Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  But the question as to what age Tolkien is addressing cannot be long deferred. Probably he himself had no precise answer in mind, but the very nature of the tale and the methods of its telling draw the principal parameters. The children listening to its recital must be young enough not to resent the genial fatherliness of the I-You technique, the encapsulated expositions, sound effects, and the rest, yet old enough to be able to cope with the fairly stiff vocabulary used on many occasions and to make at least something of the maturer elements that keep cropping up in what they hear. For, although The Hobbit is predominantly juvenile fiction, it is not all of a piece. Much of the confusion about it arises from the fact that it contains episodes more suited to the adult mind than the child's.

  One such is Bard's claim to a share in Smaug's treasure after he has killed the dragon, a claim made not only on his own behalf but also on behalf of the elves and the people of Lake-town. Tolkien has built up here a very pretty conundrum in law, equity, and morals. The treasure consists of a hoard gathered by Thorin's ancestors, but Smaug has mingled with it unstimated valuables belonging to Bard's forebears in the city of Dale. So Bard has a clear legal claim to some unclear fraction. The Lake-town men have no title in law to any portion but rest their case on the argument that Thorin owes them an equitable share because the dwarves roused Smaug to destroy their town, leaving them now destitute; and besides they helped to outfit the dwarf expedition when it was penniless. Bard invokes for them, in fact, the general principle that the wealthy "may have pity beyond right on the needy that befriended them when they were in want." And what of the elves' contention that the dwarves stole the treasure from them in the first place, as against the dwarf reply that they took it in payment for goldsmith work for the elves under a contract which their king later refused to honor? A Solomon might well pick his way gingerly among these claims and counterclaims, especially when faced with Thorin's answer that he is not responsible for Smaug's devastations, and will not bargain under threat of siege by an army anyway. If so, what is even the wise child to make of it all?

  Well, Tolkien does not leave his audience, young or old, without some guidance. He comes right out and says of Bard's claim when first uttered, "Now these were fair words and true, if proudly and grimly spoken; and Bilbo thought that Thorin would at once admit what justice was in them." Thorin's refusal is characterized as dwarfish "lust" for gold fevered by brooding on the dragon's hoard. The experienced reader of Tolkien's other writings recognizes here his usual condemnation of the cardinal sin of "possessiveness," which besets dwarves as a race and which indeed is at the core of all the evil underlying the War of the Ring, and much other ill in the world besides. But Bard is a little too eager to resort to arms, being himself somewhat afflicted by the same curse. He has to be rebuked by the elf king, who contrives to conquer the same inclination to greed in his own breast, "Long will I tarry, ere I begin this war for gold . . . Let us hope still for something that will bring reconciliation." Bilbo tries to break the deadlock by setting a moral example, but one which, oddly, requires an initial act of theft. After hiding in his pocket the great jeweled Arkenstone he steals from the recovered treasure, on the theory that it represents the one-fourteenth share promised him by the dwarves, Bilbo carries it secretly to Bard's camp by night, gives it to him freely to use as a bargaining counter against Thorin, and returns to the dwarves inside the mountain to face the music. For all this he is highly praised by Gandalf, surely a spokesman for Tolkien. Bilbo's self-sacrifice does not work out as planned, however, and open war between the contestants for Smaug's gold is averted only by the unforeseen attack of an army of goblins, which unites them against the common enemy. Tolkien's solution of the complex problem of ownership is finally moral. It comes about through the dying Thorin's repentance for his greed, which leads his followers to a generous sharing of the hoard with their new friends. This strongly fortifies the moral tone of the adventure, which began sordidly enough from motives of profit and revenge. But a good deal of rather adult territory has to be traversed to reach this consummation. One wonders what most child auditors would get out of it beyond the general impression that it is wrong to fight over who owns what. In this climactic spot the story really operates at two separate levels of maturity.

  A similar double track seems to run through that other critical episode of Bilbo's encounter with Gollum in the tunnels under the goblin mountain.4 The riddle game the two play would be fun for audiences of any age, as its prototype was in Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature. But the case may well be otherwise when it comes to the portrayal of Gollum's character, with its mixture of cruelty, greed, and miserable loneliness, and Bilbo's response of horror, fear, and pity. Taken alone, any one of these emotions is as familiar to a child as to his parents, but their skillful blending as achieved by Tolkien requires some sophistication of understanding, which comes only with years. Particularly the pity that causes Bilbo to spare the life of a vile creature whom he hates and fears seems a high moral quality of which Tolkien writes, over the heads of all save a mature audience: "A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo's heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment ..."

  Tolkien is already looking ahead to that scene of revelation in The Lord of the Rings in which Gandalf tells Frodo that Bilbo's compassion in sparing Gollum would later save the world. However that may be, in The Hobbit the whole episode is one more example of Tolkien's writing at the same time both for children and for the parents who will often be reading them the tale. A fair enough practice, provided it can be so managed as not to confuse or irritate both parties.

