The Riddles of The Hobbit (14 page)

There are many examples of both acrostic and mesostic riddles in Anglo-Saxon literature. An acrostic is a text in which the initial letters of each line spell out a hidden message, usually (in the case of Anglo-Saxon riddles), the solution. A mesostic is a form of acrostic in which the embedded letters that spell out the solution is included in the middle of the poem, usually after the caesura. I shall give you some examples of what I mean. The late seventh-century priest and author Aldheim wrote a book called the
Enigmata
comprising one hundred riddles in Latin verse. This book was included in the letter Aldheim wrote to the reigning King of Northumbria, the
Epistola ad Acircium
, which begins with a Latin verse preface that is itself an
acrostic: cleverly, the first letters spell out the sentence, ‘Aldhelmus cecinit millenis versibus odas’, from both the initial and the final letters of the lines. Aldheim’s
Enigmata
was modelled on a similar collection by an earlier writer called Symphosius, called the
Symposii Aenigmata
, which also includes acrostic riddles.

Old English riddlers had a similar predilection for acrostics. Riddle 19 from the
Exeter Book
contains not one but several acrostics, rune acrostics in this case, embedded into the Roman letters of the Anglo-Saxon poem. Here it is, and for ease of modern reading I have transliterated the original runes into their modern alphabetical equivalents, and put them in as capital letters:

Ic on siþe seah SRO

H hygewloncne, heafodbeorhtne,

swiftne ofer saelwong swiþe þrægan.

Hæfde him on hrycge hildeþryþe

NOM naegledne rad

AGEW Widlast ferede

rynestrong on rade rofne CO

FOAH For wæs þy beorhtre,

swylcra siþfæt. Saga hwæt ic hatte.

Do not to be fooled by the line breaks. Here is a modern-English version:

I saw one (S R O H) high-spirited, his head bright with ornaments, swiftly running over the pleasant plain; upon his back he had warlike strength; this (N O M) rode armourless; travelling far upon (A G E W), swiftly going on, he carried (C O F O A H). The journey was all the brighter, the expedition of these three. Say what I am called.

To solve the riddle you need to clock that its acrostics are included
backwards
, presumably because straightforwardly spelled out rune words would be too easy. Run the letter order in reverse and you have:

HORS (the OE for ‘horse’)

MON (= ‘man’)

WEGA (= ‘ways’)

HAOFOC (= ‘hawk’)

And
the riddle is solved. There are a great many modern-English descendants of this particular form of riddle:

My first is in blood and also in battle,

My second in oak and acorn and apple

My third and fourth are both the same

And can be found twice in refrain,

My second to last begins ending

And my ending begins last. What am I?
4

A related tribe of riddles presents the reader or listener with a series of descriptions, inviting us to visualise them as things in the world, only to reveal that the key is alphabetical. Here is an example from Alan Garner’s 2004 novel
Thursbitch
. John Turner is trying to get his horses home through a snowstorm.

The wind was full in their faces and the horses were trying to tuck into a bank for shelter, but Bryn kept them from shoving their panniers against the rocks. Now it was dark and the snow was swarming into his lanthorn and he could not see for the whiteness; but he knew the road. ‘Eh. Jinney. Can you tell me this poser? “Luke had it in front. Paul had it behind. Phoebe Mellor had it twice in the middle afore she was wed. Lads have it. Wenches don’t. Yon’s in life, but not in death”.’
5

We are tempted to think that Turner is referring to the male member and its sexual potential. In fact the solution to the riddle (you have guessed it already, I am sure) is the letter ‘L’.

