by Adam Roberts
It was constructed from six elements: the noise of a cat’s footsteps, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird.2
This fetter, being both insubstantial as a fish’s breath and strong as a bear’s sinews, is beyond the power of Fenrir to break. What of the other four elements? One section of the ‘prose Edda’ (the Gylfaginning, or ‘the Gulling of Gylfi’) is styled as a conversation between a mortal called Gangleri and the god Odin. Having told him the story of the fetter called Gleipnir, Odin tells Gangleri: ‘though previously you had no knowledge of these matters, you now can quickly see the proof that you were not deluded. You must have noticed that a woman has no beard, a cat’s movement makes no loud noise and mountains have no roots.’ So there we have it; straight from the Norse’s mouth—the roots of mountains do not exist.3 Whether we prefer to take ‘as nobody sees’ to be periphrasis for ‘as do not exist’, or whether we would rather take the riddle at face value and come up with an alternate answer (‘Yggdrasil’, for example) is up to us. Gollum, at any rate, is satisfied with the answer Bilbo gives him.
The second riddle is asked by Bilbo of Gollum:
Thirty white horses on a red hill,
First they champ,
Then they stamp,
Then they stand still.
When I was a boy, not yet a decade old, I received for a birthday present an audio-book version of The Hobbit, on four cassette tapes, read by the great Scots actor Nicol Williamson. I listened to those tapes over and over. Indeed, I listened to this recording so many times that, even today as I read The Hobbit, Williamson’s lovely, cawing cadences still hover over my sense of the words. The audiobook text was abridged, and indeed would hardly have fitted onto only four cassette tapes otherwise. Mostly the abridgement was sensitively done, but at one point in the book—this one—the anonymous abridger made a mistake. The answer to this riddle is ‘teeth’; but the exchange that precedes the answer goes as follows:
That was all [Bilbo] could think of to ask—the idea of eating was rather on his mind. It was rather an old one, too, and Gollum knew the answer as well as you do. ‘Chestnuts, chestnuts,’ he hissed. ‘Teeth! teeth!’
‘Chestnuts’, here, is idiomatic for ‘that’s easy!’ But the audiobook abridger, in haste or perhaps in simple misunderstanding, omitted the last two words of this passage. As a result, in my puzzled 8-year old brain, I tried to work out in the answer to a riddle about Thirty white horses on a red hill, champing, stamping, standing still could possibly be that type of nut popular at Christmastime. But we are entitled to wonder whether there is not more to this riddle than simply Bilbo’s anxiety that Gollum will shortly be sinking his teeth into hobbit flesh.
Teeth were important to the Anglo-Saxons; which is to say, they were important when they went wrong. The three Leechbooks of Bald—and what a superb name for a medical textbook that is—were written in Old English at Winchester, possibly in the ninth century, making them our oldest extant vernacular medical works. The third volume contains a variety of remedies for dental malaises. Here, for example, is the prescription ‘for a mouth broken inside’:
Take a plum (Prunus domestica) tree’s leaf, boil it in wine, let him swill his mouth with it4
Unlikely to help the dental pathology, although the alcohol in the wine would perhaps sterilise the mouth against the spread of infection. If an Anglo-Saxon complained of ‘hollow teeth’ (presumably cavities), this is what they were advised to do:
Chew bothen’s root with vinegar on that side.
