The Riddles of The Hobbit

by Adam Roberts

  A fish in water spread its race

  And a king give gold from his lofty place;

  An old hungry bear walk out on a heath

  And a river fall over a hill without death.

  An army united by unity stand

  And truth be in man, and wisdom in his hand.

  A wood cover the land with its courtly green boughs

  And a hill be fresh green; and God in His house

  The judger of deeds; and a door in a hall

  Shall still be the wide mouth that opens to all,

  And the shield have a bow where the fingers can lock.

  Birds shall speed up to heaven from every tall rock,

  The salmon shall leap like the shot of a bow

  And showers bring discomfort on worldlings below.

  A thief still steal out on the darkest of nights

  And the fiend live in fens full of misleading lights.7

  We might recognise elements of this in The Hobbit too, the Anglo-Saxon text being filtered through Tolkien’s creative imagination. The road that goes ever on; Bilbo’s ‘sting’—and Smaug in his cave; the fish upon which Gollum feeds, and which the dwarves, enclosed in their barrels, sort-of become in order to escape the wood-elves; Thorin granting his followers treasure, Beorn; the waterfall at Lothlorien; the battle of the five armies; Mirkwood—courtly, to the elves, in its eastern reaches—and Bilbo’s own underhill home (‘the door in a hall shall still be the wide mouth that opens to all’ could hardly be bettered as a description of Bilbo’s round front door). The birds in the tall rock will make us think of the ravens at the Lonely Mountain; and the thief stealing out is of course Bilbo. We could put it this way: that these ‘Gnomic Verses’ construe a riddle to which the answer is—the book called The Hobbit.

  Are the riddles in chapter 8 Tolkien’s adaptations or versions of traditional riddles, or did he invent them all himself? This looks like a simple question, but in fact it leads us into debatable, even riddling territory. You would not think so, mind, from what the scholars say. The consensus there is that the riddles are all, in one form or another, traditional. Tom Shippey notes that ‘Gollum’s riddles, unlike Bilbo’s, tend to be ancient ones.’8 Two of them—‘this thing all things devours’ riddle and ‘it cannot be seen, cannot be felt’—are both adapted from an Old English riddle poem ‘Solomon and Saturn’; his ‘alive without breath’ fish-riddle is from the Old Norse Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. Bilbo’s riddles, on the other hand, are mostly versions of nursery-rhyme traditions—Douglas Anderson, for instance, prints three such rhymes that he suggests stand behind Tolkien’s versions of the ‘teeth’, ‘eggs’ and ‘no-legs’ riddles.9

  I am not sure it is quite as clear cut as this. True, there are riddles in English or Latin, nursery rhymes or other folk poetry to which all these answers apply—mountains; teeth; wind; daisy; dark; egg; fish; time. This ought not to surprise us, for the answers are none of them unusual, abstruse or unique. All are simple nouns, concrete or abstract, all familiar features of Old English culture (there are no riddles about such non-Anglo-Saxon pastimes as smoking a pipe or wearing a waistcoat, for example). This fact alone might give us pause, actually; for often Old English and medieval riddles have bizarrely specific answers—a few paragraphs back we encountered ‘a man on horse-back with a hawk on his fist’ as an answer to an actual OE riddle, for example.

  Nonetheless, it is odd, if they are all adaptations of OE and Nursery Rhyme originals, that scholarship has been unable to find analogues for all Tolkien’ Bilbo–Gollum riddles. Conversely, if they were all invented by Tolkien it is odd that this fact has not been established. Broadly speaking, critics simply start from the premise that these the Bilbo–Gollum riddles must have analogues in OE riddle culture. For some of the riddles they have found near-analogues, and declared them to be sources. For others they have been unable to discover anything at all, and have suggested that the search must continue. I have an alternative theory.