In
Chapter 2
, above, I mentioned the idea that the
Exeter Book
riddles were all composed by one figure, the poet Cynewulf, two of whose lines (‘Hail! Earendel brightest of angels / Over Middle-earth sent down to men’) had such an important effect upon Tolkien’s own imagination. The idea that Cynewulf composed the riddles was widespread in the nineteenth century, although scholarship today considers it unlikely. But Cynwulf wrote a great many other poems—indeed Cynewulf and Cædmon are the only two Anglo-Saxon poets whose names are known to us (which is to say: there are plenty of other OE poems, but all the authors’ names have been lost).
6
And one thing for which Cynewulf is particularly famous is inserting runic acrostics, usually of his own name, into his verse.

Runes
are interesting things in their own right, and are also of course a feature of Tolkien’s particular creative strategy.
7
He inserts runes in
The Hobbit
(for instance, in the map of the Lonely Mountain), and the
Return of the King
includes amongst its appendices a key to these strange letters. More, Tolkien sometimes wrote letters in runic script: simple greetings, for instance at Christmas, made strange and riddling by the alphabet in which they are couched. Part of the appeal of runes is surely this—that they add glamour to otherwise straightforward communication precisely by
riddling
it. What cannot be denied is that Cynewulf used runes in exactly this way:

Anglo-Saxon scribes made use of [runes] for purposes of shorthand, as happened also in Scandinavia, writing the rune where the meaning denoted by the name was required … Cynewulf uses the same device to conceal, or rather reveal his name in three of his four signed poems, and the same principle is also employed for acrostic purposes in some of the Riddles of the
Exeter Book
.
8

Sometimes Cynewulf would add runes in a straightforward or consecutive manner, spelling out his name. Sometimes the elements would be rearranged, presumably to make the riddle more challenging.

Cynewulf’s method of inserting his runic acrostic is quite straightforward in
Christ II
and
Elene
. In both poems the runes occur in their right order, heralded as it were by the unmistakeable rune-name
cen
, and woven singly into the structure of the verse so as to further the narrative rather than in any way impede it…. [On the other hand]
Juliana
preserves the right order, but inserts the runes in three groups. CYN, EWU and LF, with points separating each run from the next and from the surrounding text in the MA.
Fates
, which like
Christ II
omits E as far as can be judged from the damaged MS, disturbs the position in the poet’s name by the words
F þær on ende standeþ
, followed, as far as can be surmised, by the runes W, U, L, C, Y, N, again woven singly into the text.
9

It is in this broader context of acrostic and letter-puzzles that I want to try and read the nine riddles of
chapter 8
. I am, in other words, taking these various riddles as kind of ‘meta-riddle’. Indeed, in keeping with the theoretical approach of this study as a whole, I want to suggest two ‘solutions’ to this meta-riddle, both, I think, equally valid. One
will bring us back to
The Hobbit
as a novel, via the slightly indirect route of
trolls
. The other will lead us out, into the larger world of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth storytelling. In each case the approach to the business of solving the riddle will be different.

Let us put on one side (for a moment) the ‘what have I got in my pocket?’ riddle, and start from the premise that each item in the poem stands for a different letter, a conceit for which there is precedence in Anglo-Saxon and Celtic riddle-culture.