Nobody seems to know what ‘bothen’s root’ is, so this may not be of use to any present-day cavity-afflicted readers. But the longest and weirdest prescription in the Leechbooks of Bald is for a ‘crooked or deficient’ mouth—either a specific medical diagnosis of something like cleft-palate, or else a description so general as to encompass pretty much the whole of the British Isles, tooth-wise:
Take coriander (Coriandrum sativum), dry it out, make it into dust, mix the dust with the milk of a woman who is feeding a boy-child, wring it out through a blue cloth and smear the healthy cheek with it, and drip it into the ear carefully. Make a bathing, then: take bramble (Rubus fruticosus) bark and elm (Ulmus campestris) bark, ash (Fraxinus excelsior) bark, blackthorn (Prunus spinosus) bark, apple tree (Pyrus malus) bark, ivy (Hedera helix) bark—the lower parts of all of these—and cucumber, smearwort (Aristolochia rotunda), boarfern (Polypodium vulgare), elecampane (Inula helenium), elfthon (Circaea lutetiana), betony (Stachys betonica), horehound (Marrubium vulgare), radish (Raphanus sativus), agrimony (Potentilla anserina), scrape the plant into a cauldron and boil them thoroughly. Once it is thoroughly boiled, take it off the fire and let it stand and make the man a seat over the cauldron and cover the man so that the vapour cannot get out anywhere except that he might breathe it in. Bathe him with this bathing for as long as he can bear it. Have another bathe ready for him then, take an entire anthill—of those that sometimes fly, it will be red—boil it in water, bathe him with it, with excessive heat. Then make him a salve: take some plants of each of those kinds, boil in butter, smear the sore parts with it, they will soon come back to life. Make him a lye from elder (Sambucus niger) ashes, wash his head with it cold, it will soon be better for him; and let the man’s blood each month on a five-night-old moon, and on a fifteen, and on a twenty.
The sheer complexity of this speaks to a world in which tooth-pain was a genuine problem. Untreated dental abscesses can kill, and even if they do not the prolonged intensity of pain the sufferer experiences is rarely equalled in life. Still, treating a patient not only with herbs but boiled anthill vapour strikes a strange, even riddling note to modern ears.
Here is another interpretation. The riddle suggests a heraldic blazon of a white horse, or several white horses, against a red field: to use the technical phrasing, horses argent against a gules field. The white horse is (amongst other things) the animal used to represent Tolkien’s home county, Oxfordshire, usually in conjunction with an ox. For example, the Oxfordshire coat of arms is a horse argent and an ox gules; the coat of arms of Deddington (a village a little way north of Oxford) includes a horse argent holding a gules shield, and the coat of arms of Wallingford (south-east of Oxford, and not far from Tolkien’s house in Headington) includes two horses argent and a gules field. The gules field suggests martial or royal qualities: the arms of the kingdom of England are three or lions rampant (we might almost say: champing and stamping) upon a gules field. Perhaps this riddle invites the reader to reflect the answer back home, to Tolkien’s nation and county: that the riddle evokes a sort of visual rebus of the thirty towns of Oxfordshire.
This leads us back towards landscape. Bilbo’s riddle is simultaneously interiorising and exteriorising, the former since it invites us, imaginatively, inside his mouth; the latter because it calls to mind a landscape—not anthills but actual hills. It is not hard to picture a hill topped with thirty as-it-were ‘horses’, because the landscape of southern England is supplied with many such sites. The most famous of these, Stonehenge in Wiltshire, predates the Anglo-Saxon period by a great stretch of time. Still, features of the pre-Dark-Age English landscape, such as barrows and hills and stone circles, are worked into Tolkien’s Middle-Earth as well. To picture a stone circle is to see landscape arranged with giant stone teeth, sticking upward.
The Oxford English Dictionary derives the word ‘stonehenge’ from stone + ‘henge’, reading the latter as a word etymologically connected with the modern ‘hanging’ or ‘suspended’. Since the lintels are indeed suspended above the earth (although the standing stones are not) the idea that Stonehenge means ‘hanging stones’ is widely accepted. Indeed, it has been for centuries. Nonetheless, there are other theories—for instance, that ‘henge’ derives not from hangian, to hang, but hencg, hinge, because the main stones were hinged up into position, or else because the lintels ‘hinge’ upon the upright stones. I want to suggest another possibility, o
ne suggested by Bilbo’s riddle, although not one ever advanced (as far as I know) by Tolkien himself. It is the suggestion that ‘henge’ is linked etymologically with hengist or hengst, ‘stallion, steed, horse, gelding’. It does not require a great stretch of imagination to see the teeth-like protrusions of ‘stonehenge’ as a circle of stone horses, stān hengsten, having champed and stamped their way in a circle, and now standing still. There is something undeniably equine about the П-shape, after all.
Gollum then asks Bilbo the third riddle:
Voiceless it cries,
Wingless flutters,
Toothless bites,
Mouthless mutters.
Bilbo has heard this one before, however, and it does not trouble him. This riddle’s answer—wind—is mimicked in the sibilant onomatopoeia of the ninefold ‘s’ tucked into these four brief lines. The alternating masculine and feminine line-endings, and the half-rhyme of ‘cries/bites’ are unusually effective. It is likely that Tolkien was aware of the following Norse riddling question and answer:
What is the source of wind that wanders
The waves unseen?
The Corpse-Eater Hraesvelg sits in the skin
Of an eagle at the end of heaven.
When his wings beat, wind moves
Over the world of men.5
This brief exchange sets up an inversion of the specified qualities of Bilbo’s riddle: sightless, lifeless instead of voiceless and mouthless; toothed (‘Hraesvelg’ means ‘chewer of corpses’) and winged instead if toothless and wingless. But the riddles share a sense of the uncanny, death-linked force of the wind. Gollum’s eerie riddle seems to me about mouths and words (‘winged words’, Homer calls them)—about speech and the impossibilities of speech. All speech ends when breath ends.
The next riddle is, we are told, made up by Bilbo on the spot:
An eye in a blue face
Saw an eye in a green face.
‘That eye is like to this eye’
Said the first eye,
‘But in low place,
Not in high place.’
The answer comes to Gollum easily: ‘daisy’. The ‘day’s eye’ finds a parallel for itself in the humble flower; but this riddle takes on added resonance when The Hobbit is put in the context of The Lord of the Rings, and the lidless eye of Sauron—an eye, we might say, in a black face, nightsy rather than daisy in nature. This eye foully mimics and inverts the brightness and wholeness of the sun. The fourth riddle is asked by Gollum:
It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills.
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.
The answer (‘dark’) comes to Bilbo because he happens to be sitting in the dark. There is a logic of opposition that determines the way this riddle, about unlight, follows a riddle about light. In the last chapter I quoted the lines from the Saga of King Heidrek that several scholars consider behind the ‘dark’ riddle.
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!
But the answer to this, given in the original text, is ‘fog’, not ‘dark’. Despite the fact that both of these are modes of visual obscurity, they really do not mean the same thing. Indeed, the experience of being inside a daytime fog is that of being surrounded by an opaque brightness, and not a darkness at all. If we think Tolkien’s Hobbit riddle a version of the Old Norse original, then we must also concede that the process of adaptation has, again, involved a sort of inversion, such that a riddle to which the answer is ‘opaque brightness’ has become one in which the answer is ‘opaque darkness’. This sort of tricksiness is not uncharacteristic of the way riddling works in this volume, something discussed in the next chapter. Indeed, tricksiness is the whole point of riddles.
The fifth is asked by Bilbo:
A box without hinges, key or lid,
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.
This riddle (to which the answer is ‘egg’) is taken by some scholars to be a version of one found in the Saga of King Heidrek. I discuss it in more detail in the tenth, and final, chapter of this present book. The sixth is Gollum’s:
Alive without breath,
As cold as death;
Never thirsty, ever drinking,
All in mail never clinking.
One striking aspect of the answer to this riddle—‘fish’—is that it is also the answer to the seventh riddle, Bilbo’s:
No-legs lay on one-leg, two legs sat near on three-legs, four-legs got some.
