The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

by Tom Shippey

  The early moves of The Hobbit depend very much on this tension between ancient and modern reactions. It begins almost as satire on modern institutions, with Mr Baggins’s language particularly taking some shrewd knocks: the more familiar it seems the more fossilised it is. Thus Bilbo’s ‘Good Morning’ is no longer a wish offered to another person, but either that, or an objective statement, or a subjective statement, or all of them together, or even a gesture of hostility. ‘“What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!” said Gandalf. “Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good till I move off.”’ His ‘not at all’ means ‘yes’, his ‘my dear sir’ means nothing, and when he says ‘I beg your pardon’ he no longer has any sense that he is asking for anything or that ‘pardon’ might be a valuable thing to receive. Against this the dwarves’ ceremonious style of salutation – ‘At your service!’ ‘At yours and your family’s!’ ‘May his beard grow ever longer!’ ‘May the hair on his toes never fall out!’ – may seem pompous and indeed be insincere, but at any rate it is about something, not just semantically empty. Similarly Bilbo, trying to be business-like, flees to abstractions, only to have the narrator expose them: ‘“Also I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration, and so forth” – by which he meant: “What am I going to get out of it? And am I going to come back alive?”’ Thorin, though long-winded enough, does not talk about calculations, but about things:* the dwarf-song which opens their conclave centres on the misty mountains cold and grim, on harps, necklaces, twisted wire, pale enchanted long-forgotten gold. No wonder the hobbit feels ‘the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves’. In the first clash between ancient and modern ‘ancient’ wins easily; in an entirely proper sense (res = ‘thing’) it seems much realer.

  In any case the narrator has his thumb firmly on the balance. His voice is very prominent throughout The Hobbit (as it is not in The Lord of the Rings), and as has been said it provides ‘a very firm moral framework by which to judge’12 – elves are good, goblins bad, dwarves, eagles, dragons, men and Beorn all in different ways in between. Besides building up morality, though, it more interestingly tears down expectation. The narrator’s favourite phrase is ‘of course’, but this usually introduces something unexplained or unpredictable: ‘That, of course, is the way to talk to dragons’, or ‘He knew, of course, that the riddle game was sacred’, or ‘It was often said … that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd’. Sometimes these and similar remarks introduce information. More often they create a sense that more information exists round the edges of the story, and that events are going according to rules only just hinted at, but rules just the same. Adjectives like ‘the famous Belladonna Took’ or ‘the great Thorin Oakenshield himself’ imply a depth of history, statements like ‘no spider has ever liked being called Attercop’ one of experience. The frequent remarks about legendary creatures of the ‘Trolls’ purses are the mischief’ kind furthermore blur ordinary experience into the magical, while the question ‘what would you do, if an uninvited dwarf came and hung his things up in your hall?’ is very much in the style of ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ The child reader senses, perhaps, the sportiveness of all this, and delights in it; the adult, as he goes along, finds himself succumbing to the ancient principle that ‘redundancy is truth’ – the more unnecessary details are put in the more lifelike we take fiction to be. The underlying point, though, is that the narrator is there cumulatively to express a whole attitude to the archaic-heroic setting: casual, matter-of-fact, even unimpressed, but accordingly lulling. He gets the landscape, the characters and the ‘rules’ through the modern barriers of disbelief and even, potentially, of contempt.

  The way The Hobbit works in fact shows up well in any comparison of Chapter 2, ‘Roast Mutton’, with its analogue in the Grimms’ folk-tale of ‘The Brave Little Tailor’. In this latter a tailor (the trade was synonymous with feebleness, as in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part II III ii) kills seven flies at a blow, and is so emboldened that he starts a career of violence and monster-killing. He bluffs his way through a contest of strength with one giant, and frightens off a whole gang of them: ‘each of them had a roast sheep in his hand and was eating it’. Sent by the king to catch two more, he hides up a tree and throws stones at them till they quarrel and kill each other: ‘they tore up trees in their agony and defended themselves’, he says airily when he shows the bodies, ‘but all that does no good when a chap like me comes along who can kill seven with one blow!’ Bilbo starts off very much as a ‘little grocer’, but he never shows anything like the ‘little tailor’s’ resource or effrontery; an omni-competent character would destroy any modern story’s action. Instead he is presented very much as a reader-surrogate, driven on by shame to try to be ‘The Master Thief’ (like the character in Asbjörnsen and Moe’s Norse folktale) but hampered by utter ignorance of the rules of the game. He is caught by one ‘fact’ which neither he nor the reader could have predicted – trolls’ purses talk – and saved by two more: wizards can ventriloquise, and ‘trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of, and never move again’. ‘As you probably know’ is here the final blow in Tolkien’s strategy of ‘counter-realism’. Nobody knows that; indeed it isn’t true; in a traditional tale no narrator could get away with so shamelessly exploiting the gap between his world and his listener’s, because of course there wouldn’t be one! However in The Hobbit the combined assurance of Gandalf, the narrator, the trolls and the dwarves outweighs the ignorance of Bilbo, and the reader. As it happens the belief about being underground before dawn is as traditional as belief in trolls and dwarves at all, going back to the Elder Edda and the end of the Alvíssmál, where Alvíss the dwarf is kept talking till daylight by Thórr, and so turned to stone.* Inventive resource is very strong in The Hobbit, over words and races and characters and events. The book’s distinguishing characteristic, though, is its sense that all these things come from somewhere outside and beyond the author, forming a Zusammenhang as solid as everyday’s and on occasion no more irrational.