  Plenty of other passages of the same double character come readily to mind, frequently in the form of sly hits by Tolkien at some favorite targets in modern life. He pokes fun, for instance, at the stodgy respectability of hobbit (or human) society which brands as "queer" any hobbit who travels to foreign parts or has even mildly unusual experiences. The family of such a black sheep always hastens to hush up the offense. Finding himself "no longer quite respectable" on his return from his adventure, Bilbo "took to writing poetry and visiting the elves." Whereupon his neighbors thought him mad. Tolkien laughs at this same rationalistic rejection of fantasy again in the Lake-town episode when he writes that "some young people in the town openly doubted the existence of any dragon in the mountain, and laughed at the greybeards and gammers who said that they had seen him flying in the sky in their younger days"—this despite the fact that Smaug is snoring on his hoard not many miles to the north. Or, another shaft at modern skeptical materialism: ". . . one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous . . ." Or, more plainly still, Tolkien's usual vendetta against our machine age showing through his remarks about goblins, that they love wheels and engines: "It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once," but in Bilbo's day "they had not advanced (as it is called) so far." Tolkien was ecologist, champion of the extraordinary, hater of "progress," lover of handicrafts, detester of war long before such attitudes became fashionable.

  Besides the paramount interest The Hobbit can claim in its own right as the earliest specimen of Tolkien's fiction to be published and therefore as showing his art in its infancy, it has also great interest as the immediate precursor—and, to some extent, source— of the far more finished Lord of the Rings. In the Foreword to the latter work Tolkien describes The Hobbit as being drawn irresistibly toward the materials he had been assembling for several years past to tell the history of the earlier Ages of Middle-earth. So much so that glimpses crept into it "unbidden of things higher jar deeper or darker than its surface: Durin, Moria,

  Gandalf, the Necromancer, the Ring." For the most part Tolkien manages to keep unobtrusive these "unbidden" incursions of serious historical matter not properly germane to a childr
en's story, but they do color the tale and perhaps help to account for those graver, more adult touches we have been discussing. Contrariwise, the writing of The Hobbit may well have served to crystallize Tolkien's thoughts about the historical materials, and particularly seems to have supplied a number of ideas that found their way, transformed, into his epic.

  The theme for The Return of the King, for instance, which has a major place in The Lord of the Rings, first appears in embryo toward the end of The Hobbit. Thorin is the rightful heir to Erebor by descent from his grandfather, King Thror, but he and his companions set out with no intention of killing Smaug and reclaiming the throne. Their purpose is simply to steal the treasure and abscond fast. Only when he arrives destitute in Lake-town and hears its people singing old legends about the golden age to ensue when a dwarf king comes back to the mountain does Thorin announce, "I return!" From this point his resolution to stay on as ruler develops naturally after he comes into possession of the treasure in the halls of his forefathers.

  When Tolkien brought Strider into the plot of the epic at Bree without (by his own confession) having yet the least "notion . . . who Strider was," he could not have had in mind the possibility of revealing him later as heir to the throne of Gondor.5 It looks very much as if Tolkien's first conception of the plot of The Lord of the Rings was solely of a dangerous journey by Frodo and his companions into Mordor, similar to Bilbo's mission to steal the dragon's treasure. Of this journey Strider was to be only a forester guide. The new role for him as future king was a master stroke, suggested by its prior use in The Hobbit, bringing in its train a far richer and more varied conception to the epic. Obviously Strider-Aragorn is no Thorin.

  Character is transmuted along with the role it serves, and his successive steps to the throne are planned with great skill to assist Frodo and Sam in their pilgrimage.

  The eagles, too, have prominent parts in both works. They save Bilbo and the dwarves from goblins and wargs when even Gandalf is powerless, and carry the whole party on their backs some distance eastward. At the Battle of the Five Armies their attack on the goblin host with beak and wing is the decisive blow which turns the tide against them. Tolkien remembered these eagles as he came to write the epic. When Gandalf needs rescuing from the prison of Orthanc or from the cliff on which his naked body lies after the fight with the Balrog, it is Gwaihir the Windlord who bears him away on his broad back. The eagles do no fighting in the final battle of Cormallen but they come flying to pluck Frodo and Sam off the slopes of Mount Doom just before it erupts. They are even welcomed by the beleaguered armies in both works with the identical cry, "The Eagles are coming!"6 Yet the birds in the epic are dignified by the more stately context in which they operate. They no longer rend and tear, as in The Hobbit, but maintain an aloof lordliness as wings of rescue only.

  Examples of this sort might be multiplied. But of special import is the use Tolkien makes of the Ring he first described in The Hobbit as a prize won by Bilbo from Gollum in the riddle contest. Judging by the text of that story as a whole, Tolkien originally thought of the Ring only as one of those rings of invisibility that abound in fairy tales, wonder-working but harmless. Bilbo puts it on his finger and takes it off frequently as a means of escape from dangers that threaten him from time to time in caves, forests, dungeons, and battles. Yet it does not enslave him or impair his moral outlook in the slightest. On the contrary, he has become a stronger and better hobbit by the time the story ends. After this first version had been completed Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings as a sequel and only then, it seems, conceived of the scheme of taking over Bilbo's Ring and turning it into the potent instrument of evil around which swirls all the action of the epic. Bilbo's finding of it, which in The Hobbit is merely a turning point in his personal "career," was to be magnified into a turning point in the history of Middle-earth. The Ring itself, which The Hobbit does not report as belonging to the Necromancer or anybody else, was to be attributed to Sauron as maker and master, in order to account for its malignant power over anyone wearing it.

