The Riddles of The Hobbit

by Adam Roberts

  One way of answering this question would be to say that Bilbo can divorce himself from the Ring where Frodo cannot because Bilbo’s story (primarily The Hobbit) takes place within the ethical framework of Old Germanic culture; where Frodo’s story in The Lord of the Rings—though set in the same fictive world—actually takes place within the different conceptual and ideological-theological climate of Tolkien’s Catholic beliefs.

  Free will in Christian theology means that we all have—at all times, whenever we make a choice—the freedom to choose to do good or evil. The fact that God (omnipotent, and knowing the future as He does) already knows all the choices we are ever going to make in our life does not diminish this freedom as it presents itself to us, in time, continuously. But marriage is something of a special case that divides Protestant and Catholic theologies. For a Protestant it is possible to choose divorce (which is to say; Protestants have the freedom, under certain circumstances, to choose to end their marriage). This is not a choice offered to Catholics. Of course, a Catholic might say, everybody who enters into a marriage does so, or should do so, of their own free will. That is to say, the proscription against divorce can be thought of as a way of saying merely that once a choice has been freely made it is then necessary to live with the consequences of that choice—which, if anything, places a higher value upon the notion of free will. Of course Catholics are perfectly capable of freely willing for themselves the evils of adultery, bigamy and so on. Marriage is no more a practically binding relationship for them than it is for a non-Catholic. But in Catholic belief it is a spiritually binding one. Catholics who go through a form of divorce and begin relationships with others are, their priest might say, only fooling themselves. In the eyes of God they are still married.

  Frodo’s ambiguous position with respect to the Ring mirrors this problematic. Once he accepts the Ring (although at that point he knows no better: we wonder—if Frodo had known all the trouble bound up with the Ring, would he have accepted it from Bilbo?)—once he has accepted it, he is bound to it. He cannot divorce himself from it. Only death can break the bond. In the novel this is realised by the death of the Ring itself, which occurs at the moment of the death of Gollum.

  This may seem like a rather bleak, even carceral vision of marriage, but it is not out of keeping with Tolkien’s thoughts on the subject. In a letter to his son from 1941 Tolkien wrote that women are ‘instinctively monogamous’ (qualifying the judgement with ‘when uncorrupt’) but that men are not. Their fallen nature destroys the possibility of a monogamous alignment between male bodies, minds and soul.

  He goes on:

  However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment … but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains.12

  This may seem a rather extreme way to construe marriage (‘for a Christian man there is no escape … ’), especially when Tolkien ends this same letter by commending his son to ‘the one great thing to love on Earth: the Blessed Sacrament’. There is, we might feel, something alarming in any free agent being so remorselessly bound to anything.

  At that time when he was still friendly with C. S. Lewis, Tolkien wrote to offer an opinion upon Lewis’s book Christian Behaviour (1943), in which the argument is advanced that there ought to be two forms of marriage: one a Christian commitment, lifelong and binding; the other a purely secular State-sanctioned contract which could be dissolved. Tolkien disapproved of this idea, insisting (the words in square brackets mark Tolkien’s revisions to the original draft of this letter) that

  Christian Marriage—monogamous, permanent [lifelong], rigidly ‘faithful’—is in fact the truth about sexual behaviour for all humanity: this is the only road of total health [total human health] (including [with] sex in its proper place) for all [all] men and women.13

  There is an interesting diremption between ‘permanent’ and ‘lifelong’ here. One of the pieces of prose not included in the Silmarillion is a fairly lengthy discussion entitled ‘Of the Laws and Customs among the Eldar pertaining to Marriage and Other Matters Related Thereunto’ (it is included in volume 10 of Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle Earth, Morgoth’s Ring). Here we learn that the elves lived according to strict notions of married chastity:

  The Eldar wedded once only in life, and for love or at the least by free will upon either part. Even when in after days, as the histories reveal, many of the Eldar in Middle-earth became corrupted, and their hearts darkened by the shadow that lies upon Arda, seldom is any tale told of deeds of lust among them.14

  There is one detail of quasi-Lewisian compromise: Tolkien adds a period of betrothal (‘the betrothed gave silver rings one to another’) that ‘was bound to stand for one year at least, and it often stood for longer. During this time it could be revoked by a public return of the rings, the rings then being molten and not again used for a betrothal. Such was the law.’ Should the betrothal lead to marriage the betrothed ‘received back one from the other their silver rings (and treasured them); but they gave in exchange slender rings of gold, which were worn upon the index of the right hand.’15

  All this business with the interchange of rings is very interesting. We might, in the light of it, want to read the One Ring as embodying a sort of malign anti-marriage, the photographic negative, as it were, of a blessed sacrament. The only major character in The Lord of the Rings whom Tolkien dramatises as a functioning member of a happy marriage is also the only character in the book wholly immune to the power of the ring: Tom Bombadil, who alone amongst all the major characters in the book has a wife. He asks Frodo for the ring, and Frodo ‘handed it at once to Tom’:

  It seemed for a moment to grow larger as it lay far a moment on his big brown-skinned hand. Then suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed. For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold. Then Tom put the Ring around the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight. For a moment the hobbits noticed nothing strange about this. Then they gasped. There was no sign of Tom disappearing!16

  The point of this episode is to dramatise that the ring has no effect upon Tom (when Frodo later slips the ring on he becomes invisible to everybody except Bombadil). It is ‘alarming’ to see Tom’s blue eye through the ring presumably because it recalls and inverts the red eye of Sauron. But my suggestion here is that the episode depends as much upon Tom’s status as happily married man as to his slightly inchoate status as ‘spirit of the land’. It is remarkable to think that Tom and Goldberry are the only functioning—which is to say, loving, sacramental—marriage in the whole of Lord of the Rings; or at least, they are until the ring is destroyed and marriage again becomes possible (and, for example, Sam can marry Rosie). Therefore is Tom immune to the malign power of the One Ring. Indeed, the hobbits’ sojourn in Tom and Goldberry’s house is figured as the symbolic equivalent of travelling through a wedding band: ‘the hobbits stood upon the threshold, and a golden light was all about them … The four hobbits stepped over the wide stone threshold.’17

  I am still, I hope, steering clear of the suggestion that we read The Lord of the Rings as an allegory of marriage; or even that it represents some sort of satire upon marriage as a oppressive power-trap. Rather Tolkien has taken ‘marriage’, in the broadest sense and with an understanding of marriage as a synecdochal sacrament for the connection between the material and the spiritual, as a structuring principle for his Fantasy. What is wedded in The Lord of the Rings is not so much ‘a man and a woman’ (let us say, Sam and Rosie; or Aragorn and Arwen). It is the possibility of the connection of a materially embodied reality to a form of divinity. But what saves this aesthetic conception from a banal piety is precisely the double-edged valences of the Ring. It is both attractive and alarmin
g: the ring around us protects, but also hems us in. Marriage is a connection founded in love, but also a restriction on the polygamous nature of man (‘Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails … great mortification’). It draws us and it makes us suffer, but it also connects us with the grace of a bountiful and exacting God. This is the appeal, and the cost, of the central project of The Lord of the Rings.

  The ring is a riddle, and its solution unpacks deeper, more spiritually profound riddles. And here is Riddle 48 from the Exeter Book, one of the riddles that scholarship has failed, satisfactorily, to solve:

  I heard a radiant ring, with no tongue,

  intercede for me, though it spoke

  without argument or strident words.

  The silent treasure said in front of men

  ‘Save me, helper of souls.’

  May men understand the mysterious saying

  of the red gold and, as the ring said,

  wisely entrust their salvation to God.

  I am, in other words, suggesting that Tolkien’s imaginative creation of a sacramental gold ring connects, in suggestively oblique ways, precisely with an Anglo-Saxon riddle that proposes such a magic circle as a link between men and God.

  8

  The Lord of the Rings and the Riddle of Writing

  This book has followed a roundabout road from the riddles in general, to the riddles contained within The Hobbit through questions of hands and rings. These last two concerns come about in part because this novel is handiwork, and rings adorn hands. I have sometimes thought that crowns, by adorning heads, imply that it is our clever brains that make us special amongst the animals; but that Tolkien’s preference for rings over crowns speaks, perhaps, to a deeper truth. A clever brain may be a very useful thing, but without the means to work cleverness into the world it is nothing. Maybe we overpraise ourselves, Saruman-like, for our powers of thinking. Maybe it is our clever hands that really separate us from the animals: dextrous, thumb-opposed, grasping, manipulating, shaping, making. Conceivably, a ring is, as it were, a crown for the hand.

  Hands wear gloves, and rings, and do many things; but one particular thing hands do is write. And ‘writing’ is the whole of the larger horizon of Tolkien’s achievement: his world is written into existence, before anything else can be said of it. Tolkien was a dedicated handwriter, whose own beautifully formed calligraphy, especially in the runic and Elvish scripts mentioned above, is a thing of beauty in its own right. Not that he was averse to more modern modes of ‘writing’. Christopher Bretherton sent him a typed letter, apologising for not hand-writing his message. Tolkien replied (on 16 July 1964) ‘I do not regard typing as a discourtesy. Anyway, I usually type, since my “hand” tends to start fair and rapidly fall away into picturesque inscrutability. Also I like typewriters; and my dream is of suddenly finding myself rich enough to have an electric typewriter built to my specifications, to type the Fëanorian script.’1 For a writer supposedly opposed to modern technology and ‘the machine’ this love of typewriters might seem odd; unless we refer to that very unTolkienian authority Marx, and his distinction between tools and machines. A tool is an extension of the worker’s body and therefore of his/her labour; a machine stands apart for the worker, and indeed turns the worker into an adjunct of itself, tending to alienate him/her from his/her labour. A typewriter is clearly a tool, rather than a machine.

  And at any rate, writing by hand, whether with one tool (a pen) or another (a typewriter), has its own magic, and its own puzzles. And this is perhaps truer in The Lord of the Rings than any other thing Tolkien wrote. It may be worth out while to consider, in this context, the riddle of writing.

  I shall begin to address that large riddle by focusing on a specific moment in The Fellowship of the Ring: the Moria chapter, when Frodo and his companions are driven beneath the Misty Mountains. There are evident parallels between the construction of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, structurally speaking. In the former, Bilbo and his companions must cross the Misty Mountains to get where they are going, and do so beneath rather than over the peaks. In the latter the situation is exactly paralleled for Frodo and his companions. In both books the parties encounter orcs, and something larger and more evil: Gollum and the ring in the earlier novel, the Balrog and Gandalf’s death in the latter.

  But what I am particularly interested in for the moment is that it is in the Moria chapter, and only there (I note one exception below), that Tolkien’s fellowship encounter written texts. Specifically the chapter includes two splendid examples of Tolkien’s own gorgeous calligraphy, inset into the text. The first (and how I wish UK copyright legislation permitted me to reproduce it) is the elvish writing inscribed onto the gate at Moria. The image is of two pillars, and beside them two trees, the branches of each tree intertwined with each pillar. In the space between them is a large star, just below the centre of the composition; above this is a crown, with a second larger crown above that topped by a constellation of seven smaller stars. Linking the two pillars, and arcing over these various elements, is a semi-circular arch, in which the elvish script is carefully written.

  This of course is the occasion for one of the most memorable riddles in The Lord of the Rings, one that manages to trick even Gandalf. The Elvish script says ‘speak friend and enter’. Gandalf takes this to mean he must divine the magical password, and he tried a number of possible charm-words in vain. In fact the riddle has fooled him—he needs only do what he is told, speak ‘friend’ (mellon, in Elvish) and the door opens.

  The second image is the less decorative. It is a rectangular plaque upon a tomb, on which is written, in angular dwarf-runes, the legend: BALIN SON OF FUNDIN LORD OF MORIA. These two images in the main body of the book, and the charts of various Elvish and Dwarfish alphabets in the book’s appendices, stand testament to Tolkien’s interest in fine calligraphy. But they also pose a question: why are there so few written texts in the world of the Lord of the Rings? There are lots of oral texts, for the novel is littered with interpolated songs and verses and riddles that have been memorised and repeated by various characters. But tabulating all the written texts mentioned does not give us very much:

  Moria-writing: Namely the two texts already mentioned, together with the written record the Fellowship discover inside Moria. They attract attention by virtue of being so splendidly, visually rendered.

  Bilbo’s book: But this exists in the novel largely (until the very end) as unwritten; something Bilbo will get around to at some point. More, it exists in a complicated metatextual relationship with the novel we are reading, so I will put it on one side for a moment.

  The odd single rune: Gandalf marks his fireworks with a G-rune, for instance; and scratches a ‘G’-rune on a stone at Weathertop.

  One ‘scroll’: mentioned and quoted in the ‘Council of Elrond’ chapter, in which Isildur writes down what the ring looks like, records its inscription, and declares it is ‘precious’ to him. Which leads me, of course, to:

  The ring: Sauron’s ring has writing upon it, of course, although it is writing only visible when heated in Frodo’s fire. The writing, reproduced in the novel, is in the elvish script; although the language is the ‘black tongue’ of Mordor. It identifies the ring as the ‘one ring’ that rules all the others. Now, obviously, this is writing of the profoundest and most penetrating significance for the novel. More, it is evil. It precedes, and determines, all the (actual) writing that constitutes Tolkien’s novel. Can we say, taking things a little further, that it in some sense stains written text with some malign mark or quality? The ring-writing itself, and Isildur’s scroll, are permanent records of the wickedness of the ring in action, after all.

  This might start us thinking about the way written marks can be misinterpreted. Strider and the hobbits do not understand Gandalf’s ‘G’ rune at Weathertop. Gandalf himself misses the true meaning of the Moria-Gate inscription. Writing, perhaps, is a riddle in this sense: that it tends to mislead or wrongfoot us, to distract us from the answe
r.

  But actually I want to argue a position almost the reverse of this. Gandalf’s problem with the Moria-gate inscription is that he over-reads; he assumes a level of complexity that is not there. When he sees how straightforward the instruction is he laughs. Something similar is the case with ‘the remains of a book’ they find at the beginning of book 2, chapter 5. Initially it looks as though this, with an almost facetious literalness, is going to be ‘difficult to decode’, in this case because it is so materially damaged.

  ‘We drove the orcs from the great gate and guard—I think; the next word is blurred and burned: probably room—we slew many in the bright—I think sun in the dale.’

  And so on. But in fact, the reading of this text reveals a near-fatal facility, a slippage between text and world. They read the words ‘We cannot get out. The end comes, drums drums in the deep … they are coming’ and without intermission these words becomes their reality.

  There was a hurrying sound of many feet.

  ‘They are coming!’ cried Legolas.

  ‘We cannot get out,’ said Gimli. (LotR, 341)

  In other words, the thing with written language is not that it is too obscure, or ambiguous, or slippery; but on the contrary, that it is too plain. It does exactly what it says (you speak ‘friend’ and enter). It bridges the gap between text and world too immediately, and renders itself real with a dangerous completion. This is at the heart of the power of the ring. The whole novel is a written-textual articulation of that fact.

  Writing in this sense is prior; foundational. If we wanted to invoke Derrida, we could say: Lord of the Rings is a logocentric text. It is what you find when you excavate down, below the surface logic of the represented, past the oral traditions and remembered songs. Which is why Moria is the precisely the right place for these two fine calligraphic interpolations, and why no such writing (I mean: samples of actual Middle-earth calligraphy, inserted into the text) is found anywhere else in the novel, the ring excepted. The symbolic logic of Moria is: dig down deep enough, and you free a terrible, destructive evil. This evil is literalised as ‘Balrog’, a fiery agent of destruction. But the novel has already established the crucial fiery agent of destruction in the literal letters of the One Ring (‘“I cannot read the fiery letters,” said Frodo, in a quavery voice.’) Oral literature connects you with a living tradition of other people; but written literature short-circuits community and conducts a spark of terrible danger directly into reality.