  The Ring as ‘Equalizer’

  This ‘illusion of historical truth and perspective’ is, of course, as Tolkien himself said of Beowulf, ‘largely a product of art’ (‘Monsters’, p. 247). And sometimes the art ran out. Tolkien himself admitted (Observer, 20 February 1938) that twice he got stuck. He did not say where, leaving that for later researchers to make fools of themselves over, but it may be argued that the first few chapters of The Hobbit consist mostly of disengagement and playing down the readers’ collective sense of doubt. As late as the start of chapter 4 the company is halted again (for the third time), and there is a sense of the author groping for intellectual justification. In the mountain-storm Bilbo looks out and sees that ‘across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below’. Giants never enter the Tolkien universe again – Gandalf accepts their existence for a second in chapter 7 – and the passage is a failure of tone; it reads like an old interpretation of giants as ‘nature-myth’, i.e. as personifications of the avalanche like Thórr and his hammer personifying thunder and lightning. This is too allegorical for Middle-earth. But the story takes off very shortly afterwards, with the capture by the goblins (incidentally still too close to munitions workers as the trolls were to labourers), the escape, the goblin runners pursuing ‘swift as weasels in the dark’, and Bilbo’s forcible detachment from the dwarves. Crawling along the tunnel hours later ‘his hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel. It was a turning point in his career’, comments Tolkien, ‘but he did not know it.’ A turning-point in Tolkien’s career too, f
or from this came most of his subsequent inspiration – Gollum, Sauron,13 eventually The Lord of the Rings itself.

  But no more than Bilbo did Tolkien realise this at the time. As he testified later (LOTR p. xv), glimpses in The Hobbit ‘had arisen unbidden of things higher or deeper or darker than its surface: Durin, Moria, Gandalf, the Necromancer, the Ring’. The ring changed its significance even between editions of The Hobbit.14 In the first matters were relatively straightforward: Bilbo found the ring, met Gollum, they agreed to hold a riddle-contest, the stakes being Bilbo’s life against Gollum’s ‘precious’. Bilbo won, but since by accident he’d acquired Gollum’s ‘precious’ already he asked to be shown the way out instead. The sequence works, it excuses Bilbo of any charge of theft (he’d won the ring fair and square) but as anyone familiar with the Ring in its later manifestations will see, the amazing thing is Gollum’s readiness to bet his ‘precious’, bear the loss of it, and then offer to show the way out as a douceur. ‘I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: “We are ssorry; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only pressent, if it won the competition”’ (Hobbit first edition, p. 92). In the second and subsequent editions his last words are ‘Thief! Thief! Thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it for ever!’ Furthermore Gollum’s charge is arguably true, since in this version the deal was Bilbo’s life against any nominated service, such as showing the way out. In both versions Bilbo gets the ring and the exit, but in the latter one it is his claim to the ring which is shaky.

  Now, Tolkien integrated this second thought into his story marvellously well, even keeping the first version as an excuse Bilbo had told with uncharacteristic dishonesty to put his claim to the ‘precious’ beyond doubt. However, it is the first thought one should keep in mind while considering the genesis of The Hobbit. And here the obvious point, surely, is that the ring is just a prop: a stage-prop, like the marvellous devices common in fairy-tales or legends (there is a wish-fulfilling ring in the Grimms’ ‘The King of the Golden Mountain’, and a cloak of invisibility), but also a prop for Bilbo’s status with the dwarves. It is a kind of ‘Equalizer’. After acquiring it Bilbo remains in most ways as out of touch with Wilderland as before: he cannot dress meat or dodge wargs, and when in chapter 15 Balin asks if he can make out the bird’s speech he has to reply ‘Not very well’ – the narrator, still maximising the distance between him and everyday Middle-earth normality, adds ‘(as a matter of fact, he could make nothing of it at all)’. He cannot even tell when crows are being insulting. But the ring makes up for this. Before he had it he was essentially a package to be carried, his name as a ‘burglar’ nothing but an embarrassment even to himself. With the ring he can take an active part. He uses it straight away to get past the dwarves’ look-out and raise his prestige – they ‘looked at him with quite a new respect’ – and then to save his companions first from the spiders and second from the elvish dungeons. The problem after that is in a way to maintain his status without simply reducing it to the accident of owning a magic ring. Tolkien takes some trouble over this, observing in the wood-elves’ dungeon that ‘One invisible ring was a fine thing, but it was not much good among fourteen’ – so that credit for that escape is Bilbo’s – and after the fight with the spiders that ‘knowing the truth about the vanishing did not lessen [the dwarves’] opinion of Bilbo at all; for they saw that he had some wits, as well as luck and a magic ring – and all three were useful possessions.’ There is something provocative in this last statement, for it seems to deny that owning a magic ring could be an accident. Still, the very arguability of Bilbo’s status shows how the ring changed The Hobbit: it brought a new possibility of action which would be simultaneously ‘heroic’ and credible, it developed the opposition of ancient and modern motifs into something like a dialogue.

