The Riddles of The Hobbit (29 page)

  
7
.  ‘Gnomic Verses’, in Gavin Bone,
Anglo-Saxon Poetry
(Oxford 1943), 49.

  
8
.  Tom Shippey,
J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
(London: HarperCollins 2000), 24.

  
9
.  Douglas Anderson,
The Annotated Hobbit
(London: Unwin Hyman 1988).

10
.  Humphrey Carpenter (ed.),
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
(London: HarperCollins 1995), 32.

11
.  Carpenter (ed.),
Letters
, 123.

12
.  Kevin Crossley-Holland,
The Exeter Book of Riddles
(London: Penguin; revised edn 1993), 31.

13
.  Douglas Wilhelm Harder, ‘Timeline and Chronology for
The Hobbit
’,
https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/Personal/Hobbit

14
.  Counting the Preface (which begins ‘This is a story of long ago’)
The Hobbit
is disposed into 15+5 sections.

  
1
.  Noting that Gollum ‘does not hiss at all when reciting his riddles; they are anomalous to his normal habits of speech’, John Rateliff speculates whether this fact indicates that ‘these riddles predate the book’ (John D. Rateliff,
The History of the Hobbit: Mr Baggins
(London: HarperCollins 2007), 106–7). Though it cannot be proved, it is certainly possible that Tolkien drafted all the riddles before he began writing
The Hobbit
.

  
2
.  James Carey’s translation; James Carey and John T. Koch (eds),
The Celtic Heroic Age: Literary Sources for Ancient Celtic Europe and Early Ireland and Wales
(Malden, MA: Celtic Studies Publications 1994), 265.

  
3
.  Robert Graves,
The White Goddess
(amended and enlarged edition; London: Faber and Faber 1961), 13. Graves’s huge, idiosyncratic book is explicitly an attempt to ‘unriddle’ the puzzles of myth and poetry. ‘A historical grammar of poetic myth has never previously been attempted’, he claims in the book’s Preface, ‘and to write it conscientiously I have had to face such “puzzling questions, though not beyond all conjecture” as Sir Thomas Browne instances in his
Hydriotaphia
: “what song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid amongst the women”.’ Graves goes on to list some of the mythological riddles the book addresses, predominantly two lengthy riddling texts attributed to the Welsh bard Taliesin, but also encompassing the number of the beast in the Biblical
Revelation of Saint John
(Graves treats the number, written in Latin, as an acrostic riddle), and a variety of English poems.

  
4
.  This is from Brian Jacques’ popular children’s fantasy,
Redwall
(London: Hutchinson 1986). The answer, of course, is ‘BARREL’.

  
5
.  Alan Garner’s
Thursbitch
(London: Vintage 2004), 1.

  
6
.  If we go
beyond poetry we can add the Abbot of Aldheim and later Bishop of Malmesbury, best known as a a writer of theological prose, but a man who also riddled. ‘He also delighted in elaborate forms of word-play embodied in riddles, an amusement that proved consistently popular to the Anglo-Saxons in the vernacular as well as in Latin’, H. R. Lyon,
Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest
(2nd edn; Harlow: Longman 1991), 281.

  
7
.  Tolkien’s runes, unlike his various ‘elvish’ alphabets, are based on actual Anglo-Saxon runic script, although some letters are reversed, assigned different phonetic qualities and otherwise adapted. ‘Tolkien used the Anglo-Saxon runic symbols and variations, reversals and inversions for the alphabet called Cirth or Angerthas, meaning runes, or, more literally, “engraved” letters. The forms of Tolkien’s adapted runes signify linguistic sound relationships. An extra stroke is added to the voiced sound where there are pairs of voiced and unvoiced sounds’ (Ruth S. Noel,
The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle Earth
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1974), 43).

  
8
.  Ralph W. V. Elliot,
Runes: an Introduction
(Manchester: Manchester University Press 1980), 43.

  
9
.  Ralph W. V. Elliott, ‘Cynewulf’s Runes in
Juliana
and
Fates of the Apostles
’, in Robert E. Bjork (ed.),
Cynewulf: Basic Readings
(London: Routledge 1996), 294. Elliot’s thesis is that the disruption of the order of letters in Cynewulf’s name reflects his spiritual disarrangement as a mortal sinner before God’s perfect grace.

