The Riddles of The Hobbit

by Adam Roberts

  Shakespeare turns Hamlet from a scheming two-dimensional character into an immensely complex, nuanced three-dimensional individual. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the first properly modern figures in world literature. This, indeed, is in large part why this play enjoys the titanic reputation it does. Medieval literature has its fair share of colourful and engaging characters (and much more than a fair share of blank ciphers and cardboard heroes); but there is no one in it like Hamlet; and we are much more like Hamlet than we are like Chaucer’s knight.

  How does this relate to Tolkien? Sigurd and Gudrún is an exercise in conscious archaism not just in subject matter, and not just in poetic form and idiom. It treats its characters in flat, archaic ways. It did not have to do so. What makes The Lord of the Rings much more than an exercise in reheating old mythology under an invented nomenclature and geography is the way its main conceit parses a much more interesting and much more contemporary dilemma. Of course some of Tolkien’s players are as brightly coloured and as stiffly static as any from the Edda—Aragorn, say; or Elrond. But at the heart of the narrative are three figures that are as modern, in their way, as Hamlet: Frodo, Sam, and above all, Gollum. Frodo is, as a character, acted upon by various forces—his sense of duty, his awareness of a kind of family belatedness, his love of home and his draw to the excitements of otherness; and all these things are written over, in complex ways, by his increasing dependence on the ring. Sam appears to be a more straightforward individual: deeply attached to his home, loyal to his master, yet fascinated by the un-Shire-like glamour of the elves. But out of his three-way internal struggle the story renders a kind of stubbornness of purpose, and heroism, that is all the more effective for being pitched at so ordinary a level. Gollum, as Aldiss noted, is the most interesting of all. His possession of the ring is of longer duration, and his addiction to it more deeply rooted, than any other character we encounter in Tolkien’s storytelling (with the possible exception of Sauron himself). Yet Gollum’s character has not been flattened or homogenised by his ring possession. In a sense he is a kind of anti-Sam, as stubborn and purposeful (in his way) as the hobbit, devious where Sam is straightforward, wicked where Sam is virtuous. And despite all this his character is as much a mode of apprehending pity as it is part of the ethical binarism of the larger narrative. With Gollum the unimaginable and sustained pressure of evil upon an ordinary soul has resulted in a kind of bizarre eversion, a forcing of what is inside out, such that Gollum’s odd little mannerisms, his habit of referring to himself in the third person, his toddler-like verbal tics and evasions, his self-pity and the remnants of his sense of duty and courtesy—all these things enact a kind of excavation of character (in the modern sense) itself.

  In other words, what makes The Lord of the Rings particularly valuable as fantasy is the way it bridges old Anglo-Saxon fascinations with heroism, doom and catastrophe with modern fascinations with guilt, desire, power, compromise and the hidden springs of psychological life. And although there is nothing so nuanced, or complex in Sigurd and Gudrún, it is a revealing text so far as Tolkien’s understanding of characterisation is concerned.

  Does Bilbo change during the course of The Hobbit? We might say that for Tolkien personality—character, behaviour, subjectivity—is determined by soul. We are not automata, merely performing our programming; for we have ‘free will’. But saying so is not to concede, from a traditionalist Catholic point of view like Tolkien’s, that human subjectivity is in a state of continual and radical flux. People may change a little, but they do not change much, and in the mass they hardly change at all. ‘Free will’ is, as it were, a horizontal freedom: we may choose to do good or evil, to live in accordance with our Creator’s will or to seek to thwart it. But we do not have the vertical freedom implied by ‘Bildungsroman’: to change in any radical sense, since the ‘we’ entailed in such a change is determined not by brain chemistry, genetics or environment but by an eternal spirit donated by God. We may choose to act in one way or another, but we may not choose to be other than who we are.

  The changes to Bilbo’s ‘character’ in The Hobbit, in other words, are external. He becomes a little less sedentary, a little less stay-at-home, a little less bourgeois.3 As a function of this he becomes less timid and less existentially myopic; but these are figured not as alterations to his subjectivity so much as the uncovering of more heroic values that were always present. Adventures are more than diverting ways of passing the time; they are opportunities for us to test ourselves, to bring out aspects of ourselves that have been hidden.

  Another way of saying this would be to suggest that there is an inertia in Tolkien’s conception of how ‘character’ works. To say so is not necessarily to denigrate his writerly approach to the question; for too much fluidity and flux in the representation of a character is as distorting as too immovable a rigidity. Moreover, this inertia cuts both ways. We might suggest that an individual who has been traumatised may suffer, but can be healed. For Tolkien, it appears, this is not so. Frodo’s experiences carrying the ring through The Lord of the Rings mark him in ways that cannot be expunged by a happy ending followed by decades of contented, uneventful living. Even Sam, who only had the ring for a short space of time, is indelibly traumatised by it. The novel suggests only one remedy: that both characters leave Middle-earth altogether, and travel to a magical westward realm.

  There is another reason, of course, why Tolkien conceives of ‘character’ in this way; and to discuss it I return, yet again, to the Exeter Book. Writing to his son Christopher (8 January 1944), Tolkien copies out three lines of Anglo-Saxon verse:

  Longað þonne þy læs þe him con leoþa worn,

  oþþe mid hondum con hearpan gretan;

  hafaþ him his gliwes giefe, þe him god sealed.4

  He adds, translating the passage:

  From the Exeter Book. Less doth yearning trouble him who knoweth many songs, or with his hands can touch the harp: his possession is his gift of ‘glee’ ( = music and/or verse) which God gave him. How these old words smite one out of the dark antiquity! Longað! All down the ages men (of our kind, most awarely) have felt it, not necessarily caused by sorrow, or the hard world, but sharpened by it.5

  ‘Longað þe him’; ‘this man languishes’; ‘longing defined this man’. This is at the heart of Tolkien’s sense of character: longing defines us. It is longing that makes us what we are. Not Bildungsroman, derived from the German word Bildung (meaning ‘growth’ or ‘education’) but Longingsroman is what Tolkien writes.

  10

  The Enigma of Genre Fantasy

  The problem with Realism is that it is almost inevitably superficial. But the problem with the metaphorical modes of fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, ‘magic realism’ and the like, is almost that they are too deep.

  (Pierre Delalande)

  I do not intend, in this chapter, to try and generate an itinerary of every author who has been influenced by Tolkien or written a sub-Tolkien Fantasy novel: this book does not have the space to encompass such a survey. Indeed, a lifetime is too short (and eternity barely long enough) for such a task, for post-Tolkien fantasy has proved astonishingly fertile, and most of its texts are very lengthy. Nor do I intend here to attempt a discussion of the various sub-genres post-Tolkienian fantasy is sometimes divided into by fans: Heroic Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery, Gritty Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Weird fiction and the like. Some fans, and some critics too, spend a great deal of time upon such taxonomies. But it seems to me that taxonomy itself is a poor way of apprehending what it is about Fantasy that has made it so successful. Quasi-structuralist attempts to fit the larger body of Fantastic literature into a grid miss the point of the mode—which is, of course, the desire to escape the grid altogether.

  I do not say so wholly to dismiss taxonomic studies of the form. Of course, there is pleasure to be had in spotting similarities and parallels between things, and grander totalising pleasure in disposing of a large body of diverse individual texts into a
small number of pigeonholes. The pleasure, to put it bluntly, has to do with control; and when it is applied to the world (as Linnaeus did) there is some point to it, for the world, for most human history, has been hostile and even dangerous. But when it is applied to SFF it misses the crucial thing that draws us to these texts in the first place: not the illusion of control (power), but the sense of transport.

  Broadly speaking, this is what is distinctive about the appeal of Fantasy texts to fans of Fantasy. The technical vocabulary of criticism, by talking about ‘novums’ and ‘estrangement’ and ‘structural fabulation’, although they are talking about this thing, do not sound as if they are, which may be a distraction. Closer to the money-shot is the descriptor ‘Fantasy’ itself: a word which has a spread of meanings, not all of them negative or merely escapist in connotation. Why ‘fantasy’, then? Or, perhaps it would be better to say: what is behind the desire for fantasy?

  Again, speaking very broadly, readers of Fantasy pick up their favourite books because those books give them something missing from the world as it actually is—and missing, too, from artistic representations of the way the world actually is; or ‘realism’ as it is sometimes called. We might call this thing ‘enchantment’, a sense of magic. Readers of SF are in search of something similar in their preferred genre: a newness that the actual world lacks, except that it is too easy to imagine that this newness inheres in one or other prop or physical item (a time machine, a ray gun, a spaceship). But this is to reduce SF to gadgets. This is not the right way of thinking about the problem, however, for the world itself has no lack of gadgets—is, indeed, rather over-supplied with gadgets. Better to talk in terms of ‘sense of wonder’, provided we realise that this in practice is a slightly less rebarbatively awe-inspiring quality than the eighteenth-century ‘Sublime’. It might, in fact, be best to think in terms of ‘cool’ if that did not carry with it the odour of imprecision. Heroic Fantasy, we know, takes as its setting a pre-industrial world, in which some of the conveniences according to modern humanity by machines fall within the purview of magic, whilst others are dispensed with altogether. The former strategy enables escapist fantasy about the empowerment of magical skill; but the latter strategy also enables escapism, by giving the readers access to an earthier, more authentic, more empowered, more physical existence than they have trapped as pale wageslaves by the webs of Civilisation and Its Discontents.

  Now, the standard defence of escapism goes something like this: ‘what’s wrong with escapism? Who is it that opposes escape? Jailers!’ It’s an incomplete logic, although there is a grit of truth in it. If you are a parent, and your teenage child spends eight hours a day upon their bed in heroin-induced lassitude as a strategy of escaping the anomie of modern teenagerdom, you do not need the soul of a jailer to want him, her, to stop. Art is about modes of engagement with the world, not modes of avoiding it.

