by Adam Roberts
Dragons are huge and destructive forces, as likely to appear on land as at sea. But which dragon? One possible answer to Riddle 3 is Niðhöggr, the vast dragon who lies under the ground gnawing at the roots of the world tree and making the earth and oceans shake. The creature’s name means either ‘malice-striker’ or ‘striker in the dark’ and he is controlled by one figure only, the Norse god Hel, who rules the underworld. In the Poetic Edda Niðhöggr is described devouring the corpses of the dead, but also as coming out from time to time into the open air:
There comes the dark dragon flying,
the shining serpent, up from Niðafjöll
Niðhöggr flies over the plain, in his wings
he carries corpses.13
‘Niðafjöll’ means ‘the Mountains of the Dark of the Moon’; another detail which feeds into Tolkien’s Roverandom story.
To take stock for a moment: we have, then, three possible solutions for these famous Anglo-Saxon riddles. In setting out these three I am following a Tolkienian lead—not in the specific answers I propose, for as far as I know he himself offered no solutions to these riddles, but in a broader sense, the one outlined in his celebrated lecture ‘The Monsters and the Critics’. In that work Tolkien insisted that although scholarship tends to want to downplay the fantastical and monstrous aspect of Old English literature in favour of rationalised, historical or social explanations, in fact the heart and soul of the literature is in the monsters. (I discuss Tolkien’s lecture in more detail below). So: let’s entertain the possibility that the answers to all three riddles are ‘dragon’.14
Tolkien’s imagination was strongly drawn to Dragons. ‘I find “dragons” a fascinating product of imagination’, he wrote to Naomi Mitchison in 1949. At the same time he noted that ‘the whole problem of the intrusion of the “dragon” into northern imagination’ was, in effect, a riddle to which he had not yet found a solution. Another letter, written to Walter Hooper on 20 February 1968, may be relevant here. In this letter Tolkien confirms that he has never himself seen a dragon, and that he has no wish to. He then relates a story he heard from C. S. Lewis concerning an individual named Brightman, an ecclesiastical scholar of some repute, who sat in the Common Room of Magdalen College Oxford saying very little for many years. One night there was a discussion of dragons, and according to Lewis:
Brightman’s voice was heard to say, ‘I have seen a dragon.’ Silence. ‘Where was that?’ he was asked. ‘On the Mount of Olives,’ he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant.15
The riddle of Brightman’s gnomic comment is not so very hard to unravel, except that it answers a riddle with another riddle, or perhaps it would be better to say: answers it with a religious mystery. The dragon he has seen presumably has to do with his personal encounter with Christ. The mystery here (which also, I think, galvanises Tolkien’s own creative imagination) is that the fabulous type of Satan can also function as a type of Christ—that evil and good can be reconciled on the largest, spiritual scale. The dragon of which, despite all its instinct towards destruction, only good ultimately comes. The dragon, we might say, as a manifestation of what Graham Greene, in resonant phrase, once called the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.
To broaden the discussion a little: in addition to specific poems set out as riddles, Anglo-Saxon poetry is threaded through with kennings: a distinctive, circumlocutionary trope that uses figurative and riddling phrases in place of simple indicatives. The Beowulf-poet for instance sometimes refers to the sea as ‘the sea’, and sometimes as ‘the whale-road’ or ‘the gannets’-bath’. A kenning might be easily unriddled, particularly if predicated upon the object’s use—an example would be a sword described as ‘a wound-hoe’. Alternatively it might be more oblique and baffling: in Beowulf 1032 a sword is fela lafe, presumably ‘that which the file left behind’ when the smith was sharpening it.
The word kenning is originally Old Norse, and comes from the word kenna, which means ‘knowledge’. The Modern English verb to ken does survives, although in a marginal and dialectic sense (although the phrase beyond one’s ken, ‘beyond the scope of one’s knowledge’, contains the word, like a bug in amber, preserved in its original sense). In other words, ‘kennings’ like full riddles are games of knowledge: they ask, in the first sense, ‘do you know what this is?’ and more broadly they open more puzzling questions about the certainty, ground and transparency of all knowledge. Since the pleasure of a kenning is proportionate to its complexity it does not surprise us that Old Norse texts are replete not only with the kenning but the tvíkenning—the double-kenning. To unpack ‘grennir gunn-más’ from the Norse Glymdrápa (the phrase means ‘feeder of the war-gull’) we need first to understand that ‘war-gull’ is itself a kenning for ‘raven’. ‘Feeder of ravens’ is a sardonic way of describing a warrior, somebody destined to end up a corpse on the battlefield and eaten by carrion birds. The modern ‘cannon-fodder’ is a similar kenning, although since it has become a phrasal cliché it is likely that few who hear it are moved to decode it as a kenning. How far Anglo-Saxon culture similarly took kennings as mere clichés, and how far they functioned as actually estranging mini-riddles, can only be a matter of conjecture. But at least some kennings engage the mind in the process of unriddling. When I first learned to ride a motorcycle a medical student friend of mine noticed my crash-helmet in the hallway of the flat we shared and said to me: ‘I see you have become an organ donor.’ This—although I did not then know the word—was a kenning, a distant cousin of the ‘feeder of ravens’ sort; for motorcyclists are much more likely to be involved in fatal accidents, and their corpses therefore are more likely to supply hospital surgeries with young, healthy organs for transplant.
It is a striking thing that, whilst scholars describe kennings as a characteristically common-Germanic business, only Old Norse and Old English poetry contain actual kennings. For our purposes, since these are the two literary and cultural traditions that most directly fed into Tolkien’s own imaginative work, this is relevant; although it raises questions as to why kennings did not appeal more broadly. More, Old English writers do not seem to have been interested in the Norse tvíkenning: all Anglo-Saxon kennings are all of the simple two-term form like ‘file-left’ or ‘whale-road’. But we can say that, on the level of word and form, the simple kenning is the bringing together of two terms that generates a third. This is, in other words, the action of metaphor, the leap into comprehension. The kenning mimics the process by which the mundane thing and the mundane thing can combine together to make something transcendent: meaning.16
Anglo-Saxon culture was fascinated by the intersection of the divine and the mundane, as was Tolkien. We can go further and suggest that it is in its riddles that this great mystery is most often given voice. By way of small example here, in Chris McGully’s elegant translation, is Riddle 85 from the Exeter Book:
My home’s noisy. I’m not. I’m mute
in this dwelling place. A deity shaped
our twinning journey. I’m more turbulent than he,
At times stronger. He’s tougher—durable.
Sometimes I come to rest. He always runs on ahead.
For as long as I shall live I shall live in him.
If we undo ourselves death’s due claims me.17
Scholars tend to agree that the solution to this riddle must be ‘a fish in the river’; although I think we can be more precise, and say ‘a turbot in the Thames’. Of all the rivers in England, only the Thames was worshipped in the Dark Ages as a god—archaeologists have recovered, only from this waterway, large numbers of swords and other valuable metalware from this period that had once been offered up to the god of the river. The point of this riddle, it seems to me, is to do more than pose a puzzle. It is to suggest the ways in which the river is continually pouring its life out into the ocean and yet is continually renewing itself. The river is both living and immortal, a deity: and the fish, who is always in motion, is its holy
inhabitant. It is puzzling and yet it is right that the mundane and the divine are twined round one another. (In the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter of The Hobbit, not one but two of the riddles have the answer ‘fish’). Nor is this confined to a pagan sense of the world. Here is riddle 51, once again in McCully’s version:
Four wondrous things fall through my eyes,
travelling together. Their tracks were black,