10
.  The word for ‘fish’ in Tolkien’s Eldar or Sindar Elvish languages is nowhere recorded, but it would not surprise me if it began with an ‘s’. Elvish is well supplied with sinuous ‘s’ words that pertain to the same semantic field, including
sîr
, river;
sir
‘flowing’ and
súrinen
‘winding’.

11
.  Noel,
Languages of Tolkien
, 50.

12
.  ‘The word
Alb
meaning lofty in the Celtic language; on which account the Alps, Apennines, Mount Albis, &c, got their names’ (Godfrey Higgins,
The Celtic Druids
(1827), 394). The Scots Gaelic name for Scotland, ‘Alba’, means ‘the mountainous country’.

13
.  Translated by Carolyne Larrington,
The Poetic Edda
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), 110.

14
.  The ‘staf’ part of the word may be cognate with the modern English word ‘staff’; and it is not a stretch to imagine that a kenning for a stalk of grain might be a word that compares it to a kind of staff. Perhaps the parallel with the ocean comes from not the individual stalk of grain, but rather a whole field. You will have seen, as I have, the wind moving over a full-grown field of wheat or barley and making the surface ripple like a sea.

15
.  Australian poet Peter Porter’s 1989 lyric ‘A Chagall Postcard’ (from
Possible Worlds
) comes close to riddling this:

Is this the nature of all truth,

The blazing god, the bride aloof,

The riddle cutting like a tooth,

              The dwarf that crows?

The
god has seen the standing grain,

The bride is shrouded by her train,

The mystery is strung with pain,

              A cold wind blows.

       To compare this version of Porter’s poem with the words Porter actually wrote (Porter,
Possible Worlds
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989), 17) is to grasp the slipperiness of specific vocabulary in the debatable realm both of riddles and discussion of riddles.

16
.  Jonathan Wilcox, ‘Mock-Riddles in Old English: Exeter Riddles 86 and 19’,
Studies in Philology
93 (1996), 180–7.

17
.  It is perfectly possible to connect this belief to Tolkien’s own Christian faith. After all the fish, IXTHUS, is a key Christian trope; any believer in Christ would have no difficulty in seeing him as, metaphorically, ringing the cosmos.

18
.  Corey Olsen,
Exploring J. R. R. Tolkien’s
The Hobbit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 2012), 106.

  
1
.  Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’, in
Tree and Leaf
(London: Allen & Unwin 1964), 25.

  
2
.  Tolkien,
Unfinished Tales
(ed. Christopher Tolkien; London: Allen & Unwin 1980), 322.

  
3
.  Tolkien,
Unfinished Tales
, 325.

  
1
.  According to pleasingly alliterative trio V. Cumming, C. W. Cunnington and E. Cunnington (
The Dictionary of Fashion History
(Oxford: Berg 2010), 86) the earliest recognisable ‘interior’ pocket dates from the sixteenth century. It was known originally as a French pocket: ‘the earliest form of horizontal slit pocket with the opening covered by a flap’.

  
2
.  Patrick Rothfuss,
The Name of the Wind
(New York: Daw 2006), 427.

  
3
.  
Beowulf
(ed. A. J. Wyatt; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1914), i.

  
4
.  This is Seamus Heaney’s translation:
Beowulf
(London: Faber and Faber 1999), p. 67. Heaney’s translation is used throughout this chapter.

  
5
.  Andrew Orchard,
Critical Companion to Beowulf
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2003), 121–2.

  
6
.  Earl R. Anderson, ‘Grendl’s
glof
(
Beowulf
2085b–88) and Various Latin Analogues’,
Mediaevalia
8 (1982) 1–8.

  
1
.  Tolkien was angered by a Swedish translator’s assumption that ‘the Ring is in a certain way “der Nibelungen Ring”’. He wrote to Allen & Unwin on
23 February 1961, that ‘both rings were round and there the resemblance ceases’ and adding that ‘the “Nibelung” traditions … [have] nothing whatsoever to do with
The Lord of the Rings
’ (Humphrey Carpenter (ed.),
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
(1985; London: HarperCollins 1995), 306–7).

