The Riddles of The Hobbit (12 page)

And finally Bilbo asks the ninth riddle: ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ We shall come back to this tricky question later.

The answers, then, to the riddles are as follows:

Mountain; teeth; wind; daisy; dark; egg; a fish; a fish being eaten; time; the ring.

In miniature this reproduces the balance of good and evil construed, symbolically, by the novel itself. On the one hand we have the things of the above-ground, the open-air and sunlight (wind, daisies, eggs); on the other, we have things hidden away, inside (as teeth are inside your mouth, or fish inside water—these two things are combined in the seventh riddle, as teeth mash-up the fish and deliver it inside the body). The mountain is defined by its roots—where Bilbo and Gollum are—and its dark. Time devours. The ring is a vacancy that, we go on to learn, unites all that is dark, and hidden, and destructive.

Why did Tolkien choose these ten riddles, and put them into his story in this order? Mountain; teeth; wind; daisy; dark; egg; a fish; a fish being eaten; time; a golden ring. It works, almost, as string of rebuses encapsulating the narrative of the novel itself: the Misty Mountains, the teeth of the various creatures that seek to devour our heroes (trolls, Gollum, orcs, wolves and dragons); the day’s-eye of the sun revealing Bilbo’s invisibility; the dark under the mountains, or within Mirkwood, both standing for the evil against which good must fight; the box and its treasures that is the subject of this quest; the various times Bilbo and the dwarves fall into water; the time of the narrative itself; the ring—and its larger significances. Here is an Old English ‘gnomic’ poem:

A stream must mingle with the sea

And a mast stand tight when winds are free;

A sword be dear to humans still

And the wise serpent live in a hill;

A
fish in water spread its race

And a king give gold from his lofty place;

An old hungry bear walk out on a heath

And a river fall over a hill without death.

An army united by unity stand

And truth be in man, and wisdom in his hand.

A wood cover the land with its courtly green boughs

And a hill be fresh green; and God in His house

The judger of deeds; and a door in a hall

Shall still be the wide mouth that opens to all,

And the shield have a bow where the fingers can lock.

Birds shall speed up to heaven from every tall rock,

The salmon shall leap like the shot of a bow

And showers bring discomfort on worldlings below.

A thief still steal out on the darkest of nights

And the fiend live in fens full of misleading lights.
7

We might recognise elements of this in
The Hobbit
too, the Anglo-Saxon text being filtered through Tolkien’s creative imagination. The road that goes ever on; Bilbo’s ‘sting’—and Smaug in his cave; the fish upon which Gollum feeds, and which the dwarves, enclosed in their barrels, sort-of become in order to escape the wood-elves; Thorin granting his followers treasure, Beorn; the waterfall at Lothlorien; the battle of the five armies; Mirkwood—courtly, to the elves, in its eastern reaches—and Bilbo’s own underhill home (‘the door in a hall shall still be the wide mouth that opens to all’ could hardly be bettered as a description of Bilbo’s round front door). The birds in the tall rock will make us think of the ravens at the Lonely Mountain; and the thief stealing out is of course Bilbo. We could put it this way: that these ‘Gnomic Verses’ construe a riddle to which the answer is—the book called
The Hobbit
.

Are the riddles in
chapter 8
Tolkien’s adaptations or versions of traditional riddles, or did he invent them all himself? This looks like a simple question, but in fact it leads us into debatable, even riddling territory. You would not think so, mind, from what the scholars say. The consensus there is that the riddles are all, in one form or another,
traditional. Tom Shippey notes that ‘Gollum’s riddles, unlike Bilbo’s, tend to be ancient ones.’
8
Two of them—‘this thing all things devours’ riddle and ‘it cannot be seen, cannot be felt’—are both adapted from an Old English riddle poem ‘Solomon and Saturn’; his ‘alive without breath’ fish-riddle is from the Old Norse
Saga of King Heidrek
the Wise. Bilbo’s riddles, on the other hand, are mostly versions of nursery-rhyme traditions—Douglas Anderson, for instance, prints three such rhymes that he suggests stand behind Tolkien’s versions of the ‘teeth’, ‘eggs’ and ‘no-legs’ riddles.
9