  Tolkien himself, asked about this matter, replied variously. In a letter published in The Observer, 16 January 1938, he expatiated upon various sources for The Hobbit, stressing the importance of Beowulf in particular (‘Beowulf is among my most valued sources’) and talking a little about the then-unpublished Silmarillion. The penultimate paragraph of this letter mentions the riddles:

  And what about the Riddles? There is work to be done here on the sources and analogues. I should not be at all surprised to learn that both the hobbit and Gollum will find their claim to have invented any of them disallowed.10

  This seems, at first blush, to support the idea that Tolkien adapted all his riddles from traditional sources. But this is not actually what the passage says. In fact it is couched in a rather elegantly riddling idiom. It asserts nothing, but rather intimates (‘there is work to be done here … I should not be at all surprised to learn’) in a manner precisely designed to lead the unwary reader astray. We might answer: of course these riddles were not invented by Gollum and Bilbo—for Gollum, and Bilbo themselves were ‘invented’ by somebody else, the writer of the present letter. But to say so gets us no closer to the ‘sources’ of the riddles.

  If this letter implies that the Bilbo–Gollum riddles are all variants of traditional sources, another letter denies precisely this. Writing to Allen & Unwin on 20 September 1947 Tolkien declared:

  As for the Riddles: they are ‘all my own work’ except for ‘Thirty White Horses’ which is traditional, and ‘No-legs’. The remainder, though their style and method is that of old literary (but not ‘folklore’) riddles, have no models as far as I am aware, save only the egg-riddle, which is a reduction to a couplet (my own) of a longer literary riddle which appears in some ‘Nursery Rhyme’ books, notably American ones.11

  In other words, Tolkien is asked twice whether these riddles are versions of traditional examples, or all his own work. The first time he answers the former, or at least strongly implies that; the second time he answers the latter, although with a raft of exceptions. It is hard to avoid the sense that, whatever else is going on in these letters, Tolkien is being playfully mystifying about his riddles.

  In the next chapter I suggest that Tolkien’s selection of riddles in this chapter was not random, and that one of the things that this chapter does is reveal ‘riddling’ to be a more self-reflexive mode than a simple sequence of questions-and-answers. But before I do that, I want to explore the notion that Tolkien’s apparently contradictory approach to the question of ‘sources’ for his riddles is actually itself a sort of riddle.

  The Hobbit is full of rhymes and songs. Ten of these (in chapter 8) are specifically called ‘riddles’. But in fact not only do these various verse texts draw broadly on OE riddle traditions, but that the poems that are not specifically identified as riddles are the ones with the most readily identifiable sources in Anglo-Saxon riddle literature. This perhaps looks counter-intuitive, but that of course would be precisely the point: for a riddle works exactly by being counter-intuitive. To play such a game over the length of a novel would be evidence of a ludic slyness certainly not incompatible with Tolkien’s imagination. ‘There is’, as he put it, ‘work to be done here on the sources and analogues.’

  A few examples will give a sense of what I mean. Here is ‘Riddle 28’ from the Exeter Book:

  Biþ foldan dæl fægre gegierwed

  mid þy heardestan ond mid þy scearpestan

  ond mid þy grymmestan gumena gestreona,

  corfen, sworfen, cyrred, þyrred,

  bunden, wunden, blæced, wæced,

  frætwed, geatwed, feorran læded

  to durum dryhta. Dream bið in innan

  cwicra wihta, clengeð, lengeð,

  þara þe ær lifgende longe hwile

  wilna bruceð ond no wið spriceð,

  ond þonne æfter deaþe deman onginneð,

  meldan mislice. Micel is to hycganne

  wisfæstum menn, hwæt seo wiht sy.

  Crossley-Holland translates a
s follows:

  Some acres of this middle-earth

  are adorned with the hardest and the sharpest,

  most bitter of man’s fine belongings;

  it is cut, threshed, couched, kilned,

  mashed, strained, sparged, yeasted,

  covered, racked, and carried far

  to the doors of men. A quickening delight

  lies in this treasure, lingers and lasts

  for men who, from experience, indulge

  their inclinations and don’t rail against them;

  and then after death it begins to gab,

  to gossip recklessly. Even clever people

  must think carefully what this creature is.12

  His translation, as he himself notes, is slanted towards the solution he considers the most likely: ‘the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of John Barleycorn or ale’. But he concedes:

  My version of lines 4–6 to some extent simplify the original … there is unfortunately no way in which a translator can echo the remarkable music (achieved by adding rhyming pairs to the usual alliteration and four-stress lines) of this same passage:

  corfen, sworfen, cyrred, þyrred,

  bunden, wunden, blæced, wæced,

  frætwed, geatwed, feorran læded

  to durum dryhta …. clengeð, lengeð,

  I think this piece of rousing Old English verse is behind the song the goblins sing as they carry Bilbo and the dwarves underground as their prisoners:

  Clash, crash! Crush smash!

  Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!

  Pound, pound, far underground!

  …

  Swish smack! Whip crack!

  Batter and bleat! Yammer and bleat!

  Work, work! Nor dare to shirk!

  While Goblins quaff and Goblins laugh,

  Round and round far underground!

  (Hobbit, 68)

  We read this as a simple, if cruel hearted, song of goblin triumph. I am proposing that, like many riddles, it has a double meaning—it celebrates the capture of dwarves and a hobbit; but it also asks us to solve it as a puzzle. What is smacked, cracked, couched and kilned, battered and beaten, mashed and strained, covered and racked, and finally carried far from the doors of men—such that goblins can quaff and laugh? I am with Crossley-Holland: the answer would seem to be: ale.

  Later in the story the goblins trap the party up some fir trees, which are then set on fire. They sing a characteristically cruel song:

  Fifteen birds in five firtrees,

  their feathers were fanned in a fiery breeze!

  But, funny little birds, they had no wings!

  O what shall we do with the funny little things?

  Roast ’em alive, or stew them in a pot;

  fry them, boil them and eat them hot?

  (Hobbit, 107)

  ‘Fifteen birds in five firtrees’ straightforwardly describes the situation the dwarves, wizard and Bilbo have found themselves in, of course. But the rhyme has something in common with the tradition of number riddles. Crossley-Holland notes a Brahman riddle from the Rig Veda that describes a wheel with twelve spokes upon which stand 720 sons, all from one father—the year (‘720’ sums the days and nights). In the Exeter Book Riddle 22 plays similar number games:

  Sixty men in company came

  riding down to the estuary. Eleven

  of those mounted men had horses

  of peace, and four had pale great horses.

  They could not cross the water

  as they wished for the channel was too deep,

  the shelf too abrupt, the current too strong

  the choppy waves thronging. Then the men

  and their horses climbed on to a wagon—a burden

  under the cross-bar.

  The riddle continues, describing how ‘a single horse’ pulls the wagon over the estuary, ‘no ox, nor carthorse, nor muscular men / dragged it with him’ and ‘he did not swim, / nor muddy the water, nor ride on the wind, nor double back.’ Scholars suggest two possible solutions to this riddle. One is that the sixty men in company are the stars surrounding the pole star, circling through the sky during the course of the night; and the fifteen mounted on horses are the specific constellation of the Great Bear, or ‘the Great Wain’ (sometimes called Charles’ Wain), that ‘crosses the estuary’ in the sense of being reflected in its waters. The four ‘great pale horses’ are the four stars marking out the rectangular component of the constellation, which are visibily of a different intensity to the others.

  A second answer, quite incompatible with the first, is that the sixty men are the half-days of the month of December (it was a common Anglo-Saxon habit to calculate by half-days, or half-years). The eleven riders on ‘horses of peace’ stand-in for the holy days—the month’s four Sundays and seven feast days. The ‘estuary’ is then taken as the divide between the old year and the new. As to whether we are supposed to take the ‘four’ as part of the eleven, or to add them to the eleven (the latter seems to me to make more sense), the question remains moot. And the fact that there are two possible answers seems to me a strength of the riddle rather than a weakness.

  In Tolkien’s riddle, ‘fifteen’ crops up again, this time disposed into ‘five’ groups. Tolkien was attentive to the dates over which his fictional narrative was disposed, dates which can be calculated with reference to the descriptions of full, half and new moons. As Douglas Wilhelm Harder shows, the events of The Hobbit begin in April 2941; and Bilbo returns home in June 2942 (3rd Age): fifteen months.13 The ‘five’ may refer to the five stages of the journey: from Bag-End to Rivendell, Rivendell to Erebor, Erebor back to Beorn’s house (Harder shows that on the return journey they stay ‘approximately four months’, time for the snows to melt), then to Rivendell again and finally back home.14

  I want to close this chapter with the suitably riddling suggestion that the answers to the nine Bilbo–Gollum riddles—mountain; teeth; wind; daisy; dark; egg; a fish; a fish being eaten; time; a golden ring—are bodied forth into the verse that surrounds the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter, and all occur elsewhere in The Hobbit. We might take this a number of ways: as mere coincidence (of course); as a sign that the answers to the Bilbo–Gollum riddles are so generalised and appropriate to the cultural idiom of a reinvented ‘Dark Age’ fantasy as to be ubiquitous; or—perhaps—as design.