but pale their path. Among these planing birds
swift was strongest: swooped up through air,
dove under water. He worked restless,
this pioneer pointing the journey
all four must make over filigreed gold.18
McCully himself follows conventional scholarly wisdom in proposing the solution: ‘four fingers holding a quill’. Personally, I do not see that this is a terribly good solution to the riddle. One holds a pen with two fingers and a thumb, not with ‘four fingers’; the digits of a writing hand can hardly be said to ‘fall through the eyes’ and it is not usual to plunge one’s hand under water before writing. As a kenning for ‘writing’ black tracks over a pale path has a certain loveliness to it, I concede; but the filigreed gold at the end suggests to me that we are talking not about mundane writing but rather an elaborate, expensive illuminated manuscript. In other words I am suggesting that the answer to this riddle is not writing as such, but the Gospels. Producing beautifully illustrated versions of these texts was, of course, one of the main occupations of monks. Here, the four saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John make their journey via the writing of black ink on white page, but their work is also illuminated by gold, and other colours too. And each gospel author had his own animal: the eagle for St John, an ox for Luke, a winged lion for Mark and a winged man (or angel) for Matthew. That is to say, Matthew, Mark and John could all fly, and could be described as ‘planing birds’; but only St John, the eagle, is ‘the strongest’ bird, capable of swooping up through the air and diving down into the water—as both sea eagles and fish eagles do. John leads, ‘pointing the journey’ because he is the author of the prophetic Revelation with which the Bible concludes.
But these two specific readings are a roundabout way of making a larger and I believe fairly uncontentious point. One of the things riddles do is close the ground between mundane puzzle and divine mystery. There are several ways in which this is made manifest in Dark Age culture. Here is an example of what I mean: one way this culture tried to understand the puzzling nature of divine–mortal interaction was by having a god actually pose riddles to a mortal, in a contest. Indeed, riddle contests were an important part of Dark Age culture. This might be by way of passing the time and having fun; but they also had a deeper significance.
One example of this latter is the field of law. However counter-intuitive it might seem to modern sensibilities, Dark Age culture closely connected legal process and riddles. Perhaps this had to do with a sense that the law was rarely simple or straightforward; for the law, after all, tends to highlight puzzling or counter-intuitive aspects of human existence. In Dark Age and early medieval Ireland and Wales the riddle was thought an essential means of both teaching and practising law.19 Where the latter is concerned, Judges in early Irish law courts were expected to base their judgment on five grounds, bringing to bear natural justice, Scripture, legal analogy as well as two riddle-like elements: the fásach (a group of legal maxims that can be thought of part of wisdom literature more generally) and the roscad. This last is a mode of gnomic verse jurists were taught, and which Fergus Kelly argues can best be thought of as riddles.20 Riddles are a mode of wisdom, and wisdom should inform legal judgment. To quote Christopher Guy Yocum:
While judges were not valued as highly as poets, possibly because of the view that they were artisans, the cultivation of wisdom literature was apparently entrusted to judges as part of their duties in regard to the law.21
We have evidence that the riddle was used as an instructional tool in Welsh and Irish law schools; and can assume it was used elsewhere in the northern world. The Gúbretha Caratniad (‘False Judgments of Caratnia’) is an Early Irish legal dialogue that foregrounds how important riddles were to Early Irish and Welsh jurisprudence. It is found in a manuscript dating from the mid twelfth century—Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS B 502—though the work itself is considerably older. It details a question and answer to-and-fro between a Judge called Caratnia and his king Conn Cétchathach. The Judge makes a series of ‘false’ legal judgments, and the king points out that these judgments contravene Irish law. The judge then explains the particular circumstances that make these superficially ‘false’ judgments actually true. As Robin Chapman Stacey points out, ‘the genre to which these conversations belong’ is the riddle. He adds that the fact that riddles formed part of a legal education ‘is not surprising’.
