The Riddles of The Hobbit

by Adam Roberts

  Figure 4.1 Thor protects his daughter as he riddles a rather egg-like Alvíss: illustration by W. G. Collingwood (1908)

  The Alvíssmál concerns a dwarf called Alvíss who claims that Thor’s daughter has been promised to him in marriage; this is a match the hammerman is not keen to see go ahead. Thor makes the match conditional upon Alvíss correctly guessing a series of thirteen riddles, all taking the same form (see Figure 4.1). Indeed, we could say that these riddles have a kind of reverse structure to them. Thor provides what amounts to an answer, Alvíss replies with a number of riddling equivalents to the term. Here is the first two of Thor’s questions, and the dwarf’s answer:

  ‘Tell me this, All-wise—I foresee, dwarf,

  that you have wisdom about all beings—

  what the earth is called, which lies in front of men,

  in each of the worlds.’

  ‘Earth it’s called among men, and ground by the Æsir,

  the Vanir call it ways;

  the giants evergreen, the elves the growing one,

  the Powers above call it loam.’

  And here is the second:

  ‘Tell me this, All-wise—I foresee, dwarf,

  that you have wisdom about all beings—

  what the sky is called, known everywhere,

  in each of the worlds.’

  ‘Sky it’s called among men, home of the planets by the gods,

  wind-weaver the Vanir call it,

  the giants call it the world above, the elves the lovely roof,

  the dwarfs the dripping hall.’13

  We can imagine inverting the process to generate more conventionally framed riddles (‘I am the dripping hall, the lovely roof; I am wind-weaver. What am I?’) One of the Alvíssmál riddles overlaps with the Bilbo–Gollum game more directly:

  ‘Tell me this, All-wise—I foresee, dwarf,

  that you know all the fates of men—

  what the wind is called, which blows so widely,

  in each of the worlds.’

  ‘Wind it’s called among men, the waverer by the gods,

  the mighty Powers say neigher;

  whooper the giants, din-journeyer the elves,

  in hell they call it stormer.’

  This provides an interesting contrast to Gollum’s ‘wind’ riddle. Indeed, we might rewrite the Alvíssmál riddle this way:

  Waveringly it always flows

  Horseless it neighs

  Whooping and dinning-down it goes

  To storm hell’s ways.

  The riddles of the Alvíssmál, even though each starts with (as it were) the solution, contains one riddle that no modern scholar has yet solved. Thor asks All-wise what the ocean is called, and the dwarf replies:

  ‘Sea it’s called among men, and endless-lier by the gods,

  the Vanir call it rolling-one;

  home of the eel the giants, “lagastaf” the elves,

  the dwarfs the deep ocean.’

  And a little later, Thor asks what ‘seed’ is called, to be answered:

  ‘Barley it’s called by men, and grain by the gods,

  the Vanir call it growth,

  eatable the giants, “lagastaf” the elves,

  in hell they call it head-hanger.’

  The riddle here is that nobody, not even the professors of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, know what the word ‘lagastaf’ means. It is hard to see how the same word could be applied both to the ocean and a seed—although we can set our riddle-solving imaginations to the task and suggest possible solutions.14

  But there is another way in which the Alvíssmál relates to The Hobbit. We know that Tolkien quarried the Elder Edda to write his novel, and populate his imaginary world. For example, he took his names for the dwarfs, or dwarves, who visit Bilbo from the Edda’s opening poem, ‘The Seeress’s Prophesy’ or Voluspa. But he took more than names from the Edda. From the Alvíssmál he took an important plot element.

  You remember that Thor was quizzing Alviss the dwarf about his knowledge of the names of things for a reason—he wanted to prevent him from marrying his daughter. But Alvíss knows all the answers, so it looks as though Thor’s plans are going to fail. It is only at the end of the Alvíssmál we realise the true cunning of Thor’s plans. In the last stanza of the poem he compliments Alviss (‘In one breast I’ve never seen / more ancient knowledge’) adding:

  With much talking I say I’ve beguiled you;

  Day dawns on you now, dwarf.

  It was all a trick: the rising sun turns Alviss into stone, and Thor is spared the indignity of having a dwarf for a son-in-law.