‘Fish on a little table, man at table sitting on a stool, the cat has the bones.’ The reduplication of answers seems to me a puzzling thing, not least because it in effect gifts the answer to Gollum (‘as it was’, the narrator notes, ‘talking of fish [it] was not so very difficult’). I have a theory as to why Tolkien includes two riddles next to one another with, in effect, the same answer; and I elaborate it in the next chapter. For the moment I will confine myself to noting that there are many riddles that have a similar form to this one of Bilbo’s—I do not mean in the sense that they are about fish, but in the sense that they stack up numbers in the service of trying to baffle the listener. For example, a riddle collected in a seventeenth century collection called Holme Riddles:
Q. ther is a thing that doth both goe sit & stand hath eight legs & lives 3 reed this ridle i pray thee
Or in modern English: there is a thing that all at once goes, sits and stands; it has eight legs and three lives. Read this riddle I pray you! The answer is ‘a man on horse-back with a hawk on his fist’. Gollum asks the eighth riddle:
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.
The answer to this riddle (‘time’) comes to Bilbo in a fluke: he means to ask for more time to work out the solution, but can only gasp out ‘time! time!’ But it may occur to readers of The Hobbit that there is a more straightforward answer to this puzzle lurking, underneath a different mountain to the one in which the riddle contest is being held, at the end of the novel. For Smaug has turned Erebor into a wasted land, denuded all the countryside of life, slain kings, destroyed towns, and smashed all the iron and stone weapons sent against him. But Bilbo, I suppose, can be forgiven for not yet knowing about him. Critics compare one of the Solomon and Saturn riddles:
Ac hwæt is ðæt wundor ðe geond ðas worold færeð
styrnenga gæð, staðolas beateð,
aweceð wopdropan winneð oft hider?
But what is that wondrous thing that travels around the world
going sternly beating at the foundations
awakens weeping often works his way in here?
The answer to this is yldo, old-age. It is hard to avoid the sense that this provides a poor fit to Tolkien’s riddle; for whilst age is a function of time, time is not the same thing as old age. The two have a non-commutative relationship (the one causes the other, but the other does not cause the one). What this does, I think, is put into question that approach to Tolkien’s riddles that likes to parse the riddles only as variants of pre-existing originals. Bilbo and Gollum trade ‘old chesnuts’ and new-minted riddles both; but, as John Rateliff notes, the riddle contest as a whole is more remarkable for Tolkien’s creative input: ‘it should be stressed however that, whatever Tolkien’s sources and inspiration, this striking scene and the riddles it is built around are almost entirely Tolkien’s own creation. Both frame (back and forth interaction of the two contestants) and content (the riddles themselves) differ greatly f
rom their precursors.’6
And finally Bilbo asks the ninth riddle: ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ We shall come back to this tricky question later.
The answers, then, to the riddles are as follows:
Mountain; teeth; wind; daisy; dark; egg; a fish; a fish being eaten; time; the ring.
In miniature this reproduces the balance of good and evil construed, symbolically, by the novel itself. On the one hand we have the things of the above-ground, the open-air and sunlight (wind, daisies, eggs); on the other, we have things hidden away, inside (as teeth are inside your mouth, or fish inside water—these two things are combined in the seventh riddle, as teeth mash-up the fish and deliver it inside the body). The mountain is defined by its roots—where Bilbo and Gollum are—and its dark. Time devours. The ring is a vacancy that, we go on to learn, unites all that is dark, and hidden, and destructive.
Why did Tolkien choose these ten riddles, and put them into his story in this order? Mountain; teeth; wind; daisy; dark; egg; a fish; a fish being eaten; time; a golden ring. It works, almost, as string of rebuses encapsulating the narrative of the novel itself: the Misty Mountains, the teeth of the various creatures that seek to devour our heroes (trolls, Gollum, orcs, wolves and dragons); the day’s-eye of the sun revealing Bilbo’s invisibility; the dark under the mountains, or within Mirkwood, both standing for the evil against which good must fight; the box and its treasures that is the subject of this quest; the various times Bilbo and the dwarves fall into water; the time of the narrative itself; the ring—and its larger significances. Here is an Old English ‘gnomic’ poem:
A stream must mingle with the sea
And a mast stand tight when winds are free;
A sword be dear to humans still
And the wise serpent live in a hill;