The Riddles of The Hobbit

by Adam Roberts

  The Riddles were not written by Cynewulf: all evidence of the least value speaks against his claim. It seems fairly certain that they are products of the North. Their place as literary compositions (not as folk-riddles) in one collection, and their homogeneous artistry, which finds abundant vindication in a hundred common traits, argue strongly for a single author, though a small group of problems brings convincing evidence against complete unity. That their period was the beginning of the eighth century, the hey-day of Anglo-Latin riddle-poetry, is an inviting surmise unsustained by proof.4

  Cynewulf is most famous for two lines, riddle-like though not technically a riddle (in fact the lines are extracted from his poem Crist). These lines, as it happens, had the most prodigious effect upon the imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien:

  éala éarendel engla beorhtast

  ofer middangeard monnum sended

  Hail! Earendel of angels the brightest

  Over Middle-earth to men sent down.

  Tolkien wrote ‘there was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English’. The openness of his phrasing here is in its own way indicative of something important, as if it would miss the point to reframe the lines as a riddle posed in terms of content—for instance, ‘who or what is Earendel?’ Nonetheless, Cynewulf’s powerful lines do riddle us, and they certainly riddled Tolkien. His proposed solution to this question was The Silmarillion, his earliest attempt at a systematic articulation of his fantasy legendarium, that in turn led to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

  In The Silmarillion ‘Eärendil’ is a mariner descended from both elvish and mannish stock and therefore an individual who, in mythic form, mediates the ‘immortal’ and ‘mortal’ valences of Tolkien’s own world-view. In 1967 Tolkien drafted a lengthy account of his reaction to Cynewulf’s lines (and the role they played in sparking his own imaginative creativity). He wrote this as a letter to be sent to a man called Rang who had contacted Tolkien with queries about his invented nomenclature; although in the event the letter was never sent. In the letter he describes the Eärendil name as having an important connection with his own creative imagination. He notes how greatly he was struck, when studying Anglo-Saxon before the First World War, by ‘the great beauty of this word (or name)’. It was consonant with conventional Anglo-Saxon, but also struck Tolkien’s ear, he says, with unusual sweetness and euphony. In the letter he goes on to elaborate his theory that ‘éarendel’, the OE original, is a name rather than a word, and that it referred to ‘what we now call Venus: the morning star’.5 His argument spills into a footnote, as Tolkien develops a thesis about Cynewulf’s semantic signification: éarendel meaning ‘ray of light’ is etymologically connected with ‘aurora’, and also appears in the Bickling Homilies (a tenth-century collection of religious writing whose author or authors are unknown to us). Tolkien seems sure that Cynewulf’s lines ‘refer to a herald, a divine messenger’, the morning star as ‘herald of the rise of the true Sun in Christ’. Finally, and with a rather beautifully deflating final turn, he adds that this notion was ‘completely alien to my use’ in writing The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.

  In adapting and re-appropriating, as he very often did, Old English words and names, Tolkien nonetheless insists ‘the borrowing when it occurs’ is ‘simply that of sounds, that are then integrated into a new construction; and only in the one case of Eärendil will reference to its source cast any light on the legends or their “meaning”.’ The use of what we now call scare-quotes around ‘meaning’ in that quotation is revealing. The casting of light, on a name that means light, in a mythology whose deep past is about the holiness of light, may explain why Eärendil is excepted in this way from all the other names Tolkien coined. ‘Light’, he noted in 1951, ‘is such a primeval symbol in the nature of the Universe, that it can hardly be analysed’, although he makes the effort at least as far as his own invented mythology goes:

  The Light of Valinor (derived from light before any fall) is the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically (or philosophically) and imaginatively (or subcreatively) and ‘says that they are good’—as beautiful.6

  Tolkien hardly needs to make specific allusion to the opening of Genesis to make his point. ‘Let there be light!’ is, in one sense, behind the whole of Tolkien’s imaginative enterprise. And a yearning to heal the breach between reason and imagination, between the auroral beauty of spiritual life and the practical necessity of the mundane, is exactly the role a figure such as Eärendil embodies. That God permits such a division to enter into existence—that he divided the light from the darkness before even creating human beings and giving them the power to choose the one or the other—is itself a very deep riddle.7 Tolkien’s appropriation of Eärendil’s name to his made-up Elvish linguistic world, and his styling of his creation as specifically a mariner, takes us back, as it were, before the Genesis fiat lux to the primal waters of the deep. As he explains in his unsent letter to Rang, characteristically enclosing the word poem within the quotation marks of (I suppose) distancing modesty: ‘before 1914 I wrote a “poem” upon Earendil who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun.’ He notes that he adopted him into his personal mythology as ‘a prime figure’: a sailor, a guiding star and a ‘sign’ of mortal hope, adding that ‘the name could not be adopted just like that: it had to be accommodated to the Elvish linguistic situation’, something accomplished via a notional Elvish stem ‘*AYAR’ meaning ‘Sea’, referring both to the great Western sea of Middle-earth and (‘Aman’) to the Blessed Realm of the Valar.

  ‘Earendil who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun … ’ Heaven/haven is a linguistic riddle that fascinated Gerard Manley Hopkins, and which (of course) predates him as a word-quibble. More relevant to our purposes here is the sense in which it is the spiritual function ‘Ayar’. For this is a word presented as meaning both sea and (Aiya!) ‘hail’ or ‘greeting’; and as specifically intervening between the immortal and the mortal realm. In all this we are being given the answer to a riddle—‘who is Eärendil’?—that reveals itself to be another riddle: broadly ‘how is there a divide between the divine and the mortal?’ and more practically speaking ‘how can the breach be overcome?’ The sea greets us; it welcomes us. But Middle-earth is bordered by a western, not an eastern ocean: a place of sunsets not sunrises.

  Sea is also where the Exeter Book starts, with three linked riddles that still puzzle scholars today. Here are the opening lines of the first:

  Who is so clever and quick-witted

  as to guess who goads me on my journey

  when I get up, angry, at times awesome;

  when I roar loudly and rampage over the land?8

  The riddle goes on to talk about ‘I with my roof of water’, adding ‘I carry on my back what once covered / every man, body and soul submerged / together in the water’; although confusingly the riddle also claims ‘I burn houses and ransack palaces’. It concludes: ‘Say what conceals me / or what I, who bear this burden, am called.’ Scholars gloss this as ‘a storm on land’, but we cannot be sure, for none of the Exeter Book riddles include their own solution. Conceivably lightning from a storm might set light to buildings, although the situation described in the riddle is surely far too wet to permit the sort of conflagration described (‘smoke rises, ashen over roofs’).

  The riddle hinges, we could say, on the deliberate crashing together of two quantities (sea, land) more usually kept apart. One of Tolkien’s more eccentric views was that ‘the Atlantis tradition’ was ‘so fundamental to mythical history’ that it must have ‘some kind of basis in real history’; although this in turn (as he wrote to Christopher Bretherton, 16 July 1964) speaks more forcefully to some important component in Tolkien’s personal subconscious (‘what I might call my Atlantis-haunting’) than actual history. He tells Bretherton how the Atlantis myth, or some version of it, has given him nightmares thro
ughout his life: a ‘dreadful dream’ of a great wave, emerging either from the still waters of the sea or else washing over the green landscape. He adds that converting this nightmare into stories has to some extent ‘exorcized’ the dream, but not to the point of banishing it altogether. ‘It always ends by surrender’, he writes; ‘and I awake by gasping out of deep water.’9

  The temptation to psychoanalyse Tolkien for this vividly-recalled dream experience, though strong, is worth resisting—as an impertinence quite apart from anything else. And anyway there is a level on which this first Exeter Book riddle is not so puzzling: it means death, as with Christian passing finally to the city of Zion at the end of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Indeed, I suggest that constellating the first Exeter Book riddle with Tolkien’s imaginarium draws up another possible solution to the former. In Norse mythology the world-ocean was inhabited by, and to an extent identified with, a dragon called Jörmungandr. In the Prose Edda Thor goes fishing for this great serpent, rowing out in a boat and baiting his hook with an ox’s head. A great sea-dragon, rearing up apocalyptically over the land-habitations of humankind, could both blast with fire and drown with water; but what is most interesting about this is not its specific solution itself as the way it draws together (pentecostal) fire and (baptismal) water in a catastrophic overturning of the mortal world. Who conceals such a dragon? God, of course. More to the point, concealment, and unconcealment, are what riddles do, as do divine mysteries.

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary (a project with which Tolkien was involved for a time, although I am not suggesting he worked on this particular entry) the English word ‘dragon’ derives from Greek δράκων, (drákōn), ‘dragon, serpent of huge size, water-snake’, which in turn probably comes from the verb δρακεν (drakeîn) ‘to see clearly’. The ironic force of this etymology is rather striking, for it names an imaginary, and therefore (strictly) invisible, beast as precisely the clearly seen one. But it is right, of course. Dragons are clearly seen, in our cultural imaginary at any rate. And Tolkien’s own love for dragons is clearly connected with what can be seen and what cannot be seen, dramatised in The Hobbit with Bilbo’s first encounter with Smaug wearing a ring of invisibility. As with the larger fascination Tolkien’s work manifests with questions of visibility and invisibility, or seeing and blindness, this turns out to be a way of finding dramatic and emblematic mode of rendering the fundamentally evangelical truth—seeing past the epiphenomena of this world to the prime reality of God. ‘Because thou hast seen me’, Christ tells Thomas, ‘thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’ (John 20:29).

  The second and third riddles of the Exeter Book do similar work in elaborating a mysterious connection between destroying oceanic water and saving divine grace. Indeed, the riddles are so closely linked, thematically, that some scholars think we should read all three as one long riddle. Here, again in Crossley-Holland’s translation, is the opening of Riddle 2:

  Sometimes I plunge through the press of the waves,

  surprising men, delving into the earth,

  the ocean bed. The waters ferment,

  sea-horses foaming …

  The whale-mere roars, fiercely rages,

  waves beat upon the shore; stones

  and sand, seaweed and saltspray, are flung

  against the dunes when, wrestling

  far beneath the waves, I disturb the earth,

  the vast depths of the sea. Nor can I escape

  my ocean bed before he permits me who is my pilot

  on every journey.

  The riddle concludes by asking ‘tell me, wise man: / who separates me from the sea’s embrace / when the waters become quiet once again?’ The answer provided by scholars is ‘an earthquake under the sea’, or perhaps ‘a storm at sea’. Either answer could be correct. I would suggest, though, that we can also read this riddle in the light of Tolkien’s own ‘Fastitocalon’, a poem he published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. He took the peculiar name ‘Fastitocalon’ from an Anglo-Saxon bestiary. He explained in a letter to Eileen Elgar (5 March 1964) that the name may have come from ‘Aspido-chelone’, which means a round-shield-shaped turtle. Of this proper name ‘astitocalon’ is a simple corruption, although the initial ‘f’, according to Tolkien, was an unwarranted addition to make the word alliterate with the rest of the line in which it appears ‘as was compulsory for poets in his day’.10 The actual line is: þam is noma cenned / fyrnstreama geflotan Fastitocalon, which means ‘he is given a name / the first-stream floating one, Fastitocalon’. Tolkien goes on to consider the widely-used trope of the treacherous location at which sailors moor thinking it an island, but which is actually a semi-submerged ocean monster. He thinks this myth derives ‘from the East’, and that it may embody some exaggerated memories of actual marine turtles. But when this legend comes to Europe, Tolkien notes, the monster becomes less turtle-ish and more whale-like. He hardly needs to add, but does for clarity, ‘in moralized bestiaries he is, of course, an allegory for the Devil, and is so used by Milton’. In amongst the many other things Tolkien’s own ‘Fastitocalon’ poem is, it can be taken as an answer to the question asked by Exeter Book Riddle 2 (‘who separates me from the sea’s embrace?’), the answer being ‘God’, the pilot who steers this destructive marine force for His own reasons, the mystery of his grace. And the Anglo-Saxon sense of the sea as a monster, magnificent and wonderful but also alarming and terrifying is picked up in Riddle 3:

  Sometimes my Lord corners me;

  then He imprisons all that I am

  under fertile fields—He frustrates me,

  condemns me in my might to darkness,

  casts me in to a cave where my warden, earth,

  sits on my back. I cannot break out

  of that dungeon, but I shake halls

  and houses; the gabled homes of men

  tremble and totter; walls quake,

  then overhang. Air floats above earth,

  and the face of the ocean seems still

  until I burst out from my cramped cell

  at my Lord’s bidding, He who in anger

  buried me before, so shackled me that I

  could not escape my Guardian, my Guide.

  Sometimes I swoop to whip up waves, rouse

  the water, drive the flint-grey rollers

  to the shore. Spuming crests crash

  against the cliff, dark precipice looming

  over deep water.

  The riddle continues for many lines in this vein, before concluding with the demand: ‘tell me my name, / and Who it is rouses me from my rest, / or Who restrains me when I remain silent.’ ‘God’ is a very good answer to these latter two questions, just as this and the two preceding riddles are, in the final analysis ‘about’ the combined grace and anger of God, the way he structures mortal existence on the largest scale via both giving and taking away (to quote the resonant line from Job 1:21). But the proper response to the first demand, ‘tell me my name’, must be more than simply ‘earthquake’ or ‘storm’—although that tends to be what the scholars offer by way of solution. Crossley-Holland notes that in line 50 of the riddle its subject is described as ‘scripan’, an Old English word ‘meaning a sinewy and sinister gliding movement; it is also used by the Beowulf-poet in describing both the monster Grendel and the dragon.’11 Is this also a riddle about a dragon?

  There is a celebrated story about dragons that exists in a number of variants. Two dragons, one red and one white, are engaged in a titantic struggle underground. It is possible these stories began as folk-explanations for earth tremors into which nationalistic significance was later read—as, for instance, that the Red Dragon was Wales and the White England. In the Mabinogion tale ‘Lludd and Llefelys’, the hero Lludd is faced with three riddling afflictions to the land, the second of which is a terrifying scream that comes every first of May and makes all the women in the kingdom miscarry. The solution to this conundrum is two battling dragons; and Lludd s
olves it by putting them both to sleep with mead and burying them in Dinas Emrys, in North Wales. Nennius’ Historia Brittonum (written sometime in the 820s) takes up the story centuries later. King Vortigern’s attempts to build a castle at Dinas Emrys are thwarted, for the earth shakes his structures to pieces every time he tries. Eventually a soothsayer (according to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s retelling in his Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1140), this soothsayer is Merlin himself) reveals that these earthquakes are being caused by the subterranean battling dragons, and shows how to subdue them.

  Tolkien had some light-hearted fun with this myth himself, combining it with stories of the Norse world-girdling ocean-dragon Jörmungandr, in Roverandom (written 1925, though not published until 1998). This story is set at the seaside at Foley, but also encompasses the light side of the moon, where the Man in the Moon lives in a fine tower, and the dark side where sleeping children frolic in the valley of dreams and the undersea kingdom of the mer-king. The protagonist is a dog called Rover, who takes the name Roverandom to distinguish himself from two other dogs in the story (a moon-dog and mer-dog) also called Rover. These dogs get up to various larks, including teasing the Great White Dragon of the moon (‘white with green eyes and leaking green fire at every joint, and snorting black smoke like a steamer … the mountains rocked and echoed, and the snow dried up; avalanches tumbled down’) and rousing up the undersea serpent (‘when he undid a curl or two [of his tail] in his sleep, the water heaved and shook and bent people’s houses and spoilt their repose for miles and miles around.’)12 It is certainly possible that Tolkien had the Exeter Book riddles at the back of his mind when writing this.