I am not sure it is quite as clear cut as this. True, there
are
riddles in English or Latin, nursery rhymes or other folk poetry to which all these answers apply—mountains; teeth; wind; daisy; dark; egg; fish; time. This ought not to surprise us, for the answers are none of them unusual, abstruse or unique. All are simple nouns, concrete or abstract, all familiar features of Old English culture (there are no riddles about such non-Anglo-Saxon pastimes as smoking a pipe or wearing a waistcoat, for example). This fact alone might give us pause, actually; for often Old English and medieval riddles have bizarrely specific answers—a few paragraphs back we encountered ‘a man on horse-back with a hawk on his fist’ as an answer to an actual OE riddle, for example.

Nonetheless, it
is
odd, if they are all adaptations of OE and Nursery Rhyme originals, that scholarship has been unable to find analogues for all Tolkien’ Bilbo–Gollum riddles. Conversely, if they were all invented by Tolkien it is odd that this fact has not been established. Broadly speaking, critics simply start from the premise that these the Bilbo–Gollum riddles
must
have analogues in OE riddle culture. For some of the riddles they have found near-analogues, and declared them to be sources. For others they have been unable to discover anything at all, and have suggested that the search must continue. I have an alternative theory.

Tolkien himself, asked about this matter, replied variously. In a letter published in
The Observer
, 16 January 1938, he expatiated upon various sources for
The Hobbit
, stressing the importance of
Beowulf
in particular (‘
Beowulf
is among my most valued sources’) and talking a little about the then-unpublished
Silmarillion
. The penultimate paragraph of this letter mentions the riddles:

And what about the Riddles? There is work to be done here on the sources and analogues. I should not be at all surprised to learn that
both the hobbit and Gollum will find their claim to have invented any of them disallowed.
10

This seems, at first blush, to support the idea that Tolkien adapted all his riddles from traditional sources. But this is not actually what the passage says. In fact it is couched in a rather elegantly riddling idiom. It asserts nothing, but rather intimates (‘there is work to be done here … I should not be at all surprised to learn’) in a manner precisely designed to lead the unwary reader astray. We might answer: of course these riddles were not invented by Gollum and Bilbo—for Gollum, and Bilbo themselves were ‘invented’ by somebody else, the writer of the present letter. But to say so gets us no closer to the ‘sources’ of the riddles.

If this letter implies that the Bilbo–Gollum riddles are all variants of traditional sources, another letter
denies
precisely this. Writing to Allen & Unwin on 20 September 1947 Tolkien declared:

As for the Riddles: they are ‘all my own work’ except for ‘Thirty White Horses’ which is traditional, and ‘No-legs’. The remainder, though their style and method is that of old literary (but not ‘folklore’) riddles, have
no models
as far as I am aware, save only the egg-riddle, which is a reduction to a couplet (my own) of a longer literary riddle which appears in some ‘Nursery Rhyme’ books, notably American ones.
11

In other words, Tolkien is asked twice whether these riddles are versions of traditional examples, or all his own work. The first time he answers the former, or at least strongly implies that; the second time he answers the latter, although with a raft of exceptions. It is hard to avoid the sense that, whatever else is going on in these letters, Tolkien is being playfully mystifying about his riddles.

In the next chapter I suggest that Tolkien’s selection of riddles in this chapter was not random, and that one of the things that this chapter does is reveal ‘riddling’ to be a more self-reflexive mode than a simple sequence of questions-and-answers. But before I do that, I want to explore the notion that Tolkien’s apparently contradictory approach to the question of ‘sources’ for his riddles is actually itself a sort of riddle.

The Hobbit
is full of rhymes and songs. Ten of these (in
chapter 8
) are specifically called ‘riddles’. But in fact not only do these various
verse texts draw broadly on OE riddle traditions, but that the poems that are
not
specifically identified as riddles are the ones with the most readily identifiable sources in Anglo-Saxon riddle literature. This perhaps looks counter-intuitive, but that of course would be precisely the point: for a riddle works exactly by being counter-intuitive. To play such a game over the length of a novel would be evidence of a ludic slyness certainly not incompatible with Tolkien’s imagination. ‘There is’, as he put it, ‘work to be done here on the sources and analogues.’

A few examples will give a sense of what I mean. Here is ‘Riddle 28’ from the
Exeter Book
:

Biþ foldan dæl fægre gegierwed

mid þy heardestan ond mid þy scearpestan

ond mid þy grymmestan gumena gestreona,

corfen, sworfen, cyrred, þyrred,

bunden, wunden, blæced, wæced,

frætwed, geatwed, feorran læded

to durum dryhta. Dream bið in innan

cwicra wihta, clengeð, lengeð,

þara þe ær lifgende longe hwile

wilna bruceð ond no wið spriceð,

ond þonne æfter deaþe deman onginneð,

meldan mislice. Micel is to hycganne

wisfæstum menn, hwæt seo wiht sy.

Crossley-Holland translates as follows:

Some acres of this middle-earth

are adorned with the hardest and the sharpest,

most bitter of man’s fine belongings;

it is cut, threshed, couched, kilned,

mashed, strained, sparged, yeasted,

covered, racked, and carried far

to the doors of men. A quickening delight

lies in this treasure, lingers and lasts

for men who, from experience, indulge

their inclinations and don’t rail against them;

and then after death it begins to gab,

to
gossip recklessly. Even clever people

must think carefully what this creature is.
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His translation, as he himself notes, is slanted towards the solution he considers the most likely: ‘the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of
John Barleycorn
or
ale
’. But he concedes:

My version of lines 4–6 to some extent simplify the original … there is unfortunately no way in which a translator can echo the remarkable music (achieved by adding rhyming pairs to the usual alliteration and four-stress lines) of this same passage:

corfen, sworfen, cyrred, þyrred,

bunden, wunden, blæced, wæced,

frætwed, geatwed, feorran læded

to durum dryhta …. clengeð, lengeð,

I think this piece of rousing Old English verse is behind the song the goblins sing as they carry Bilbo and the dwarves underground as their prisoners:

Clash, crash! Crush smash!

Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!

Pound, pound, far underground!

…

Swish smack! Whip crack!

Batter and bleat! Yammer and bleat!

Work, work! Nor dare to shirk!

While Goblins quaff and Goblins laugh,

Round and round far underground!

(
Hobbit
, 68)

We read this as a simple, if cruel hearted, song of goblin triumph. I am proposing that, like many riddles, it has a double meaning—it celebrates the capture of dwarves and a hobbit; but it also asks us to
solve
it as a puzzle. What is smacked, cracked, couched and kilned, battered and beaten, mashed and strained, covered and racked, and finally carried far from the doors of men—such that goblins can quaff and laugh? I am with Crossley-Holland: the answer would seem to be:
ale
.

Later
in the story the goblins trap the party up some fir trees, which are then set on fire. They sing a characteristically cruel song:

Fifteen birds in five firtrees,

their feathers were fanned in a fiery breeze!

But, funny little birds, they had no wings!

O what shall we do with the funny little things?

Roast ’em alive, or stew them in a pot;

fry them, boil them and eat them hot?

(
Hobbit
, 107)

‘Fifteen birds in five firtrees’ straightforwardly describes the situation the dwarves, wizard and Bilbo have found themselves in, of course. But the rhyme has something in common with the tradition of number riddles. Crossley-Holland notes a Brahman riddle from the
Rig Veda
that describes a wheel with twelve spokes upon which stand 720 sons, all from one father—the year (‘720’ sums the days and nights). In the
Exeter Book
Riddle 22 plays similar number games: