by Adam Roberts
This is not a random observation. Tolkien’s 1939 essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ celebrates two distinct modes of Fantasy, the homely and the transcendental. The former is epitomised by traditional fairy tales, which Tolkien sees as beautiful and profound narratives of escape and resacralisation. The latter is the New Testament, which Tolkien thinks shares those key qualities with fairy stories but which he also thinks exists on a higher, truer and more important plane. This is how he puts it:
The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending.’ The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.1
My beef, if I may slip into a nonvegetarian idiom for a moment, is not with Tolkien’s religious beliefs, which (although I do not share them) are clearly essential to the dynamic of his art. My beef is with the notion that all our bents and faculties have a purpose. In Tolkien’s second version of The Hobbit, it is precisely the haphazardness, the intimations of glorious, human, comic incompetence, that must be sanded, smoothed and filed away. It is no longer enough for Gandalf to turn up on the doorstep of the world’s least likely adventurer merely because that is the sort of thing batty old wizards do. Now he must do so because he has a larger plan. In the first version of the story it does not really matter why Gandalf chooses a hobbit, of all people; or more precisely, his whylessness of choice is actually the point of the story. (‘I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging’, Gandalf says, with what could easily be read as desperation, ‘and it’s very difficult to find anyone.’) This is because the novel is not about Gandalf’s whys, it is about Bilbo’s adventure. Why he is chosen matters less than the way he acquits himself on his journey, and the extent to which he sheds his unheroism to become a better fellow. That is what matters because we are he. That is how the reading experience goes.
But in Tolkien’s second version of The Hobbit everything has to happen for a reason. Gandalf was not idly arranging an adventure; he was setting in motion one crucial play in a larger strategy of the grand war against Evil.
I knew that Sauron had arisen again and would soon declare himself, and I knew that he was preparing for a great war…. The state of things in the North was very bad. The Kingdom under the Mountain and the strong Men of Dale were no more. To resist any force Sauron might send to regain the northern passes in the mountain and the old lands of Angmar there were only the Dwarves of the Iron Hills, and behind them lay a desolation and a Dragon. The Dragon Sauron might use with terrible effect. Often I said to myself: ‘I must find some means of dealing with Smaug.’2
Just to be clear: I have no problem with what SF and Fantasy fans call ‘retconning’, the retrospective rewriting of a text to make it more coherent with the later iterations of that textual world. Not in the least, for I take ‘text’ to be fundamentally fluid and adaptable. I can go further, and say that one of the things that gives Tolkien’s art depth and resonance is precisely the way he layers medium and deep historical pasts into his present-set tale; and having this secondary perspective on the material of The Hobbit adds echoey, plangent splendour to the whole. But that is not to say that this particular piece of retconning makes sense. On the contrary: it compels us to believe that Gandalf, deciding that it was a strategic priority that Smaug be eliminated, thinks not of sending an army, and certainly not of going himself and tackling the dragon with his, you know, magic. Rather he thinks: ‘I’ll go to the extreme other end of the continent, recruit a number of dwarves, some of them manifestly not up to the task (Bombur?), plus a hobbit without any experience or aptitude for a mission of this sort whatsoever, and send them off travelling halfway across the world past unnumbered perils, most of the way unchaperoned, in the hope that somehow they’ll do the old worm in.’ Why the dwarves? Well, I suppose they can at least be persuaded to go, since they regard Erebor as rightfully theirs; although you have to wonder whether a competent military strategist might not think first of approaching the men of Dale. But there is no reason in this scenario why Bilbo would be anyone’s first, or thousand-and-first choice. Actually, in this second version of the story Tolkien comes up with three reasons why it is a good idea to wager the entire success of the operation on Bilbo, a figure of whom Thorin rightly says ‘he is soft, soft as the mud of the Shire, and silly’, a judgement with which Gandalf concurs.3 Those three reasons are:
That hobbits do not wear shoes, where Dwarfs do (‘suddenly in my mind [I pictured] the sturdy, heavy-booted Dwarves … the quick, soft-footed hobbit’), a consideration, certainly, since Dragons have good hearing; although you might think that advising the Dwarves to take off their boots might be less precarious than hanging the success of the enterprise around the neck of a sort of Middle-earth fur-footed Homer Simpson.
That Smaug would not know Bilbo’s scent, where he would recognise the smell of Dwarves, although apparently Tolkien added this as an afterthought to his MS (it is written in pencil: ‘a scent that cannot be placed, at least not by Smaug, the enemy of Dwarves’). A scent that cannot be smelt at all by Smaug would make more sense, but fair enough. The fact that he smells a thief in his lair but can not immediately place the thief’s provenance might confuse him for … oh, six seconds or so. The third reason is the most arbitrary of all–
Gandalf just feels in his water that it would be a good idea: ‘listen to me Thorin Oakenshield … if this hobbit goes with you, you will succeed. If not you will fail. A foresight is on me.’ Hard not to see this as code for ‘I’ve already written this story and know how it turns out’, which in turn comes dangerously close to a cheat.