  Escapism is not a very good word, actually, for the positive psychological qualities its defenders want to defend; it is less a question of breaking one’s bars and running away (running wither, we might ask?); and more of keeping alive the facility for imaginative play, which only a fool would deny is core to any healthy psychological makeup. Kids are good at play, and have an unexamined wisdom about it; adults, sometimes, forget how vital it is. What is wrong with Art that insists too severely on pressing people’s faces too insistently against the miseries of actual existence is not that we should not have to confront Darfur or Iraq, poverty or oppression; it is that such art rarely gives us the imaginative wriggle room to think of how things might be improved, or challenged, or even accepted. Imaginative wiggle room, on the other hand, is something SF-Fantasy is very good at.

  An art that simply depresses is liable to be an ineffective art because it will tend to disable rather than enable imaginative engagement. Fantasy carries us away. We want it to: that is why we go to it in the first place. As to why we get such pleasure in being carried away (get such pleasure, not to put a finer point on it, by focusing on what the world is missing, on its lack) … this is a large question and one with which this study must be largely concerned. But to begin with it is worth dwelling momentarily on this trope of ‘carrying away’.

  The difference between a metaphor and a simile is a matter of semantic nicety that some people find hard to articulate. This is perhaps because there is not really a difference; the two words are used more or less interchangeably in many contexts. But I like to insist upon a difference for all that: simile, as the word suggests, is a way of talking about something by comparing it to something that is similar: ‘Achilles is courageous, like a lion’ focuses our attention on the point of likeness. The word metaphor, as rhetoricians remind us, means a carrying over, a passage of meaning from one thing to another thing. This might sound like hairsplitting, but there is a difference here, and it seems to me one that opens a chasm of signification that speaks directly to the desire at the heart of SFF. ‘Achilles is a lion’ metaphorically carries across from one thing to a completely different thing. Because, crucially, Achilles is not a lion—there are a wealth of ways in which Achilles and a lion are different. To say ‘Achilles is metaphorically a lion’ is in one part to bring out a point of simile (in this one respect—his courage—Achilles is a lion) but it is always, inevitably, to do much more: it is to generate (in Samuel Delany’s words) an imaginative surplus, a spectral hybrid of beast–human. This imaginative surplus is what carries us away, and metaphor is its vehicle. That is partly what I mean when I talk about SFF as being in crucial ways a metaphorical literature: one that seeks to represent the world without reproducing it.

  ‘Desire’ then is, I am suggesting, at the heart of SFF’s appeal; and I am saying something else—I am saying that, whilst desire is also at the heart of the structuralist, systematizing urge, it is a desire radically opposed to the desire we call Fantasy. Fantasy, in a healthful, ludic, rejuvenating way, is precisely about escaping the grid. It is about the imaginative and affective surplus, the overspill. Indeed, I am tempted to say, because this is the case, the desire of Fantasy (let us qualify it a little: of the best Fantasy—and without wanting to sound circular, I would suggest that this is in fact by way of identifying what it is about those texts that makes them the best) comprehends the excessive nature of desire itself.

  It tells us nothing about the reason so many people fall in love with (the phrase is not hyperbolic) The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, to say that it is ‘a portal-quest fantasy’. That is indeed a feature of the text, and one it shares with many other texts; but most of these others texts are not enchanting—we do not fall in love with them) in the way we do with Tolkien. Actually The Lord of the Rings is a book precisely about desire, and what is so canny in its delineation of the operation of that desire is the way it dramatises it as simultaneously transporting and isolating; it excavates, we might say, our instinctive understanding that desire is captivating in a wonderful as well as an enslaving sense. It is a striking thing, in this respect, that nobody doubts the intense desirability of the ring at the heart of the narrative, even though, in Tolkien’s rendering, it is never made explicit what it is the ring actually does. It has something to do with power, we are told; and the person who has the ring will be able to wield power—tyrannically—although at the same time the various people who have the ring in the book (Gollum, Frodo, Sam) seem to derive no social or practical empowerment. Indeed, on the contrary: the efficacy of the artefact seems pointedly antisocial: it can make them disappear, it can remove them completely from the social body.

  There is a moment early in the first film of Jackson’s trilogy where Sauron is shown wielding the ring. He sweeps his arm on the battlefield, and sending scores of warriors flying into the air is a rare lapse of representational sophistication in a film-trilogy otherwise, I would say, sensitive to the point of the text. Certainly, subsequently Jackson abandons such literal-mindedness, and is much better about finding visual analogues for the ring’s appeal. Because this is
the whole point. The ring does not work in this text as some kind active mcguffin. It is not a gadget. Rather the ring construes desire itself, and in doing so makes manifests its intense, destructive desirability, precisely as absence. It is something not there, a little hollow, a badge of literal invisibility, something associated with the dark in subterranean caverns or the inaccessibility of riverbeds. The ring is lack, and it is part of Tolkien’s brilliance to understand so thoroughly that lack is the currency of desire.

  Actually, and to digress momentarily, I am not sure this is what Tolkien thought he was doing; I think he thought of his ring in terms of lack because he meant the ring to symbolise evil, and for his Boethian/Acquinian theological perspective on the world evil is absence: the world itself, as God, is necessarily good except insofar as it has been eroded or perverted by evil. But that does not alter what I am saying, I think. There are reasons why The Lord of the Rings has had the global impact it has, that its myriad imitators have not. Tolkien’s novel construes desire (readerly desire) because it understands desire.