  This, of course, is how Gandalf saves Thorin and company from the trolls in The Hobbit’s second chapter, ‘Roast Mutton’. Having captured all thirteen dwarves, and Bilbo, three trolls are bickering amongst themselves how best to cook and eat them, when the sunrise surprises them and turns them to stone. After this lucky escape, Bilbo realises that Gandalf, in amongst the trees, has been provoking the fight by imitating the voices of each of the trolls in turn in order to say disobliging things about the other trolls. It is a clever strategy; worthy of Gandalf, and rather more than we might expect from the—usually, in Norse myth—rather slow-witted Thor.15

  It is worth saying a little more, here, about trolls. Tolkien’s three trolls are called William Huggins, Bert and Tom (we are not vouchsafed Bert and Tom’s surnames): good, solid English names, all. They are a bit dim, a bit quarrelsome, small-c conservative and they like a bit of cooked meat washed down with beer—in other words they could hardly be more English, excepting only their propensity for cannibalism, something generally frowned upon in England. Bilbo introduces himself to them with an inadvertent riddle of his own:

  ‘Blimey Bert, look what I’ve copped!’ said William.

  ‘What is it?’ said the others coming up.

  ‘Lumme if I knows! What are yer?’

  ‘Bilbo Baggins, a bur—a hobbit,’ said poor Bilbo.

  (p. 44)

  This puzzles the trolls, as well it might: ‘what’s a burrahobbit?’ We know, of course, that Bilbo had been going to say ‘Bilbo Baggins, a burglar’ and has, wisely, thought better of it halfway through. But there are other ways of approaching this riddle. What is a burrahobbit?

  One answer might be: the sort of a hobbit who lives in a burrow. Of course, as the opening of the novel makes clear, all hobbits live in such domiciles, so the distinction might seem superfluous. No: Bilbo is (or at this stage in the narrative, will become—for a Norse riddle is as likely to be a prophesy as a description of the world as is) a very special, indeed a unique sort of hobbit.

  The word ‘burr’ or ‘bur’ means ring. It derives from the Middle English burwhe or burwe and can mean, variously, ‘a circle’, ‘a ring’, a protective ring (for instance, of a fence or wall), or a circle about the moon or a halo of moonlight—this latter is also called ‘a brough’, which is a variant of the same word. Another, related word is ‘broch’ or ‘brogh’, which is, to quote the OED, ‘a sort of round tower, having an outer and an inner wall of dry stone’. The modern word ‘brooch’, for the round ornament that some people wear pinned to their lapels or dresses, is very likely etymologically related to this.

  In other words, ‘burrahobbit’ might be an archaic way of saying ‘ring-hobbit’. And that brings me to my second reading of the ‘meta-riddle’ of the ‘Riddles in Dark’ chapter, which in turn leads me on to discuss the relationship between Tolkien’s Hobbit and its much longer, follow-up story, The Lord of the Rings.

  I am the mountains;

  I am teeth;

  I am the wind;

  I am a daisy;

  I am the dark;

  I am an egg;

  I am a fish;

  I am a fish;

  I am time;

  I am a golden ring.

  What am I?

  A possible way of reading this, as a riddle, would be to see its constituent elements not as letters, but as separate items that all share one quality
. Indeed, it would be to see the final item—since ‘what have I got in my pocket?’ is a question of a different sort to all the other riddle questions—as being not another riddle, but as the answer, included in the riddle itself. There are certainly many riddles that play this sort of game with the reader. One you may know is the riddle ‘As I Was Going To St Ives’:

  As I was going to St Ives

  I met a man with seven wives

  Every wife had seven sacks

  Every sack had seven cats

  Every cat had seven kits

  Kits, cats, sacks, wives

  How many were going to St Ives?

  The answer is displayed in plain view in the first line of the poem, of course: only I was going to St Ives. All the other creatures were going in the opposite direction. Jonathan Wilcox notes that there are several Old English riddles that operate by the same logic.16 He gives the example of riddle 86 from the Exeter Book, which I quote here in the original and Wilcox’s translation.

  Wiht cwom gongan, þær weras sæton

  monige on mæðle mode snottre;

  hæfde an eage ond earan twa,

  ond twegen fet, twelf hund heafda

  hrycg ond wombe ond honda twa,

  earmas ond eaxle, anne sweoran

  ond sidan twa. Saga hwæt ic hatte.

  (A creature came walking where men sat, many in an assembly, wise in mind; it had one eye and two ears, and two feet, twelve hundred heads, a back and a belly and two hands, arms and shoulders, one neck and two sides. Say what it is called.)

  ‘The survival of a partly analogous Latin riddle’, Wilcox argues, ‘has made possible a solution.’ The later, Latin riddles is: ‘now may you see what you scarcely may believe: one eye within, but many thousand heads. Whence shall he, who sells what he has, procure what he has not?’ Unlike the riddles in the Exeter Book this puzzle includes its own answer (‘a one-Eyed Seller of Garlic’). Wilcox comments: ‘since the Old English riddle contains the same paradox, albeit in more bewildering form, this same answer has been universally (and gratefully) accepted by modern editors and commentators ever since the discovery of the analogy by Dietrich.’ But Wilcox thinks this answer is wrong. Instead he proposes that the solution to the question ‘say what I am’ is riddler; and he brings in the ‘As I Was Going To Saint Ives’ rhyme as a comparison.

  Following a similar logic, we might want to solve the Bilbo–Gollum meta-riddle by reading the final element ‘what have I got in my pocket’ as answer rather than question. All the things Bilbo and Gollum riddle one another about are ring-like. Some of the elements are obviously round or ring-shaped (egg, teeth, daisy); some are metaphorically so—time is marked by the circular reoccurrence of days, and seasons, and clocked so on the faces of our timepieces. The winds blow around the world, itself conceived as circular by the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse, which is to say as land circled by a great ring-shaped ocean. Darkness, whilst not in itself having any shape, signifies the absence or gap in the centre of a ring. ‘Mountains’ are harder to parse as ring—except that Tolkien’s Middle-earth is surprisingly well-supplied with ring-shaped mountain ranges, and those mountains are hollow, bodies of matter around an absent centre. The original riddle, of course, describes mountains in terms of two features—roots and height—of which the latter is material and the former, as I discussed earlier, absent; which is in turn a way of describing the structure of a ring.

  And what of fish? As I mentioned above, the Norse view of the world saw it as ring-shaped: a circular shield with a mass of land in the middle (itself a sort of ring around the hollow Mediterranean sea at its centre), in turn ringed-about by a great circular ocean. And in that ocean is Jörmungandr, a name that means ‘enormous monster’—a sea-serpent or enormous fish, that lies encircling the world with its huge tail in its huge jaws. 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. Gollum, sitting in his little boat fishing for much smaller fish, seems trivial by comparison; but the comparison is interesting nonetheless. The entire world, for the Northmen, was ringed about with a gigantic fish, biting its own tail.17

  So these things all speak to one thing: bands of solid matter around a central vacancy. The ring. And as Corey Olsen notes, the ‘pocket’ question signifies a particular sort of circling round from Gollum to Bilbo’s experience.

  The Pocket question also prompts us to think about the fate from which Bilbo’s luck is saving him. Throughout the riddle contest, Bilbo and Gollum have stood forth as spokesmen for opposing perspectives, for light and darkness, for wholesomeness and corruption, for contentment and despair. We end the game, however, with a question that serves not to separate the two, but to establish a link between them. Both of them have had the same ring in their pockets, and we see Bilbo doing for the first time what Gollum has been doing for ages; fingering the ring in his pocket and talking aloud to it…. Tolkien shows us the connection between the two worlds, a connection that is embodied in the ring, Gollum’s ring that turns out to be the answer to Bilbo’s last and most personal riddle.18

  The circularity of the ring embodies the tendency of evil to recirculate through our lives, passing from one generation to another. This is in turn leads us to consider the relationship between The Hobbit and Tolkien’s great sequel, The Lord of the Rings. That relationship is more complicated than you might think. Indeed, it would not go too far to call it a riddle in its own right.

  5

  The Puzzle of the Two Hobbits

  How many The Hobbits did Tolkien write?

  The short answer is that Tolkien wrote two versions of the story. In the first, a troop of (to use what Tolkien insisted was the proper plural form of the word) dwarves are planning to trek to a distant mountain in order to steal a great pile of treasure guarded by a lethal, fire-breathing dragon—or more properly, to steal it back, since they claim it belongs to them. They are looking for a professional thief to help them in this dangerous business. The wizard Gandalf, for reasons that appear largely capricious, tricks the dwarves into hiring Bilbo Baggins, an ordinary, sedentary, unadventurous hobbit. He likewise tricks Bilbo into going along. This situation is played broadly for laughs, because Bilbo is so patently unfitted to the business of adventuring. Actually, ‘unfitness’ also seems to characterise the dwarves: the party stumbles from disaster to disaster as they journey, escaping death by hairs’ breadths half a dozen times at the hands of trolls, goblins, wolves, spiders and hostile elves. They are saved from their early misadventures by Gandalf’s interventions, for though eccentric he is considerably more competent than they. Later, though, Gandalf goes off on his own business, and the party has to get into the habit of rescuing itself. They stumble through a series of potentially fatal pickles, somehow managing, by a combination of luck and hobbit-judgement, always to get away. Indeed, tracing Bilbo’s development from massively incompetent to marginally incompetent is one of the readerly pleasures of the narrative.

  The titular hobbit happens to have picked up a magic ring during the course of his travels. Ownership of this ring, and a rather shallow learning curve, gradually make Bilbo better at thieving and sneaking about. When, against the odds, the party reaches the dragon’s mountain, the quest is achieved, much more by luck than judgement. Bilbo uses the magic ring to creep into the dragon’s lair and to steal one cup from the great hillocks of piled pelf; but that is as much as he can do. Luckily for all of them, the loss of this single piece happens to enrage the dragon, causing him to leave the mountain with the furious intention of burning up the local town of men. One of the defenders there, warned by a talking bird, shoots a lucky arrow that kills the beast. After this there is a big battle: armies converging on the mountain and its now undragoned hoard. The leader of the dwarf-band is killed, but otherwise things work out well for everybody. Finally, having spent almost all the novel adumbrating the ‘there’ of the novel’s subtitle, the story sprints through the ‘and back again’, hurrying the materiall
y enriched Bilbo home in a few pages.

  I stress the ‘incompetence’ angle in this retelling because, really, that is what characterises the main players. It is an endearing incompetence, used partly for comedy, partly for dramatic purposes (by way of racketing up the narrative tension and keeping things interesting) and partly to facilitate the readers’—our—engagement. Because we can be honest; we would be rubbish on a dangerous quest. We are hobbitish types ourselves, and our idea of fun is snuggling into the sofa with a cup of cocoa and a good book, not fighting gigantic spiders with a sword. Or more precisely, we enjoy fighting giant spiders with a sword—in our imaginations only. The Hobbit has been as commercially successful as it has in part because the hobbits are able (textually-speaking) so brilliantly to mediate our modern, cosseted perspectives and the rather forbidding antique warrior code and the pitiless Northern-European Folk Tale world.

  That there is something haphazard about the larger conception of this adventure is part of its point. Obviously, it makes for a jollier tale if a clearly unsuitable comic-foil is sent on a dangerous quest, and a less jolly tale if that protagonist is some super-competent swordsman alpha-male. The bumbling, homely qualities of Bilbo, and the pinball-ball bouncing trajectory from frying pan to fire to bigger fire of the narrative, are loveable aspects of the whole. It also expresses a larger truth. The motor of the story is the idea that adventure will come and find you, and winkle you out of your comfortable hidey-hole. It is a beguiling idea, in part because it literalises the action of story itself. We settle ourselves to read, in physical comfort; but the story itself transports us imaginatively out of our cosy cubby and away, upon all manner of precarious, exciting, absorbing and diverting journeys.

  This is The Hobbit that appeared in 1937, to both acclaim and commercial success. But there is another The Hobbit; a second The Hobbit written by Tolkien, comprising revisions to this first edition, additional material written for the Lord of the Rings and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, plus other material. The most significant of these latter are two separate prose pieces, both called ‘The Quest for Erebor’ first collected in the posthumously-published Unfinished Tales (1980). Tolkien’s first revisions were confined to the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter. After writing the first Hobbit Tolkien came to the conclusion that ‘the Ring’ was more than just a magic ring conferring invisibility on its wearer—that it was indeed the most powerful artefact in the whole world, one with which people could become so besotted as to lose their souls. Gollum, he reasoned, would not freely give up such an item. So he rewrote the scene, and all subsequent editions of the novel treat the encounter in a less light-hearted manner. This is symptomatic of something larger, a reconceptualising (Tolkien purists might say: a distillation or focusing) of his now-celebrated legendarium. No longer a folk-story, it now becomes a grand sacramental drama of incarnation, atonement and redemption.