another letter, written to Walter Hooper on 20 February 1968, may be relevant here. In this letter Tolkien confirms that he has never himself seen a dragon, and that he has no wish to. He then relates a story he heard from C. S. Lewis concerning an individual named Brightman, an ecclesiastical scholar of some repute, who sat in the Common Room of Magdalen College Oxford saying very little for many years. One night there was a discussion of dragons, and according to Lewis:

Brightman’s voice was heard to say, ‘I have seen a dragon.’ Silence. ‘Where was that?’ he was asked. ‘On the Mount of Olives,’ he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant.
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The riddle of Brightman’s gnomic comment is not
so
very hard to unravel, except that it answers a riddle with another riddle, or perhaps it would be better to say: answers it with a religious mystery. The dragon he has seen presumably has to do with his personal encounter with Christ. The mystery here (which also, I think, galvanises Tolkien’s own creative imagination) is that the fabulous type of Satan can also function as a type of Christ—that evil and good can be reconciled on the largest, spiritual scale. The dragon of which, despite all its instinct towards destruction, only good ultimately comes. The dragon, we might say, as a manifestation of what Graham Greene, in resonant phrase, once called the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

To
broaden the discussion a little: in addition to specific poems set out as riddles, Anglo-Saxon poetry is threaded through with
kennings
: a distinctive, circumlocutionary trope that uses figurative and riddling phrases in place of simple indicatives. The
Beowulf
-poet for instance sometimes refers to the sea as ‘the sea’, and sometimes as ‘the whale-road’ or ‘the gannets’-bath’. A kenning might be easily unriddled, particularly if predicated upon the object’s use—an example would be a sword described as ‘a wound-hoe’. Alternatively it might be more oblique and baffling: in
Beowulf
1032 a sword is
fela lafe
, presumably ‘that which the
file left
behind’ when the smith was sharpening it.

The word kenning is originally Old Norse, and comes from the word
kenna
, which means ‘knowledge’. The Modern English verb
to ken
does survives, although in a marginal and dialectic sense (although the phrase
beyond one’s ken
, ‘beyond the scope of one’s knowledge’, contains the word, like a bug in amber, preserved in its original sense). In other words, ‘kennings’ like full riddles are games of knowledge: they ask, in the first sense, ‘do you know what this is?’ and more broadly they open more puzzling questions about the certainty, ground and transparency of all knowledge. Since the pleasure of a kenning is proportionate to its complexity it does not surprise us that Old Norse texts are replete not only with the
kenning
but the
tvíkenning
—the double-kenning. To unpack ‘
grennir gunn-más
’ from the Norse
Glymdrápa
(the phrase means ‘feeder of the war-gull’) we need first to understand that ‘war-gull’ is itself a kenning for ‘raven’. ‘Feeder of ravens’ is a sardonic way of describing a warrior, somebody destined to end up a corpse on the battlefield and eaten by carrion birds. The modern ‘cannon-fodder’ is a similar kenning, although since it has become a phrasal cliché it is likely that few who hear it are moved to decode it
as
a kenning. How far Anglo-Saxon culture similarly took kennings as mere clichés, and how far they functioned as actually estranging mini-riddles, can only be a matter of conjecture. But at least
some
kennings engage the mind in the process of unriddling. When I first learned to ride a motorcycle a medical student friend of mine noticed my crash-helmet in the hallway of the flat we shared and said to me: ‘I see you have become an organ donor.’ This—although I did not then know the word—
was
a kenning, a distant cousin of the ‘feeder of ravens’ sort; for motorcyclists are much more likely to be involved in fatal accidents, and their corpses
therefore are more likely to supply hospital surgeries with young, healthy organs for transplant.

It is a striking thing that, whilst scholars describe kennings as a characteristically common-Germanic business, only Old Norse and Old English poetry contain actual kennings. For our purposes, since these are the two literary and cultural traditions that most directly fed into Tolkien’s own imaginative work, this is relevant; although it raises questions as to why kennings did not appeal more broadly. More, Old English writers do not seem to have been interested in the Norse
tvíkenning
: all Anglo-Saxon kennings are all of the simple two-term form like ‘file-left’ or ‘whale-road’. But we can say that, on the level of word and form, the simple kenning is the bringing together of two terms that generates a third. This is, in other words, the action of metaphor, the leap into comprehension. The kenning mimics the process by which the mundane thing and the mundane thing can combine together to make something transcendent: meaning.
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Anglo-Saxon culture was fascinated by the intersection of the divine and the mundane, as was Tolkien. We can go further and suggest that it is in its
riddles
that this great mystery is most often given voice. By way of small example here, in Chris McGully’s elegant translation, is Riddle 85 from the
Exeter Book
:

Scholars tend to agree that the solution to
this
riddle must be ‘a fish in the river’; although I think we can be more precise, and say ‘a turbot in the Thames’. Of all the rivers in England, only the Thames was worshipped in the Dark Ages as a god—archaeologists have recovered, only from this waterway, large numbers of swords and other valuable metalware from this period that had once been offered up
to the god of the river. The point of this riddle, it seems to me, is to do more than pose a puzzle. It is to suggest the ways in which the river is continually pouring its life out into the ocean and yet is continually renewing itself. The river is both living and immortal, a deity: and the fish, who is always in motion, is its holy inhabitant. It is puzzling and yet it is
right
that the mundane and the divine are twined round one another. (In the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter of
The Hobbit
, not one but two of the riddles have the answer ‘fish’). Nor is this confined to a pagan sense of the world. Here is riddle 51, once again in McCully’s version:

McCully himself follows conventional scholarly wisdom in proposing the solution: ‘four fingers holding a quill’. Personally, I do not see that this is a terribly good solution to the riddle. One holds a pen with two fingers and a thumb, not with ‘four fingers’; the digits of a writing hand can hardly be said to ‘fall through the eyes’ and it is not usual to plunge one’s hand under water before writing. As a kenning for ‘writing’
black tracks over a pale path
has a certain loveliness to it, I concede; but the filigreed gold at the end suggests to me that we are talking not about mundane writing but rather an elaborate, expensive illuminated manuscript. In other words I am suggesting that the answer to this riddle is not writing as such, but
the Gospels
. Producing beautifully illustrated versions of these texts was, of course, one of the main occupations of monks. Here, the four saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John make their journey via the writing of black ink on white page, but their work is also illuminated by gold, and other colours too. And each gospel author had his own animal: the eagle for St John, an ox for Luke, a winged lion for Mark and a winged man (or angel) for Matthew. That is to say, Matthew, Mark and John could all fly, and could be described as ‘planing birds’; but only St John, the eagle, is ‘the strongest’ bird, capable of swooping up through the air
and diving down into the water—as both sea eagles and fish eagles do. John leads, ‘pointing the journey’ because he is the author of the prophetic Revelation with which the Bible concludes.

But these two specific readings are a roundabout way of making a larger and I believe fairly uncontentious point. One of the things riddles do is close the ground between mundane puzzle and divine mystery. There are several ways in which this is made manifest in Dark Age culture. Here is an example of what I mean: one way this culture tried to understand the puzzling nature of divine–mortal interaction was by having a god actually pose riddles to a mortal, in a contest. Indeed, riddle contests were an important part of Dark Age culture. This might be by way of passing the time and having fun; but they also had a deeper significance.

One example of this latter is the field of law. However counter-intuitive it might seem to modern sensibilities, Dark Age culture closely connected legal process and riddles. Perhaps this had to do with a sense that the law was rarely simple or straightforward; for the law, after all, tends to highlight puzzling or counter-intuitive aspects of human existence. In Dark Age and early medieval Ireland and Wales the riddle was thought an essential means of both teaching and practising law.
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Where the latter is concerned, Judges in early Irish law courts were expected to base their judgment on five grounds, bringing to bear natural justice, Scripture, legal analogy as well as two riddle-like elements: the
fásach
(a group of legal maxims that can be thought of part of wisdom literature more generally) and the
roscad
. This last is a mode of gnomic verse jurists were taught, and which Fergus Kelly argues can best be thought of as riddles.
20
Riddles are a mode of wisdom, and wisdom should inform legal judgment. To quote Christopher Guy Yocum:

While judges were not valued as highly as poets, possibly because of the view that they were artisans, the cultivation of wisdom literature was apparently entrusted to judges as part of their duties in regard to the law.
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We have evidence that the riddle was used as an instructional tool in Welsh and Irish law schools; and can assume it was used elsewhere in the northern world. The
Gúbretha Caratniad
(‘False Judgments of Caratnia’) is an Early Irish legal dialogue that foregrounds how
important riddles were to Early Irish and Welsh jurisprudence. It is found in a manuscript dating from the mid twelfth century—Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS B 502—though the work itself is considerably older. It details a question and answer to-and-fro between a Judge called Caratnia and his king Conn Cétchathach. The Judge makes a series of ‘false’ legal judgments, and the king points out that these judgments contravene Irish law. The judge then explains the particular circumstances that make these superficially ‘false’ judgments actually true. As Robin Chapman Stacey points out, ‘the genre to which these conversations belong’ is the riddle. He adds that the fact that riddles formed part of a legal education ‘is not surprising’.