  
2
.  John Louis DiGaetani,
Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel
(London: Associated University Presses 1978), 78.

  
3
.  Tom Shippey,
The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology
(2nd edn; London: HarperCollins 1992), 126.

  
4
.  Relatively few critical studies have addressed the novel in these terms, although one exception is Stratford Caldecott’s
Secret Fire: the Spiritual Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien
(London: Darton, Longman and Todd 2003). Caldecott quotes from the Catholic catechism (para 1147: ‘God speaks to man through the visible creation’) and argues that ‘a sense of divine providence, of things meaning more than we know, of coincidences needing to be understood, is of course one of the strongest and most lasting impressions one receives from
Lord of the Rings
’ (63). Caldecott has a different reading of the Ring to mine, however; seeing it as ‘the archetypal “Machine” ’ which ‘exemplifies the dark magic of the corrupted will’ (60).

  
5
.  Brian Davies,
Aquinas: an Introduction
(London: Continuum 2002), 210.

  
6
.  Davies,
Aquinas
, 215–18.

  
7
.  ‘The theological significance of the sacraments lies in: (1) the exhibition of the principle of Incarnation. By the embodiment of spiritual reality in material form an appropriate counterpart of the union of God with man in the Person of Christ is made patent (2) Their expression of the objectivity of God’s action on the human soul … (3) As ordinances mediated through the Church, their essentially social structure’ (
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church
, ed. F. L. Cross (3rd edn, ed. E. A. Livingstone; Oxford 1997), 1435). Sacraments work
ex opere operato
, which is to say it is the Grace itself, and not the person administrating them, that validates them. A sacrament administered by a priest is not invalidated should it transpire that the particular priest was married, a murderer or mad.

  
8
.  See for instance Shippey’s
Road to Middle-Earth
, 177–84.

  
9
.  Carpenter (ed.),
Letters
, 145.

10
.  Bernard Bergonzi, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel’, in
The Myth of Modernism and the Twentieth Century
(Brighton: Harvester Press 1986), 175.

11
.  Colin Manlove,
Modern Fantasy: Five Studies
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975), 176.

12
.  Carpenter (ed.),
Letters
, 51.

13
.  Carpenter (ed.),
Letters
, 60. Italics in original.

14
.  Tolkien,
Morgoth’s Ring
,
ed. Christopher Tolkien;
The History of Middle Earth, Vol. 10
(London: HarperCollins 1994), 210.

15
.  Something similar was the case with hobbits as well: ‘As far as I know hobbits were universally monogamous (indeed they very seldom married a second time, even if wife or husband died very young)’, (letter to A. C. Nunn, drafted probably late 1958–early 1959; Carpenter (ed.),
Letters
, 293).

16
.  Tolkien,
The Lord of the Rings
(1954–55; 1 Vol. edn, London: HarperCollins 2012), 130.

17
.  Tolkien,
Lord of the Rings
, 120. Tolkien stresses the sense of Tom’s house as a safe circle through which the Hobbits pass. They enjoy their only contented nights’ sleep in Tom’s beds. His house has windows ‘at either end … one looking east and the other looking west’ (
LotR
, 126). It is repeatedly described as suffused with golden light.

  
1
.  Humphrey Carpenter,
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
(London: HarperCollins 1995), 344. The letter goes on to note ‘I typed out
The Hobbit
.’

  
2
.  Tolkien,
The Lord the Rings
(1954–55; 1 Vol. edn, London: HarperCollins 2012), 524.

  
1
.  Franco Moretti,
The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture
(London: Verso 1987).

  
2
.  Tolkien,
Sigurd and Gudrún
, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins 2009), 176–7.

  
3
.  Tom Shippey has an excellent discussion on the linguistic and semantic connections between ‘bourgeois’, ‘borough’ and ‘burglar’ as they pertain to Hobbits in his
Tolkien: the Author of the Century
(London: HarperCollins 2002).

  
4
.  George Philip Krapp and Elliot van Kirk (eds),
The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records
(New York: Columbia University Press, 6 vols 1931–53), 3:
The Exeter
Book, 156.