  The Ring, therefore, is the link that inseparably binds the later epic to the earlier children's story. But how to explain the glaring differences between Bilbo's harmless little gold band and Sauron's ruling Ring on which hung the fate of the world? Tolkien does not really try to explain them in any detail, but he does give some hints to pacify the curious reader. In the section of his Prologue to the second (1965) edition of the epic, titled "Of the Finding of the Ring," Tolkien remarks that Bilbo had not told his friends the true story of how he obtained the Ring and that Gandalf had long suspected the falsehood. Such a lapse on the part of a usually truthful hobbit struck Gandalf as very "strange and suspicious" and made him begin to doubt that the Ring was the innocent plaything it seemed on the surface. Of course, Gandalf knew the story of Sauron's Ring. He was starting to wonder what the cause of Bilbo's deceit could be and to connect it dimly with the Ring that had come so mysteriously into his possession.

  By this new element prefacing The Lord of the Rings, as well as by some textual modifications in the latter editions of The Hobbit, Tolkien provides for the necessary transition from the latter's mere ring of invisibility to the epic's great Ring of Power. Even so, of course, for the purposes of The Hobbit Bilbo's ring continues to be only a toy, useful for escapes and escapades, but having no deeper moral significance. No reader who had not previously read the epic would sense anything malefic about it. The story of The Hobbit has its own kind of logic quite different from that of the epic. To confuse them is to do a disservice to both tales. In sum, it is important to see The Hobbit as essentially independent of the epic, though serving as a quarry of important themes for the larger work.

  To illustrate the latter point further, consider how similar the two pieces are in their basic structure. Both begin at Bilbo's home with a hobbit hero who is induced by Gandalf to set out on a long journey into enemy country to accomplish an apparently impossible quest. Each hobbit, with his companions, first finds refuge at Rivendell, where Elrond helps forward them on their mission. After overcoming many hostile creatures en route, varying much in the two cases but having in common such antagonists as trolls, wargs, ores, and even spiders (those in Mirkwood are descendents of Shelob), both groups traverse desolate regions of terror. Bilbo's Desolation of Smaug parallels the Dead Marshes outside Mordor's north gate. The Hobbit of course lacks the great supporting scenes of The Lord of the Rings in Fangorn Forest, at Helm's Deep, Edoras, the Paths of the Dead, and so on, but despite their rich diversity that is all they are structurally, supporting scenes to the all-important struggle of Frodo and Sam toward Mount Doom. Finally, both plots crest in battles that pit against each other most of the persons and races prominent in previous actions of the story, and subside in the end with a return of the hobbits to the homes from which they set out.

  All this is not to minimize the polarities in tone and scope between The Hobbit and its successor. If The Hobbit is a quarry it is one in which the blocks of stone lie scattered about in a much looser and less imposing pattern than that in which the epic assembles those which it chooses to borrow. For example, Bilbo's enemies are serial, not united under any paragon of evil, as is to happen in the epic. The Hobbit's trolls, goblins (ores), spiders, and dragon know nothing of one another and are all acting on their own. They are certainly not shown to be servants of the nameless and nebulous Necromancer, whose only function in the story is to cause Gandalf to leave Bilbo and company to confront exciting perils unaided for a time. Nor, as has been said, is that magician linked in any way with the Ring, which comes out of nowhere belonging to no one. Also, as there is no alliance on behalf of evil so there is none against it. Dwarves, elves, and men act mainly for their selfish interests, often at cross-purposes, until a coalition is forced upon them by a goblin army hostile to all at the very end. Even then the issue is relatively localized and not worldwide in its ramifications.

  Some of the places, later to be brilliantly visualiz
ed in the epic appear for the first time in The Hobbit, but its geography tends to be rudimentary and uncertain and it is not given a continental context. Bilbo's home is simply the Hill. No Shire and no hobbit society surround it. Rivendell is a valley where the Last Homely House stands, hardly described at all and not resembling the splendidly civilized palace it is to be. Bilbo's journey leads him northeastward to Erebor, without the slightest inkling that the broad cities of Gondor, capitals of the West, lie facing Mordor to the south. The existence of oceans and Undying Lands somewhere or other is mentioned only in passing. In fact, since Bilbo's world is never called Middle-earth until we run across a reference to the constellation of the Wain (stars in the Great Bear) in its northern sky, we may be pardoned for wondering whether it is any place in particular, assuming, of course, that we have not read the epic. Tolkien has not yet learned to take the pains he later takes to make us accept this world as our own planet Earth and the events of his story as a portion of Earth's distant pre-history.