The Riddles of The Hobbit (17 page)

This, moreover, is a problem faced by any writer who wishes to write about a pre-modern world. To explain what I mean, I lay my finger upon one of the most commercially successful of recent post-Tolkienian Fantasies, Patrick Rothfuss’s
The Name of the Wind
(2006). Rothfuss’ enjoyable narrative concerns a main character called Kvothe, who lives in a pre-Industrial, medievalised, magical world. Kvothe grows up as a neglected street-kid in a crime-riddled city, but manages to enrol in a legendary university of magic and learn the true names of all things so that he can control them. He has a variety of colourful adventures on his way to realising his destiny, to become ‘the greatest magician the world has ever known’. But despite being set in a medieval world,
The Name of the Wind
is written in the bourgeois discursive style familiar from a thousand nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. Here is a passage picked at random:

I settled onto the stone bench under the pennant pole next to my two friends.

‘So where were you last night?’ Simmon asked too casually.

It was only then that I remembered that the three of us had planned to meet up with Fenton and play corners last night. Seeing Denna had completely driven the plan from my mind. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry Sim. How long did you wait for me?’

He gave me a look.

‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated, hoping I looked as guilty as I felt. ‘I forgot.’

Sim grinned, shrugging it off. ‘It’s not a big deal.’
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This could be three pals from any twentieth- or twenty-first century-set novel; and hundreds and hundreds of similar passages serve only
to show the author has not entered into the medieval pre-industrial mindset that his medieval pre-industrial world required—to, for example, understand the crucial point that not guilt (‘I looked as guilty as I felt’) but
shame
was the moral dynamic for the period. But to understand that would involve shifting about the psychological portraiture of the entire project; it would have meant writing characters less like, and therefore less appealing to, a twenty-first-century readership disinclined to make the effort to encounter the properly strange or unusual.

This speaks to a broader state of affairs in which style (the language and form of the novel) is seen by many writers and readers as an unimportant adjunct to the ‘story’. It is not. A bourgeois discursive style constructs a bourgeois world. If it is used to describe a medieval environment it necessarily mismatches what it describes, creating a world that is only an anachronism, a theme park or a World-of-Warcraft gaming environment rather than actual place. This degrades the ability of the book properly to evoke its fictional setting, and therefore denies the book the higher heroic possibilities of its imaginative premise.

How to make a bridge between our modern sensibilities and the medieval matter is the problem that any modern writer of Fantasy must try to address. Rothfuss’s solution, for good and ill, and mostly for ill, is simply to write the pre-modern as if it is modern. In the
Silmarillion
Tolkien was widely criticised for writing in an unadorned antique style (‘like the Old Testament’, reviewers complained; although actually it is rather unlike the Bible and more like the northern Sagas). Ordinary readers often could not stomach this, although Old English specialists and medievalists, who are used to reading this kind of thing, usually speak of the book in warmer terms.

The Lord of the Rings
represents one solution to the problem of how to achieve this bridge. It is deliberately constructed by braiding modern perspectives (the cosy bourgeois hobbits) and pre-modern (the medieval Gondor, the Old English Rohan) together, not only in terms of story but style: the hobbit chapters are of course written with a kind of early-twentieth-century contemporaneity of narratorial voice, where the later sequences inhabit a more antiquated and high-flown idiom, full of inversions, dated vocabulary, invocative and rhetorical stiffness, although at the same time rather splendid and suitably heroic. But it is surprising how few writers have
attempted to imitate Tolkien’s stylistic strategy in this, although of course they have stolen plenty of other things from his writing.

This takes us a little away from
pockets
. My point, before it gets away from me, is that the way Tolkien creates a Dark Age and medieval world and then sets a bourgeois, modern individual (Bilbo) loose in it is not undeliberate, or a problem, but part of the novel’s design, a feature rather than a bug. This sort of anachronism, I am arguing, is part of the way the novel generates its unique effects. A better way of thinking about it would be to see it as a kind of conceptual riddle. Bilbo’s pocket is a sort of emblem for this. We can imagine the final exchange between Bilbo and Gollum re-written this way:

BILBO
: What have I got in my pocket?