The first thing that leaps out is the duplication of fishes (‘I am a fish / I am a fish’) in the middle of the sequence. The relevant letter in this case is ‘S’, or ‘Z’; embodying in its shape the sinuous curve of a fish swimming; and capturing sonically the splash and hiss of the motion it imparts to the water.
10
The initial word is suggestive, too: we can see the visual pun between the letter ‘A’ and a mountainous peak—in Tolkien’s own invented script, the Tehtar vowel sign for ‘A’ is the shape, ‘Λ’.
11
Although a number of Old English and Celtic words for ‘mountain’ (
munt
,
beorg
,
héahbeorg
) do not begin with A, others do. There is, for instance, the word
aran
(seen in the name of the Welsh mountain Aran Fawddwy, for instance), a word related to the Old English
aræran
, ‘to raise, to stand-up, to be erect’. We might also think of the modern words such as the French ‘aiguille’ or the mountain range known as the Alps. Indeed, the name ‘alps’ derives from an Old Gaelic word ‘alb’, meaning ‘mountain’.
12
The consonant ‘ł’, represented in modern Welsh by ‘ll’, is formed by pressing the tongue against the teeth in a particular way; and writing it out in Roman script creates a little schematic of a tooth, LL. This provides us with a kind of visual rebus: as ‘A’ or ‘Λ’ resembles a mountain, so LL or Ц resembles a tooth. Now the OE for ‘teeth’ is
tēþ
, but there are a number of related words, to do with the sound teeth make, that begin with ‘hl’ (which approximates to ‘ł’ or an aspirated ‘l’, and which words are sometimes spelled without the ‘h’). For instance there is
hlýdan
, which means amongst other things ‘to chatter’ or ‘clatter’ ones teeth; and
hleahtor
, which is the action of laughter—or showing one’s teeth. There is also
læswian
, which means to feed, graze or chew. Then we have ‘V’, the first letter of ‘wind’ in many languages (the Latin
ventus
, the French ‘vent’; and of course the German ‘wind’ is pronounced ‘vind’). The Old Norse
Vindr
influenced the OE and the modern English word descends from it. ‘I’ takes the form of a plant (and the modern lower-case ‘i’, with its dot-like calyx sitting atop its
stem, is even closer in this regard). But more relevantly, perhaps, is that this English letter, ‘i’, puns on ‘eye’, which is precisely the heart of the original riddle. The OE for ‘eyes’ is ‘eáge’; although the
OED
records a number of variant spellings in early usage, amongst them ‘iȝe’ and ‘yȝe’. Also relevant may be the OE íwan, which means ‘to show, to bring before the eyes’. The OE for ‘dark’ is
mirk
, something Tolkien encodes into the name of the spider-infested forest through which Bilbo and the dwarves must travel. O is (obviously) a letter shaped like an egg; but we might also wish to consider the two-letter ligature known as ‘ash’, the Æ—because in Old English the word for ‘egg’ was ‘æg’ or ‘æ´g’. Then we have our two
swimmers
—the relevant OE here being
swimman
: S, S. Finally there is ‘time’, a concept for which there are several Old English words that begin ‘l’:
læne
, which means ‘a short time’ or ‘temporary, transitory’; and
lange
, which means ‘a long time’.

To summarise, I am proposing a reading of Tolkien’s string of riddle answers as a single acrostic. I suggest a simple re-ordering of one element in the resulting word (following the OE habit of reversing elements in their own acrostic riddles), such that the two swimmers migrate, as it were, upstream before the æg and mirk. This brings us to the following, tentative solution:

In other words, the meta-riddle reveals itself, when read acronymically, as spelling out a word:
Ałvissmæl
or
Alvissmæl
. Now, the
Alvíssmál
(as the name is conventionally modernised) is the name of a poem with which Tolkien was very familiar, and one with an undeniable relationship with
The Hobbit
. It is part of the compendium of Norse mythological texts of which mention has already been made, the
Elder Edda
, The
all-viss
portion of the title is the same as
the English ‘all-wise’; it is the name of the dwarf who appears in the poem. The ‘mal’ part means ‘sayings’, or ‘riddles’. So this poem is called the ‘All-wise’s Sayings’.

Figure 4.1
Thor protects his daughter as he riddles a rather egg-like Alvíss: illustration by W. G. Collingwood (1908)

The
Alvíssmál
concerns a dwarf called Alvíss who claims that Thor’s daughter has been promised to him in marriage; this is a match the hammerman is not keen to see go ahead. Thor makes the match conditional upon Alvíss correctly guessing a series of thirteen riddles, all taking the same form (see Figure 4.1). Indeed, we could say that these riddles have a kind of
reverse
structure to them. Thor provides what amounts to an answer, Alvíss replies with a number of riddling equivalents to the term. Here is the first two of Thor’s questions, and the dwarf’s answer: