The Riddles of The Hobbit

by Adam Roberts

  Who is that shrill one

  on hard ways walking,

  paths he has passed before;

  many are his kisses

  for of mouths he has two,

  and on gold alone he goes?

  Ponder this riddle,

  O prince Heidrek!

  Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar! ‘That is the hammer, which is used in the goldsmith’s art; it screams shrilly when it beats on the hard anvil, and the anvil is its path.’ And so it goes on: twenty-eight riddles in quick succession are asked and answered one after the other. A number of them are similar enough to some of the riddles of the contest between Bilbo and Gollum to excite scholars.

  A cask of ale:

  no hand shaped it,

  no hammer built it,

  yet outside the islands

  its maker sits straight-up.

  Ponder this riddle,

  O Prince Heidrek!

  ‘Your riddle is a good one’, the king replies; ‘but I have guessed it.’ It is, of course, ‘egg’ (‘the egg-shell is not made by hand nor is it formed by hammer; and the swan that produces it carries himself erect, outside the islands’). Another riddle familiar to readers of The Hobbit is:

  Who is the mighty one

  That passes over the ground

  Swallowing water and forest?

  He fears the wind

  But flees no man

  And wages war on the sun!

  Ponder this riddle,

  O Prince Heidrek!

  The answer to this riddle is a particular sort of darkness, ‘fog’; and Tom Shippey argues that this riddle is behind the ‘dark’ riddle that Bilbo answers ‘without even scratching his head’ because ‘he had heard that sort of thing before’. We might want to pause and consider whether ‘a cask of ale’ is the same thing as ‘a box without hinges’; or whether ‘fog’ means quite the same thing as ‘darkness’; I discuss these near-analogues, or perhaps deliberate riddling swerves, in the next chapter.Each riddle is a doddle for Heidrek (Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar!) until the last one. Finally Gestumblindi asks this:

  What did Odin say

  Into Balder’s ear

  Before he was carried off to the fire?

  Of course Heidrek does not know the answer to this. Nor is it a riddle, or at least a riddle after the manner of the others; for it is not possible to guess or intuit it from the information given. Either one knows the answer or one does not; and in fact only two beings (Balder and Odin himself) can possibly know the answer to this one. In a rage, the king shouts that he has seen through Gestumblindi’s disguise (‘you alone know the answer to that riddle!’), whips out his sword and attempts to stab the god. To escape harm, Odin changes himself into a hawk and flies away, but not before cursing the king: ‘because you have attacked me with a sword, King Heidrek, you yourself shall die at the hands of the basest slaves!’

  What is the answer to this last riddle? The honest answer is: we do not know. Perhaps this is its point: that it is unanswerable. Tolkien, in what looks very like an imitation of this contest, concludes his riddle-contest between Bilbo and Gollum, with a similarly unanswerable question. ‘What have I got in my pocket’ is not a riddle in the sense that we cannot work out what the answer is; either we know, or we do not. Gollum does not know, and guesswork does not help him.

  And here we come back to the question of the riddle in the court of law. Asking an unanswerable riddle is a way of overmastering the questioned person. One of the things the Gúbretha Caratniad is interested in is the respective power rightfully due the law on the one hand and the king on the other. By acting out their riddling exchange, the Judge Caratnia and his king Conn Cétchathach are jockeying for power and status, one with the other. In a much smaller sense, this is also what Bilbo and Gollum are doing. In the words of Robin Chapman Stacey: ‘riddles function, in almost every culture in which they appear, as a means by which one person lays claim to power over another’.26

  Like Bilbo and Gollum’s contest, The Saga of King Heidrek ends on a debatable point. As Tom Shippey notes, Tolkien’s mind was particularly drawn to the grey areas of scholarship—that is, his creative imagination was sparked by debatable points. Thus the cup-stealing episode in Beowulf, which inspired the chapter ‘Inside Information’, is based on a scholarly reconstruction of a badly-damaged section of the manuscript. Similarly the name Eomer in The Lord of the Rings is borrowed, not from Beowulf, but from a scholar’s emendation of the word which actually occurs in the Beowulf manuscript. While The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise and its riddle-contest are well known among Norse scholars, ‘this particular riddle (“alive without breath”) is found in only one of the three main versions of the saga … Furthermore, the page containing this riddle is lost from the original manuscript.’27 It is the very debatableness of riddles that makes them so imaginatively powerful.

  One notion I am setting myself against, here—I may as well be plain—is that any given riddle has one right or correct answer. I take seriously the urge a riddle raises in us to ‘solve’ it, and I do not underestimate the extent to which the going from sifting through possible but unsatisfactory answers to any given riddle to lighting upon an answer that fits, like a key sliding in a lock, is a notable human pleasure. I do not repudiate this pleasure; but neither do I think it a simple thing. The thesis of this study (to repeat myself) is that riddles are, amongst other things, ways of ironising the world; and adding an answer to an unsolved riddle does not dissolve away such irony.

  I need to tread carefully here, because I am not talking about ambiguity, either in the simple or even in the more complicated Empsonian sense of the word. To read through the Exeter Book riddles is to be struck that some of the answers seem obvious where for others the answer is hard to decide. Indeed, many people from specialist scholars to enthusiastic amateurs have proposed sometimes contradictory solutions. But I want to suggest that this contradictoriness is not an index of muddle, or confusion, but of something more radically ironic in the nature of the text itself.

  I am going to look at one more Exeter Book riddle, the brief but lovely Riddle 69, by way of thinking what it means to ‘answer’ an Anglo-Saxon riddle. Here it is:

  Wundor wearð on wege: wæter wearð to bane.

  On the way, a wonder: water becomes bone.

  Scholars agree that answer to this riddle is: ice. Scholars do not always agree on the answer to any given riddle. For example, various Old English riddle experts have looked at Riddle 74 (‘I was once a young woman, / a glorious warrior, a grey-haired queen. / I soared with birds, stepped on the earth, / swam in the sea—dived under the waves, languid amongst fishes. I had a living spirit’) and suggested variously cuttlefish, water, siren and swan as the answer. By comparison, and remembering that the answers to these riddles are nowhere written down or officially tabulated, ‘on the way, a miracle: water becomes bone … ice’ looks relatively straightforward. It is a nicely satisfying and poetic image, too. But here is another answer to the riddle:

  Climbing Cooper’s Hill, and looking back at the curve of the Thames in the bright, cloudy light: the afternoon sun polishing away all grey or blue from the water until it is white, its edges sharpened by the angle of illumination, looking like nothing so much as a mighty rib-bone gleaming, set in the flesh of the land … and I thought to myself yes, water becomes bone.28

  The answer ice identifies two points of similarity (hardness, colour) with bone; but this vision of the Thames identifies three (colour, shape, setting). Does that make it a ‘better’ answer to the Exeter Book riddle? I suppose there are not many people who would say so. But stop a bit. Here is a third possible answer to the riddle:

  The company said the decision to produce a calcium water had been made after the US Health Department highlighted calcium deficiency as a major problem in the US. SWG claims to be the first US bottled water company to directly address the growing consumer awareness of the benefits of calcium for
healthier bones and teeth.29

  Or, if you prefer: ‘Milk, rich in calcium, builds strong bones!’ Now I would hazard that I would not find many Old English scholars who could so much as give either of the above ‘answers’ the time of day, much less a mention in a critical edition of the Exeter Book. As far as I can see, the unwritten rules of scholarly investigation into OE riddles goes something like this: the point of the exercise is not really, ingeniously or otherwise, to answer these riddles. Rather the point is one of imaginative entry into the mind of an Anglo-Saxon. That is to say, the modern-day scholar sets out to answer them in a way that is consistent with the world-view of an Anglo-Saxon mind. The first answer (ice) is the sort of answer a ninth-century Middlesaxon might think of. The second (the Thames seen from a hill under certain conditions of light) is an answer that, although it probably wouldn’t occur to Mr Ninth-Century, would at least be comprehensible to him. But the third answer (‘milk’) would make no sense to him at all. The fact that it makes perfect sense to a twenty-first-century dweller in Middlesex, like me, is not relevant. These, after all, are Anglo-Saxon, not modern English, riddles.30

  But why do we conceive of riddles in this way? A ‘riddle’ (from rædan, to counsel, advise or teach), like a kenning, is a mode of knowing. Riddles are about giving the commonplace a conceptual shake to enable us to see it anew. Thinking of milk as a way in which water becomes bone is a perfectly good way of knowing. If Bilbo Baggins asks ‘what have I got in my pocket?’ and Gollum answers ‘molecules of air’, then Gollum has answered the question asked. Would it be fair for Bilbo to say ‘no … although I do have molecules of air on my pocket, that’s not what was in my mind when I posed the question’—? Surely, if Bilbo were minded to say such a thing, then he ought to have cut straight to the chase and asked a different question, along the lines of ‘I’m thinking of something: guess what it is’. But that sort of question would make a very poor riddle indeed. Or:

  SPHINX: You must answer my question or die! What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening?

  OEDIPUS: Samuel Johnson’s well-trained dog.

  SPHINX: No! The answer is man, who crawls as a babe, walks tall in youth, and uses a stick in his dotage!

  OEDIPUS: You said morning, noon and evening; not infancy, youth and dotage.

  SPHINX: It’s metaphorical!

  OEDIPUS: Besides, a baby doesn’t walk on four legs. It crawls on its legs and arms. Arms aren’t legs.

  SPHINX: [Utters a howling, glass-shattering shriek] Metaphorical legs! Not literal legs! Legs in a man-ner of speak-ing!

  OEDIPUS: Well, it’s half metaphor and half literal, isn’t it, since the baby uses two legs and two arms. So of the four legs stipulated, two are literally legs and two are only metaphorically legs.

  SPHINX: Git!

  OEDIPUS: So, which is it to be, literal or metaphorical?

  SPHINX: I’m not listening! I’m putting my wings over my ears! La! La! La!

  OEDIPUS: And the noontime walking on two legs is literal, not metaphorical. So your riddle mixes metaphor and literal application in an inconsistent manner.

  SPHINX: Shut up! Shut up!

  OEDIPUS: Of these two answers to the riddle, mine better fits the terms of the question.

  SPHINX: That’s not the point. When I asked the question I was not inviting you to answer it; I was demanding that you guess what was in my mind! I was thinking of man, not Samuel Johnson’s dog; you didn’t guess that. So you must die!

  OEDIPUS: That’s hardly fair. Call your supervisor; I want to have a word with her.

  [There’s a great deal of squawking and shrieking. The Over-Sphinx comes in.]

  OVER-SPHINX: Can I help you?

  OEDIPUS: Yes. I’m far from happy with the level of service I’m getting from this Sphinx. In the first place she asked a thoroughly misleading question, and now she’s trying to palm me off with an illogical and internally inconsistent answer, even though I provided, as I was requested to do, a perfectly reasonable riddle-solution.

  OVER-SPHINX: I do apologise sir. Might I offer you a replacement riddle? I can offer you ‘Is the present king of France bald?’ or ‘how many roads must a man walk down?’

  OEDIPUS: No, I think I’d like my money back.

  Surely it is legitimate to argue that the purpose of asking a question is not to try and guess what is in the mind of the questioner, but to answer the question. Which is to say, the point of interpreting text is not to try and retrieve what was in the mind of the author but, you know, to read the text. So I am going to stick with milk.

  Another way of putting this would be to stress the playful aspect of riddling. It is a game; stimulating as well as diverting, but of necessity open-ended, an art of disclosure rather than enclosure. The name for the sort of person who would close down the possibilities of the game is kill-joy. But perhaps that looks merely petulant; so I shall close this chapter with a quotation from one of the most respected contemporary academic scholars of the OE riddle-form, Patrick J. Murphy. Murphy is less interested in simple ‘solutions’ to riddles (although he is also interested in those) because he is more interested in the way riddles work. In a word he is intrigued by what they do. He insists, helpfully, upon ‘the distinction between a riddle’s solution and its interpretation’, and he is open to the role of play in riddling. Riddles, he argues, ‘draw intricate links between disparate things, as birds become letters, bright riders shift into suns and stars, and onions strip away layers of allusion and mordant metaphor’.31 Riddling is a bringing-together; and in the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter of The Hobbit, riddles bring together two creatures, seemingly very different, but (we eventually discover) very alike.

  3

  Riddles in the Dark

  Bilbo, fleeing goblins through the subterranean chambers of the Misty Mountains, chances upon a golden ring. Later, groping about in the dark, he meets Gollum, a murky creature who dwells in the gloom catching fish in the underground lakes and eating them raw. The ring, it seems, is his. Bilbo needs a guide to help him out of the labyrinth of caves. Gollum wants to eat Bilbo. These desires, clearly, are incompatible. The two decide to settle the matter with a riddle contest.

  This may, if we stop to think about it, strike us as a puzzling way of mediating their opposing needs. This is a serious matter: life-or-death to Bilbo, and staving off starvation to Gollum. A game of riddles seems, perhaps, an infantile mode of settling the dispute. But Tolkien was drawing on a rich Old English tradition that saw riddles not as infantile or trivial. Riddles were more than simple word-games; they had binding power. Riddles for the Anglo-Saxons were not any old word-game or puzzling question; they were rituals, poems, a canon of questions about the world and ways of seeing that world. This in turn has a bearing on the legitimacy of the last ‘riddle’ Bilbo asks (‘what have I got in my pocket’; this, as Gollum rightly notes, is ‘not fair’). But before we get there let us look at the contest itself.

  It seems uncontentious to call the ‘riddles in the dark’ chapter one of the best loved sections of the novel. This reflects both the intrinsic appeal of riddles, and the brilliant characterisation of Gollum himself, one of Tolkien’s—and Fantasy’s—most iconic figures. It is worth reflecting for a moment on this, for in this first iteration there is very little to Gollum. We know he is a hobbit-sized creature, who lives in the dark. His gulping throat-noise (from which he gets his name) speaks to a degree of de-socialisation that combines the intimation of horrible appetites—after all, he does hope to eat Bilbo—with a kind of internalised nervousness or uncertainty. He has his habit of referring to himself both in the first and third person (‘I’ and ‘my precious’) which suggests the mild schizophrenia of the long isolated. More strikingly he also refers to himself in the second person plural, as ‘us’, as if folding both halves of his split personality into one. The first thing he says upon seeing Bilbo is a self-address to ‘us’: ‘bless us and splash us, my precioussss!’—a nice
oath: clean (for a family audience) and with plenty of opportunity to show off the hissing sibilance of Gollum’s trademark phrasing. More, it hovers nicely between a positive, even pious sense—the baptismal splashing of water, the religious blessing—and something darker: ‘bless’ also means wound, and the splashing might be blood.

  The conversation between Bilbo and Gollum that follows is predicated upon that ancient courtesy by which not even a troll, or a sphinx, will devour a person until a riddle has been asked and answered. (The courtesy of this circumstance is helped by the fact that Bilbo has a sword, which he does not forget to brandish.) The riddles themselves are presented to the reader as a series of poems, the verse in each case being Tolkien’s own.1 We are given the answer to each riddle immediately. The first riddle is Gollum’s:

  What has roots as nobody sees,

  Is taller than trees,

  Up, up it goes,

  And yet never grows?

  Bilbo announces this one to be easy. And since the answer is literally all around them, so it is: mountain. Nonetheless, it is in the nature of riddles to encourage a pedantic, even legalistic frame of mind in the riddled. Is the answer correct in all its particulars? For if not it will be straightforwardly misleading. The geological knowledge that tectonic activity results in mountains actually growing (Mount Everest is growing at a rate of several centimetres a year) postdates Tolkien’s novel, and certainly postdates the Anglo-Saxon culture out of which these riddles are drawn; so we can perhaps forgive the riddle for that inaccuracy. But in what sense, even for the Anglo-Saxons, do mountains have ‘roots’?

  This answer may perhaps puzzle us, for of course, unlike trees, mountains are not rooted in the earth. I used to assume that it was a common Norse belief that mountains were supplied with stony roots; that, in other words, the subterranea of mountain ranges (which, after all, nobody can see) were like the subterranea of forests. In fact the truth is otherwise. In the Prose Edda, an anthology of Norse myths composed (probably) by Icelandic king Snorri Sturluson we find the story of the terrible wolf Fenrir, a beast so powerful and monstrous it threatens the whole world. The gods try to restrain this being with increasingly strong fetters, but Fenrir breaks them easily. Finally though they manage to trap the beast with ‘a fetter called Gleipnir’.