As Joan Radner has demonstrated, the genre [of riddles] itself is used frequently, in Irish and other world traditions, to underscore the limitations of human knowledge and categorizing techniques. ‘Riddling,’ she writes, ‘reminds people of the unknown, of the limitations of what they regard as sensible and logical, of the inadequacy of their understanding. They are “manipulations of the power of knowledge,” that implicitly render ambiguous or paradoxical that which might otherwise seem to be predictable and secure.’22
One reason riddles were treated with such judicial respect by the Northmen is that the gods love them. To meet a stranger, particularly a hooded-stranger with one eye and a mysterious manner, might well mean that you have met Odin himself, the father of the gods. And if Odin asked you a riddle, you had better know the answer. Indeed, riddle-contests like this—in which a supernatural creature asks a riddle to be solved by a mortal on pain of death—appear all over world-culture. We can hardly avoid thinking of the Sphinx testing Oedipus (‘what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening?’) and of Samson’s riddle in the Bible (‘out of the strong came forth sweetness’). These puzzles encode the human sense that the divine is a mystery with which we must wrestle if we hope to do more than die like a beast.
The Old English poem Solomon and Saturn (possibly composed during King Alfred’s reign, in the later ninth-century) includes a riddle contest between the pagan king called Saturn and the Christianised figure of the Biblical Solomon. It is a text in two parts, and although the second is most relevant to my purpose here—largely consisting, as it does, of an exchange of riddles between the two deuteragonists—the first has its place too. In part 1 Saturn, having searched through Libya, Greece and India hoping to find ‘truth’ has come back disappointed. He asks for Solomon’s help, and is accordingly given a detailed account of the Pater Noster, going in detail through the individual letters that make up the prayer. He does this because these letters, represented as richly ornamented runes, individually contain divine power. I will come back to this sense of the power of the individual letter in my next chapter. The longer Solomon and Saturn II (327 lines, as compared to part I’s 169) is a straightforward riddle contest.23 In the words of Dieter Bitterli: ‘the two interlocutors pose and answer several enigmatic questions, including at least two proper riddles whose subjects appear to be “book” and “old age”.’24 Another perhaps more directly pertinent example is the Icelandic saga of King Heidrek—Old Norse rather than Old English, a favourite of Tolkien’s, and a book later translated into English by Tolkien’s son, Christopher.25 King Heidrek, a powerful king of men, happens to have a grievance against a fellow called ‘Gestumblindi’. The king sends him word ‘to come and be reconciled, if he cared for his life’; and Gestumblindi, doing so, proposes a riddle-contest.
But this fellow’s name ought to alert us straight away that all is not as it seems: for ‘Gestum Blindi’ means ‘Guest (who is) blind’—guest in the old sense of the word, ‘stranger’. The blind stranger, if we know our Norse myth, puts us in mind of Odin: one-eyed, a wanderer, fond of riddles. At any rate, rather than face the judgment of Heidrek’s
counsellors, ‘Gestumblindi’ enters into a riddle contest with the king, and asks him:
If only I still had
what I had yesterday!
discover what it was;
it hurts mankind
it hinders speech
yet speech is inspired by it
Ponder this riddle.
The king replies ‘Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar’—‘Good are (these) gáta of thine, Gestumblindi; guessed them I have’; or in less Yoda-like English, ‘your riddle is a good one, Gestumblindi; but I have guessed it!’ This is a line of verse, presumably the stock way of saying that you have solved a riddle, and the king repeats it after almost all the riddles he is asked. (The answer to the ‘if only I still had’ riddle is: ‘ale’)
I travelled from my home
And from my home I went
I saw the road of road;
There was a road underneath
And a road overhead,
And on every sides there were roads.
Ponder this riddle,
O prince Heidrek!
Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar! ‘You passed over a bridge across a river, and the road of the river was beneath you, but birds flew above your head and flew past on your either side, and that was their road.’
What was the drink
That I drank yesterday?
Neither wine nor water,
Neither mead nor ale,
It wasn’t any kind of food,
Yet I came away thirstless.
Ponder this riddle,
O prince Heidrek!
Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar! ‘You lay down in shade where dew had collected on the grass, and with this you cooled your lips and satisfied your thirst.’