GOLLUM
: What’s a
pocket
?

This brings me to
Beowulf
, the Old English epic that is both the longest and the most magnificent relict of Anglo-Saxon literature we have.

Beowulf
tells the story of its titular hero; a warrior from ‘Geat-land’ (modern day southern Sweden) who travels to the court of Hrothgar in Denmark. The Danes are allies of the Geats; but Hrothgar’s court in the splendid hall of Heotot is plagued by a murderous monster called Grendl, a creature man-shaped but of huge stature. The poem tells us that he is ultimately descended from the Biblical Cain. Every night Grendl breaks into Heorot and kills or carries off some of Hrothgar’s warriors; swords are useless against the creature’s magically-protected hide. Beowulf comes, wrestles with the monster and rips off its arm, whereupon it runs away into the night to die. Everyone is delighted at this, but celebrations are premature. Grendl’s mother, an even more terrifying creature, comes out of her lair to pay back her son’s death, and more Danish warriors are slain. Beowulf then tracks this she-devil to her home at the bottom of a lake. He swims down and fights her. His own sword Hrunting is useless against her, but luckily he finds, amongst her own spoils, a magic sword with which he cuts off her head. Once this is accomplished he finds the corpse of her son Grendl and decapitates it too, bringing the severed head back to Heorot. At last the threat has been overcome, and Beowulf returns a hero to Sweden. But the story is not over: we skip forward many years. Beowulf has acceded to the throne and ruled for many years
as a wise king, but in his old age a great dragon afflicts his nation. So he rides out to fight this monster, succeeding in killing it, although at the cost of his own life.
Beowulf
the poem ends with elegiac praise of Beowulf the hero and all that he represented.

Now,
Beowulf
occupied a central position in Tolkien’s imaginative and scholarly life; he taught it, wrote critical essays about it, delivered public lectures upon it, and left (at his death) an unfinished commentary upon the poem that, apparently, runs to some 2000 manuscript pages. Some of the ways in which this powerful poem directly informs
The Hobbit
have been covered by other commentators. Tolkien himself, in a letter he wrote to
The Times
and which has already been mentioned, pointed up the incident of the thief stealing the cup from the huge dragon as a starting point for the portion of
The Hobbit
when Bilbo steals the cup from Smaug.

And I have already had cause to mention Tolkien’s celebrated 1936 lecture about
Beowulf
, ‘The Monster and the Critics’. Published, and later reworked more than once, it remains a profoundly influential intervention into twentieth-century
Beowulf
studies, and has had a wider impact upon the criticism of Fantasy more broadly conceived. One of the main arguments that Tolkien makes in this lecture is that the Beowulf scholars have been too narrowly focused on the poem’s linguistic, philological and historical interest—in what
Beowulf
tells us about the development of the language and about the society and culture of northern Europe in the later Dark Ages. For such critics, the monsters were embarrassments to be hurried past, gauche story-filler, unworthy of the noble, uplifting verse in which they were realised. Tolkien, eloquently and persuasively, disagreed. For him the monsters were not elements to be explained away; they were the
point
of the poem.

Actually, Tolkien was not the first to talk of the poem in these terms. A. J. Wyatt’s 1914 standard edition, still widely used in the 1930s, starts with a prefatory note saying that whilst ‘the editors of
Beowulf
have with rare exceptions concentrated their attempts upon the problem of fixing and interpreting the text and have avoided discussing the literary history of the poem’, there
are
many critics (‘in monographs such as those of ten Brink, Mullenhoff and Boer’) who do precisely that, and Wyatt himself promises a volume entitled ‘Introduction to the Study of Beowulf’ which will take the poem
as
poetry.
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Perhaps for our purposes what is more interesting is that
Tolkien’s lecture expressly considers
Beowulf
to be a ‘riddle’: an ‘enigmatic poem’, constituted by the bringing together of two apparently incompatible things. He quotes from W. P. Ker’s
The Dark Ages
:

The fault of
Beowulf
is that there is nothing much in the story. The hero is occupied in killing monsters, like Hercules or Theseus. But there are other things in the lives of Hercules and Theseus besides the killing of the Hydra or of Procrustes. Beowulf has nothing else to do, when he has killed Grendl and Grendl’s mother in Denmark: he goes home to his own Gautland, until at last the rolling years bring the Fire-drake and his last adventure. It is too simple. Yet the three chief episodes are well wrought and well diversified; they are not repetitions, exactly; there is a change of temper between the wrestling with Grendl in the night at Heorot and the descent under water to encounter Grendl’s mother; while the sentiment of the Dragon is different again. But the great beauty, the real value, of
Beowulf
is in its dignity of style. In construction it is curiously weak, in a sense preposterous; for while the main story is simplicity itself, the merest commonplace of heroic legend, all about it, in the historic allusions, there are revelations of a whole world of tragedy, plots different in import from that of
Beowulf
, more like the tragic themes of Iceland. Yet with this radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges, the poem of
Beowulf
is undeniably weighty. The thing itself is cheap; the moral and the spirit of it can only be matched among the noblest authors.

Tolkien insists that this view of the poem remains influential, and potently so; but he identifies in it a ‘paradox’ that has given
Beowulf
something of the flavour of an enigmatic poem. The paradox, he thinks, has to do with the disjunction between perceived defects in the theme and structure of the poem on the one hand, and the widely reiterated nobility, grandeur and genius of the poem on the other. After surveying some other critics, Tolkien declares: ‘The riddle is still unsolved.’ His solution (the thesis of his lecture: that the monsters are at the heart of it, not in the margins) is a good one, but—as with OE riddles more generally—perhaps not the only one. He goes on to discuss the nature of what he calls ‘Northern’ bravery: its unyieldingness. He quotes Ker again (‘the Northern Gods have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like
Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.’) He finishes by defining true heroism as unyielding will and courage made ‘perfect because without hope’.

We are getting closer to the ethos of Anglo-Saxon life itself, which so inspired Tolkien and which is immanent in both
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
. But to revert to the actual subject of this chapter—what has any of this to do with pockets?

Despite not being invented until the 1600s, pockets make a surprising appearance in
Beowulf
. About two-thirds of the way through the poem
the titular hero recalls his fight against the monstrous Grendl. Here, for the first and only time in the poem, we hear about Grendl’s enormous glove.

He had this roomy ‘glof’,

a strange accoutrement, intricately strung

and hung at the ready, a rare patchwork

of devilishly fitted dragon-skins [‘
dracan fellum
’].

I had done him no wrong, yet the raging demon

wanted to cram me and many another

into this bag—but it was not to be.

(lines 2085b–90)
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A
glove
? It is a strange detail, so much so that translators often try and gloss it over, rendering the word as ‘bag’ or ‘satchel’—the celebrated Seamus Heaney translation of the poem, which I have just quoted, actually renders ‘glof’ as ‘pouch’. But ‘glove’ is most assuredly what the word means.

Here is something else: Andrew Orchard notes that it is not until Beowulf’s retelling, here, that we readers learn ‘the name of the Geat devoured by Grendl’ in the original attack.
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His name is Hondscio, which means—‘glove’ (‘compare’, Orchard suggests, ‘modern German
Handschuh
’). So the glove is in a sense doubly pointed-up here. Why?

In fact, critics on the glove do not know quite what to make of it. An article by Earl R. Anderson points out various Latin analogues.
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Some other editors and critics make reference to an Icelandic legend recorded by Snorri Sturluson—the god Thor is travelling towards the land of Giants and is finds shelter from darkness and thunder in a
‘a very big hall’ with a ‘side chamber’. In the morning he discovers that he has been sleeping in the glove of the giant Skrymir; and that the thunder he thought he heard was actually the giant’s snoring. (Orchard points out that the glove in
this
legend is ‘evidently more of a mitten, since there are apparently no fingers to it, and the “side chamber” turns out to be the thumb’.) But does this illuminate the
Beowulf
passage? Skrymir’s glove is clearly on a completely different scale to Grendl’s, and simply drawing out parallels from myth does not explain the function of this reference in this specific text.