The story of The Lord of the Rings is that even ‘the little people’ (which is to say: people like you and me) have their part to play in the great historical and martial dramas of the age; and it is a potent and truthful story, well told. But The Hobbit is that story only in its second iteration. In its first The Hobbit is not about the great dramas of the age; it is about us-sized dramas of people being taken out of their comfort zone and whisked away by Story.
I am happy that there are two versions of The Hobbit, and feel no desire to try and force them into some notional procrustean ‘coherence’. Only narrative fundamentalists, the textual Taliban, believe that all stories must be brought into that sort of rigid alignment. But of the two stories, really I prefer the one (homely, funny, a little bit slapstick and a little bit wondrous) over the other (grand-verging-on-grandiose, theological, epic and strenuously, to coin a phrase, eutragic). Although I do love them both. And I love the Dwarves vastly more than any number of elves. I love precisely their lack of graceful elegance. Thorin Oakenshield has some noble speeches in The Hobbit it is true; but his Dwarves are better at stuffing themselves with food and drink, and getting (with endearing incompetence) into ridiculous scrapes.
6
The Riddle of Bilbo’s Pocket
‘What’, Bilbo asks Gollum, ‘have I got in my pocket?’ The answer turns out to be an item with the most profound importance for Tolkien’s larger invented world. But for a moment I want to think about the content of this riddle rather than its solution.
‘Pockets’—hand-sized pouches of cloth sewn inside trousers near the waist band and connected to the outside world via slits cut into the fabric of those trousers—are features of modern life. No mythic of Dark Age hero has them. Given how handy they are for keeping things in—money, keys, rings—they are a surprisingly recent development in the history of couture.1 The Anglo-Saxon, and the medieval, way of keeping your portable property about as you travelled was to cache it in a separate bag or pouch, which you then either carried in your hand or else tied to the outside of your clothes. The old term for what we would nowadays call ‘a pickpocket
’ was cut-purse: a perfectly straightforward descriptive name, for this sort of thief would use a surreptitiously held knife to sever the cord that attached the purse to the victim’s clothes. Having your valuables dangling externally is clearly less secure than keeping the purse inside your clothes; although the best modern-day pickpockets are worryingly adept at getting hold of your stuff anyway.
We might expect, in a pre-Industrial, fundamentally ‘medieval’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, for pockets to be unknown. That they are not is a feature of the creative anachronism that characterises the novel. Tolkien’s hobbits, as many critics and readers have noted, are in effect nineteenth-century types. They wear waistcoats, smoke pipes, possess steam kettles and pop-guns, all of which are items unknown in the medieval world of Gondor or the more archaic Dark Age world of the Rohirrim. It is, after all, hard to imagine Beorn playing with a pop-gun, or Bard the Bowman wearing a three-piece suit. We might want to object that no Europe-sized world (as I take Middle-earth to be, or at least that portion of it portrayed in the Lord of the Rings map) could include such wide divergences of cultural development. But to insist upon this would be to miss the point. The relative modernity of the hobbits is one of Tolkien’s ways of bridging the gap between our own, necessarily modern readerly sensibilities and the pre-modern matter that constitutes the bulk of his story.
This, moreover, is a problem faced by any writer who wishes to write about a pre-modern world. To explain what I mean, I lay my finger upon one of the most commercially successful of recent post-Tolkienian Fantasies, Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind (2006). Rothfuss’ enjoyable narrative concerns a main character called Kvothe, who lives in a pre-Industrial, medievalised, magical world. Kvothe grows up as a neglected street-kid in a crime-riddled city, but manages to enrol in a legendary university of magic and learn the true names of all things so that he can control them. He has a variety of colourful adventures on his way to realising his destiny, to become ‘the greatest magician the world has ever known’. But despite being set in a medieval world, The Name of the Wind is written in the bourgeois discursive style familiar from a thousand nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. Here is a passage picked at random:
I settled onto the stone bench under the pennant pole next to my two friends.
‘So where were you last night?’ Simmon asked too casually.
It was only then that I remembered that the three of us had planned to meet up with Fenton and play corners last night. Seeing Denna had completely driven the plan from my mind. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry Sim. How long did you wait for me?’
He gave me a look.
‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated, hoping I looked as guilty as I felt. ‘I forgot.’
Sim grinned, shrugging it off. ‘It’s not a big deal.’2
This could be three pals from any twentieth- or twenty-first century-set novel; and hundreds and hundreds of similar passages serve only to show the author has not entered into the medieval pre-industrial mindset that his medieval pre-industrial world required—to, for example, understand the crucial point that not guilt (‘I looked as guilty as I felt’) but shame was the moral dynamic for the period. But to understand that would involve shifting about the psychological portraiture of the entire project; it would have meant writing characters less like, and therefore less appealing to, a twenty-first-century readership disinclined to make the effort to encounter the properly strange or unusual.
This speaks to a broader state of affairs in which style (the language and form of the novel) is seen by many writers and readers as an unimportant adjunct to the ‘story’. It is not. A bourgeois discursive style constructs a bourgeois world. If it is used to describe a medieval environment it necessarily mismatches what it describes, creating a world that is only an anachronism, a theme park or a World-of-Warcraft gaming environment rather than actual place. This degrades the ability of the book properly to evoke its fictional setting, and therefore denies the book the higher heroic possibilities of its imaginative premise.
How to make a bridge between our modern sensibilities and the medieval matter is the problem that any modern writer of Fantasy must try to address. Rothfuss’s solution, for good and ill, and mostly for ill, is simply to write the pre-modern as if it is modern. In the Silmarillion Tolkien was widely criticised for writing in an unadorned antique style (‘like the Old Testament’, reviewers complained; although actually it is rather unlike the Bible and more like the northern Sagas). Ordinary readers often could not stomach this, although Old English specialists and medievalists, who are used to reading this kind of thing, usually speak of the book in warmer terms.
The Lord of the Rings represents one solution to the problem of how to achieve this bridge. It is deliberately constructed by braiding modern perspectives (the cosy bourgeois hobbits) and pre-modern (the medieval Gondor, the Old English Rohan) together, not only in terms of story but style: the hobbit chapters are of course written with a kind of early-twentieth-century contemporaneity of narratorial voice, where the later sequences inhabit a more antiquated and high-flown idiom, full of inversions, dated vocabulary, invocative and rhetorical stiffness, although at the same time rather splendid and suitably heroic. But it is surprising how few writers have attempted to imitate Tolkien’s stylistic strategy in this, although of course they have stolen plenty of other things from his writing.
This takes us a little away from pockets. My point, before it gets away from me, is that the way Tolkien creates a Dark Age and medieval world and then sets a bourgeois, modern individual (Bilbo) loose in it is not undeliberate, or a problem, but part of the novel’s design, a feature rather than a bug. This sort of anachronism, I am arguing, is part of the way the novel generates its unique effects. A better way of thinking about it would be to see it as a kind of conceptual riddle. Bilbo’s pocket is a sort of emblem for this. We can imagine the final exchange between Bilbo and Gollum re-written this way:
BILBO: What have I got in my pocket?
GOLLUM: What’s a pocket?
This brings me to Beowulf, the Old English epic that is both the longest and the most magnificent relict of Anglo-Saxon literature we have.
Beowulf tells the story of its titular hero; a warrior from ‘Geat-land’ (modern day southern Sweden) who travels to the court of Hrothgar in Denmark. The Danes are allies of the Geats; but Hrothgar’s court in the splendid hall of Heotot is plagued by a murderous monster called Grendl, a creature man-shaped but of huge stature. The poem tells us that he is ultimately descended from the Biblical Cain. Every night Grendl breaks into Heorot and kills or carries off some of Hrothgar’s warriors; swords are useless against the creature’s magically-protected hide. Beowulf comes, wrestles with the monster and rips off its arm, whereupon it runs away into the night to die. Everyone is delighted at this, but celebrations are premature. Grendl’s mother, an even more terrifying creature, comes out of her lair to pay back her son’s death, and more Danish warriors are slain. Beowulf then tracks this she-devil to her home at the bottom of a lake. He swims down and fights her. His own sword Hrunting is useless against her, but luckily he finds, amongst her own spoils, a magic sword with which he cuts off her head. Once this is accomplished he finds the corpse of her son Grendl and decapitates it too, bringing the severed head back to Heorot. At last the threat has been overcome, and Beowulf returns a hero to Sweden. But the story is not over: we skip forward many years. Beowulf has acceded to the throne and ruled for many years as a wise king, but in his old age a great dragon afflicts his nation. So he rides out to fight this monster, succeeding in killing it, although at the cost of his own life. Beowulf the poem ends with elegiac praise of Beowulf the hero and all that he represented.
Now, Beowulf occupied a central position in Tolkien’s imaginative and scholarly life; he taught it, wrote critical essays about it, delivered public lectures upon it, and left (at his death) an unfinished commentary upon the poem that, apparently, runs to some 2000 manuscript pages. Some
of the ways in which this powerful poem directly informs The Hobbit have been covered by other commentators. Tolkien himself, in a letter he wrote to The Times and which has already been mentioned, pointed up the incident of the thief stealing the cup from the huge dragon as a starting point for the portion of The Hobbit when Bilbo steals the cup from Smaug.
And I have already had cause to mention Tolkien’s celebrated 1936 lecture about Beowulf, ‘The Monster and the Critics’. Published, and later reworked more than once, it remains a profoundly influential intervention into twentieth-century Beowulf studies, and has had a wider impact upon the criticism of Fantasy more broadly conceived. One of the main arguments that Tolkien makes in this lecture is that the Beowulf scholars have been too narrowly focused on the poem’s linguistic, philological and historical interest—in what Beowulf tells us about the development of the language and about the society and culture of northern Europe in the later Dark Ages. For such critics, the monsters were embarrassments to be hurried past, gauche story-filler, unworthy of the noble, uplifting verse in which they were realised. Tolkien, eloquently and persuasively, disagreed. For him the monsters were not elements to be explained away; they were the point of the poem.