  Mountain: The song the dwarves sing as they come to Laketown (chapter. 10):

  The King beneath the mountains

  The King of carven stone,

  The lord of the silver fountains

  Shall come into his own!

  This refers, in terms of its apparent reference or surface meaning, to Thorin coming home; he is ‘king of carven stone’ in the sense of having rule over the carven stones of the halls of Erebor. But I am proposing an alternate solution to this verse, taken as a riddle: that it is the mountain itself that is being described in royal terms.

  Teeth: Here I propose ‘teeth’ as an alternate answer to the Goblin song, quoted a few pages above, taken as a riddle:

  Clash, crash! Crush smash!

  Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!

  Pound, pound…

  …

  Swish smack! Whip crack!

  Batter and bleat! Yammer and bleat!

  Work, work! Nor dare to shirk!

  While Goblins quaff and Goblins laugh,

  We might want to say that teeth, in the action of crushing, mashing, laughing and speaking, are constantly in motion in these lines.

  Wind: The song sung by the dwarves in Beorn’s house, begins:

  The wind was on the withered heath,

  but in the forest stirred no leaf:

  there shadows lay by night and day,

  and dark things silent crept beneath.

  The wind came down from the mountains cold

  And like a tide it roared and rolled.

  Daisy: Amongst the songs sung by the rejoicing elves in the last chapter is one that describes stars as
flowers scattered in the lawn: ‘the stars are in blossom, the moon is in flower … Dance all ye joyful, now dance all together! / Soft is the grass, and let foot be like feather!’ (Hobbit, 279).

  Dark: The dwarves’ song from the first chapter seems to describe them:

  Far over the misty mountains cold

  To dungeons deep and caverns old

  We must away ere break of day.

  But we could also ask; what lives over the mountains before the break of day, and dwells in deep dungeons and old caverns? Dark.

  Egg: The song the wood-elves sing as they roll the barrels through the hatch and into the river:

  Roll—roll—roll—roll,

  Roll-roll-rolling down the hole!

  Heave ho! Splash plump!

  Down they go, down they bump!

  Read as a riddle, this invites the answer: eggs being boiled in a pan of water.

  The two Fish riddles are particularly interesting. The second song the wood-elves sing seems to refer as well to spawning salmon as to barrels:

  Down the swift dark stream you go

  Back to the lands you once did know!

  But I wonder if the two little rhymes Bilbo sings to taunt the giant spiders have more to them than meets the eye:

  Old fat spider spinning in a tree!

  Old fat spider can’t see me!

  Attercop! Attercop!

  Won’t you stop,

  Stop your spinning and look for me?

  Lazy Lob and Crazy Cob

  Are weaving webs to wind me.

  I am far more sweet than other meat

  but still they cannot find me!

  Each of these could be recontextualised as riddles spoken by fish mocking fishermen who are either spooling their line (spinning in a tree) or weaving a net. Both ‘lob’ and ‘cob’ are names for fish—the saltwater pollack and and freshwater gudgeon (sometimes called ‘The Miller’s Thumb’) respectively. Of course, ‘lob’, ‘attercop’ and ‘cob’ are all ancient names for spiders as well—the latter survives in the word cobweb. Indeed, ‘attercop’ is an interesting word: a disparaging way of referring to a spider of great antiquity: attor or ater is the OE for ‘poison’, and cop means cup.

  A golden ring: This, I think, is the answer to the riddle enclosed in the last rhyme in the book; Bilbo’s rhyme—‘Roads go ever ever on’ (which he reprises in The Lord of the Rings as ‘the road goes ever on and on’). The rhyme describes Bilbo’s journey, a round-trip away from home through danger and adventure and back again to home. But the answer to a riddle ‘what road goes on for ever and for ever?’ is, of course, a circle.