The Riddles of The Hobbit

by Adam Roberts

  There is a larger irony here, and it is one that recalls the idiom of riddles themselves. Indeed, it is almost too obvious to need pointing out—a meta-textual observation about how this potential-for-evil danger of written language inflects a text that is itself embodied in written language. But rather than getting diverted into that, I want to say something, briefly, about a different sort of ‘writing’: the writing with moving images of cinema.

  An even more immediate mode of linking audience to story than written script, of course, is the motion picture. It is a handicap, if only a small one, that this book on The Hobbit was written before the author had the opportunity to see the three films recently made out of this book. Certainly it would be hard to discuss The Lord of the Rings today without also discussing the trilogy of films, directed by Peter Jackson, that were made out of the books by New Line cinema. It is a trivial observation that ‘films are not the same as books’—no film ever is, and actually I would say that Jackson did, by and large, a good job with an extremely difficult brief. There are moments when the divergence between written text and visual text is more marked, however. I do not mean the absence of Tom Bombadil, or the lack of any ‘Scouring of the Shire’: script-writing decisions made for at least arguably valid reasons. But to re-read—say—The Two Towers, after watching the second movie is an interesting experience.

  Even at their best, motion picture adaptations of books (indeed especially the best examples of the form) are insidious and plaguey things, liable to overwrite one’s memory of the source text. I had read Lord of the Rings many times before seeing the films, and have re-read the books since; and I find myself surprised by how different the emphasis is between this book and that film. There is the fact that the movie braided-together the stories of Frodo and Sam on the one hand, and Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli on the other, where Tolkien’s novel is scrupulous about separating them out. But more to the point is the treatment of the latter. Broadly this amounts to (I mean, in Jackson’s Two Towers): Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli pursuing the abducted hobbits; Pippin and Merry meeting ents, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli meeting the Rohirrim, and finally a lengthy climactic hour-long battle sequence at Helm’s Deep. To re-read the novel after seeing the film is to be struck by how localised and, in a way, low-key the Helm’s Deep material is—just the one chapter—and how elongated and emphasised, by comparison, is all the stuff on Fangorn and the ents. As if Tolkien loves trees more than battles; where Hollywood loves battles more than trees.

  Of course, put it like that, and it seems obvious: of course Tolkien loves trees more than battles! Of course Hollywood takes the exact contrary view! But I think something else is going on here; something that almost a riddle. This is the question concerning the referent of the title: which two towers? Tolkien himself is not entirely helpful as far as this riddle goes. ‘The Two Towers’, he conceded, warily, ‘gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books 3 & 4; and can be left ambiguous.’ Initially he planned to call Book III The Treason of Isengard and Book IV The Journey of the Ringbearers, or else The Ring Goes East. He had several possible suggestions for an overarching name for the two together, an arrangement forced upon him by the exigencies of postwar publishing and not one with which he was happy.

  The riddle, then, is: which two towers? Tolkien’s own illustration of the towers, and a note at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring suggests the towers are Minas Morgul and Orthanc. But in a letter to Rayner Unwin Tolkien instead specifies Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol. And as far as Tolkienian scholarship goes, a case has been made for pretty much any permutation of the five towers that appear in the story: the tower of Cirith Ungol, Orthanc, Minas Tirith, Barad-dûr and Minas Morgul. The motion picture, of course, plumps unambiguously for: Barad-dûr in Mordor and Orthanc in Isengard. I will come back to the towers in a moment.

  I ask myself, as any critic ought, howsoever few actually do: does my proximity to this novel make it impossible for me to get the requisite critical distance upon it? Take for example, the matter of Gandalf’s return from seeming death in the mines of Moria. This is a narrative development that seems to me (on my umpteenth, or perhaps umpty-first, reading) perfectly natural and logical. But I know some who did not know the story, and who, watching the movies for the first time, groaned mightily when Ian McEllen popped up again, thinking it a cheesy and ridiculous plot-twist.

  Gandalf’s return is not gratuitous, or out of context. Indeed, the whole of the third book (Two Towers 1) is about this—about, that is to say, rebirth. It is the return from death; or more precisely it is about the vivification of the inert. So on the one hand characters are presumed dead and then discovered alive: Merry and Pippin, for instance, as well as Gandalf himself. Of course the case with Gandalf is more than that the others thought him dead but actually he was alive. Gandalf actually does die, becomes a corpse, and then is reborn, ‘sent back’ in his word, although he does not vouchsafe by whom. What was it like being dead? That is a riddle worth answering. ‘I lay staring upward while the stars wheeled over, and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth.’2 ‘Wandered’, with its hint of ‘wondered’, is particularly nice.

  Perhaps the most striking thing about his resurrection is that Gandalf comes back invulnerable. The last we see of Gandalf the Grey he is complaining that he is tired (‘what an evil fortune! And I am already weary’ (LotR, 348)). Now he appears to have almost limitless energy—when the four of them ride all day and all night across Rohan, Gandalf permits them only a couple of hours rest; and whilst Legolas and Gimli sleep the wizard stands, leaning on his staff and peering into the darkness. Not only does he not need sleep, he cannot be harmed by weapons. He tells his companions that ‘none of you have any weapon that could hurt me’. This carries with it the suggestion that all Gandalf’s subsequent battlefield heroics with Glamdring is a kind of play-acting: for he can no more be slain than could Milton’s Satan. But this state of affairs is logical, according to the shape of Tolkien’s imaginarium: Gandalf has been put on the same level vis-à-vis mortality as the Nazgul, who similarly cannot be killed in the normal course of things (although Saruman, it transpires, can).

  A little later in the narrative, Gandalf performs a sort of Lazarus-act on Theoden. The king goes from being functionally dead, an inert and seemingly beyond-aged man to being a vigorous leader and warrior. Gandalf’s return, and Theoden’s rebirth, are two of the most significant events of The Two Towers; symbolic both of the turning of the tide against Sauron. And standing in some manner of typological relationship, extra-textually, to the resurrection of Christ.

  Then there are the ents. Trees, whilst being, of course, alive, are more or less inert. The ents trope the coming to life of inert matter: the ents are the scenic, character and structural externalisation of Gandalf’s return to life. They (ents, Gandalf) share a sense of the intense, beautiful slowness of everyday time—to quote again the words Gandalf uses to describe life from the perspective beyond life: ‘each day was as long as a life-age of the earth’. Yet both act swiftly, and decisively, against evil. To put it in a nutshell: in this book, the inert comes alive. Tolkien’s brilliant move with the ents, and much of the focus of this book, is the vivification of the insentient and unmoving.

  This, then, is (I think) the real meaning of the two towers of the title. The reference is not to the architecture of the secondary world, but rather to life and death themselves. This book traverses the hinterland between the Tower of Life and the Tower of Death, the crisscrossing and unexpected reappearances that weird space enables. In brief, then, the first half of The Two Towers is a book artfully, and I think eloquently, passing from the tower of Death to the tower of Life. Gandalf, dead, revivifying; Theoden, a living corpse, returned to youth; Trees, rooted and insentient, transformed by Tolkien’s imagination into roving, powerful ents. The second half of The Two Towers, in complementary fashion, traces the opposite trajectory; from Life to Death, or some ghastly state in between
which is not yet dead but not quite life. It does not seem to me either irrelevant or random that the main characters of the first part of The Two Towers move, broadly, east to west; where Frodo, Sam and Gollum move, broadly, the opposite way, from west to east. One way of summing up this book would be to invoke Coleridge’s famous but, I think, poorly understood phrase ‘Nightmare Life-in-Death’. It is this that the book delineates. Gollum is a major figure in this section partly because he embodies this Coleridgean fate: a creature who has lived far beyond his natural span of life and is more profoundly damaged and miserable as a result than is easily described. But the theme of the book hits home most powerfully in Chapter II, ‘the Passage of the Marshes’. This is introduced by a clever little glance back to The Hobbit’s riddles:

  Alive without breath

  as cold as death

  never thirsting, ever drinking;

  clad in mail, never clinking.

  The original answer to this riddle (‘fish’) is supplemented, in this chapter of the later novel, by a second, much more eerie solution to this riddle. For Gollum’s words perfectly describe the warriors (‘they lie in all the pools,’ says Frodo, dreamily: ‘pale faces, deep deep under the dark water … grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad / Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead’). These cannot be actual corpses, as Sam points out; for they died an age ago. But whatever they are they turn the very landscape into a place in which some grisly remnant of life clings to death.

  As with the warriors alive-without-breath beneath the waters of the Dead Marshes (and as with Gollum himself), so with Frodo. Stung by Shelob at the end of the book, and so mortified that Sam initially believes him a corpse; yet a poisoned body in which life still clings. Shelob, also ancient, is also more Death than Life. She smells of death. She has no care for the doings or structures of the living, except as food. The Nightmare of Life-in-Death is very different, indeed profoundly so, from Death-in-Life. The latter is natural; a ripeness; the grain of existence. The former is a kind of violation. This book understands that.

  This is why, I would say, this is the right place (in Tolkien’s pattern) for Faramir’s account of the Numenoreans. This quasi-Atlantean civilisation is Tolkien’s revisioning of Ancient Egypt, and an object lesson in pride punished. But the crucial details are the way the Numenoreans tried to cheat death, and created a population of ghastly mummy-like individuals as a result. The rulers created tombs that are more splendid and beautiful than the houses of the living, because they were in thrall to death and had turned their back on life.

  The Return of the King carries through this elaboration of the theme of Death-in-Life/Life-in-Death. It opens, for instance—after settling Pippin in Minas Tirith—with a big-set piece scene in which the restless alive-in-death cluster around Aragorn, eager to be granted peace. The king in waiting walks the path of the dead and the dead come to him armed: ‘pale banners like shreds of cloud, and spears like winter-thickets on a misty night’ is how Legolas describes them, in a piercingly Hardyesque moment of lyrical phrasing. They are likened to winter because winter is what they are; Aragorn’s magic is in turning them from an arrested, eternal winter into the sort of winter that passes on to make way for Spring. And as the book ends, it passes through Chapter 8 ‘The Houses of Healing’ and the near-deathly-alive, wounded in the battle, are brought back to life, again by Aragorn’s special magic. And in the middle we have the striking scene of Denethor’s suicide. He has to die, in order for the rule of the Stewards to end and the rule of the King to begin. But suicide is a semiotically tangled from this novel’s point of view, an act that shifts valence from pagan stoic heroism to Christian sin and damnable wickedness across the same divide that creatively divides Tolkien’s own imagination. Certainly he does not want to parse self-murder as a nobly Roman action. Accordingly, erring perhaps too far on the other side, he forces it into the straight-jacket of over-coded pseudo-Christian moralising. Gandalf lectures Denethor sternly on the baleful pride and despair of such an action. ‘Authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor’, he booms, ‘to order the hour of your death’—presumably forgetting, in the moment, that he himself effectively threw himself into the chasm at Khazad-Dum in order to save his comrades. Or perhaps it is one law for wizards; another for Gondor. We might be tempted to think that a double standard. For in point of fact one of the general trajectories of this book is precisely that pseudo-samurai or Horatius-at-the-Bridge sacrifice of self. How else to describe Frodo and Sam going (as they think) into certain death? Or the Rohirrim galloping will-nil towards a massively larger army? Or Gandalf rejecting the truce terms and dooming (they all think) the entire army to destruction? But out of this death is snatched, eucatastrophically, life: victory—the trope of Christian sacrifice, redemption and the final solution of the mystery life-in-death that generates life from death.

  The riddle of writing, in Tolkien, is somehow the riddle of death. To be wise is good; but to be too wise, and especially to revel pridefully in one’s wisdom, like Saruman, is not good. And to be all wise—for again I bring the argument back to the sayings of the all-wise, the Alvíssmál—is death. I wonder if Tolkien was attracted to the story of Thor and the too-clever dwarf because it suggests that knowing all the answers is actually the loser; that knowing all the answers is a kind of petrification. Alvíss’ pride can be intuited from the smug range of his knowledge; but it leads directly to a kind of petrified death-in-life. To read from ‘riddles’ in the narrow sense, to religious mysteries in the larger: Alvíss hoped for union with a god, to marry (that crucial sacrament) a god’s daughter, but he was not worthy. Religious mysteries do not exist in order to be trivially ‘solved’; the individual who blithely claims to know all the riddles of faith, God, life and death is at the least fooling his/herself, and at the worst runs the risk of leading people astray. The answer to the biggest riddles of life, we might think, is neither in book-learning nor in knowing more generally. It is in loving.

  9

  The Volsung Riddle: Character in Tolkien

  Some years ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Aldiss at the Cheltenham literary festival. I say interview; Aldiss, an old pro of the festival-and-interview circuit, effectively monologued, very entertainingly, for an hour and a half. I enjoyed it enormously. During the course of a wide-ranging discussion, he touched on the success of Tolkien and the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies then being in the cinemas. Aldiss said that he had a relatively low opinion of the novel, chiefly because it had, in his words, ‘no characters’ in it; or (he added) to be more precise it had only one character—Gollum. What he meant, of course, was that of all the figures appearing in the novel, only Gollum shows the complexity we have come to associate with ‘character’ in the modern sense; the sense of an internal dynamic or conflict. The remaining figures, we might think, are types rather than characters: defined by a governing humour—the king-in-disguise heroism of Aragorn; the stoic unwavering loyalty of Sam Gamgee—that may be subject to temptation (as Boromir is tempted by the thought of possessing the ring) but is otherwise linearly and straightforwardly conceived. This is not a flaw in Tolkien’s aesthetic, I think. If his concept of ‘character’ is more static than many other twentieth-century writers, that reflects both his and the novel’s immersion in Dark Age and Medieval culture, whose literature is much more widely supplied with types than characters in the modern sense—and also, perhaps, his own Christian beliefs. If one considers human personality the outward manifestation of an eternal, God-given soul, then one may be less likely to see it as radically mutable.

  This in turn is part of a much larger discussion about the representation of ‘character’ in modern literature. Without wishing to digress too egregiously, I shall sketch a couple of points relevant to what I want to argue here. In its earliest forms, the novel tended to take ‘character’ as a fixed quantity; as did earlier prose and verse romances. A character might be heroic, or vill
ainous, brave or quixotic; but that character would remain that way throughout the story. This changes, broadly speaking, at the end of the eighteenth-century with the invention of a new mode of novelistic storytelling, the Bildungsroman or ‘novel of personal growth and development’. This is a somewhat contested point, but I am here following Franco Moretti’s influential thesis that the Bildungsroman, as a novelistic form, was more-or-less invented out of whole cloth in the later eighteenth century following the success of Goethe’s Willhelm Meister novels. This helped create the climate into which a new set of stories could be written, tracing the growth and personal development of their titular protagonist.1 A thumbnail definition of a Bildungsroman might be: a story in which the main character grows and changes, such that by the end of the novel s/he is in some radical sense a different person to the one they were at the beginning. Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) is an example of such a novel: Emma Woodhouse is recognisably the same woman at the end of that novel as at the beginning, but the emotional and psychological force of the book lies in the way it traces her growing self-awareness and maturity, becoming altogether a less shallow, thoughtless individual. By contrast Samuel Richardson’s earlier Pamela (1740), a phenomenal bestseller in its day, cannot be described as a Bildungsroman. Its central character, Pamela Andrews, is a virtuous, simple, happy and chaste serving maid. During the course of the novel she is pursued by her master Mr B., who wishes to seduce her. She resists him, is abducted, nearly raped, forced to live under a series of appalling psychological and physical stresses. Eventually Mr B. relents, and marries her. At the end of the novel she is exactly the same virtuous, simple, happy, chaste woman she was at the beginning. To say so is not to denigrate Richardson’s writing, actually. On the contrary, his point is precisely the dramatic demonstration of virtue triumphing. To say that such a treatment rings false by our contemporary standards of psychological verisimilitude is, in a sense, to make an anachronistic criticism. Certainly our present-day understanding of ‘character’ is that prolonged, severe trauma will distort it, even after the stress is removed, marking it post-traumatically; that prolonged suffering tends to warp a person’s character. Indeed, the success of ‘the Bildungsroman’ as a mode of novel-writing was so widespread that it has now, generally speaking, been simply incorporated into what we expect of novelistic characterisation. We take it for granted that the characters in our novels will grow and change, will go (in that hideous Hollywood-screenwriter phrase) ‘on a journey’ psychologically speaking. Each must manifest ‘a character arc’. Moretti points out that it is in the nineteenth century that literature suddenly becomes fascinated with telling the stories of children growing up, from David Copperfield and The Mill on the Floss through to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and Proust. The relatively new focus on childhood and adolescence is what we might expect from a mode such as Bildungsroman. After all, it is when we are children and adolescents that our ‘character’ is most malleable, changing and developing over the process we call ‘growing up’. Indeed Moretti notes that it is after this that Shakespeare’s Hamlet—of all pre-Romantic characters the most internally conflicted—becomes conventionally thought of as, in essence, a teenager. In a connected move, ‘adolescence’ itself started to become thought of as a Hamletian time, marked by moodiness, a fondness for dressing in black, quarrelling with one’s parents, obsessing over the opposite sex and indulging in angst-y thoughts about life, death and the universe. Moretti notes that Shakespeare’s play actually specifies Hamlet’s age at 30, something many who know the play by reputation only may find surprising. Similarly, it is not coincidence that Tolkien’s hobbits grow accordingly at a strangely decelerated pace, not reaching maturity until 33.