  The main subject of that dialogue is courage. Few modern readers of Beowulf, or the Elder Edda, or the Icelandic ‘family sagas’, can escape a certain feeling of inadequacy as they contemplate whole sequences of characters who appear, in a casual and quite lifelike way, not to know what fear is. How would we manage in such a society? With our culture’s characteristic ‘softness, worldliness, and timidity’15 would we be fit for anything but slavery? To this self-doubt Bilbo Baggins makes a sober but relatively optimistic response. His style of courage shows up when he is in the dark and alone. He faces fear first in the escape from Gollum, when he takes a ‘leap in the dark’ rather than kill a defenceless enemy (this comes only in the second edition). A more significant scene is when he faces the giant spider and kills it ‘all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else’. A third is as he creeps down the tunnel to his first sight of Smaug, but stops as he hears dragon-snoring ahead. Tolkien lays great stress on this:

  Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. At any rate after a short halt go on he did … (p. 200)

  Such scenes remind us that even Samuel Colt’s ‘Equalizer’ did not make all men heroes: it only made them all the same size. They also provide a behaviour-model which is not quite beyond emulation (no one can fight a dragon, but everyone can fight fear). Mainly they place in a kindly light that style of courage – cold courage, ‘moral courage’, two o’clock in the morning courage – which our age is most prepared to venerate.

  They further expose the dwarves to something like the satire turned on Mr Baggins’s modernisms at the start of the story. Thorin Oakenshield, for all his heroic name, sends Bilbo down the tunnel, and the rest do little but look embarrassed. The narrator insists (p. 199) that ‘they would all have done their best to get him out of trouble … as they did in the case of the trolls’, but he may not carry entire conviction. When he escaped from the goblins Bilbo had just decided he had to go back into the tunnels and look for his friends when he found his friends deciding just the opposite about him! ‘If we have got to go back into those abominable tunnels to look for him, then drat him’, is their last word. Maybe Gandalf would have talked them round. But before this begins to sound like treason against the images of the ancient North (the ‘great contribution’ of whose early literature, Tolkien had said, was ‘the theory of courage’, ‘Monsters’, p. 262), it needs to be said that The Hobbit’s dialogue contains many voices. There is something splendid in the narrator’s reversion to laconicism at the end, when he says (as a matter of course) that since Thorin is dead Fili and Kili are too; they ‘had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother’, a motif immemorially old. Much can be said too for Thorin Oakenshield, while for some considerable stretch of the story, say chapters 6 to 8, one can see Tolkien exploring with delight that surly, illiberal independence often the distinguishing mark of Old Norse heroes. Gandalf’s own reaction to being treed is just to kill as many enemies as possible; the rescuing eagles are, the narrator says euphemistically, ‘not kindly birds’; there is a fine scene of sullen insolence between Thorin and the elf-king; but the centre of the whole sequence is Beorn.

  He is in a way the least invented character in the book. His name is an Old English heroic word for ‘man’, which meant originally ‘bear’, so that naturally enough he is a were-bear, who changes shape, or ‘skin’ as Gandalf calls it, every night. He has a very close analogue in Bothvarr Bjarki (= ‘little bear’), a hero from the Norse Saga of Hrólfr Kraki, and another in Beowulf himself, whose name is commonly explained as Beowulf = ‘bees’ wolf’ = honey-eater bear, and who breaks swords, rips off arms and cracks ribs with ursine power and clumsiness. Beorn keeps bees too; is surly in disposition; not to be trusted after dark; and ‘appalling when he is angry’, a description not altogether different from being ‘kind enough if humoured’. The dwarves and Bilbo see both sides of him, but perceive them as one. On their second morning they find hi
m in a good mood, telling ‘funny stories’ and apologising for having doubted their word – it has been confirmed by two prisoners:

  ‘What did you do with the goblin and the Warg?’ asked Bilbo suddenly.

  ‘Come and see!’ said Beorn, and they followed round the house. A goblin’s head was stuck outside the gate and a warg-skin was nailed to a tree just beyond. Beorn was a fierce enemy. But now he was their friend … (p. 124)

  ‘The heart is hard, though the body be soft’, said Tolkien of fairy-tale readers. But actually in context Beorn’s ferocity is attractive. It goes with his rudeness and his jollity, all projections of that inner self-confidence which as Tolkien knew lay at the core of the ‘theory of courage’. ‘What do you believe in?’ ask whole sequences of kings to Icelandic wanderers in sagas. ‘Ek trúi á sjálfan mik’, runs the traditional response, ‘I believe in myself’. Killer-Glúmr, an axeman like Beorn, widens this to believing in his axe and his moneybag and his storehouse as well. Both characters have the air of men who have ‘been into’ a crisis of existentialism – and straight out the other side, leaving the crisis sadly tattered.