The Riddles of The Hobbit

by Adam Roberts

  Adam Phillips has some interesting things to say about masturbation which, strange as it might seem, are relevant here. Philips starts by quoting Leo Bersani:

  Bersani once said in an interview that the reason most people feel guilty about masturbation is because they fear that masturbation is the truth about sex; that the truth about sex is that we would rather do it on out own, or that, indeed, we are doing it on our own even when we seem to all intents and purposes to be doing it with other people. The desire that apparently leads us towards other people can lead us away from them. Or we might feel that what we call desire is evoked by details, by signs, by gestures; that we fall for a smile or a tone of voice or a way of walking or a lifestyle, and not exactly for what we have learned to call a whole person; and that this evocation, this stirring of desire, releases us rather more into our own deliriums of fear and longing than into realistic apprehension of the supposed object of desire. There is nothing at once more isolating and oceanic than falling for someone. Lacan formulated the ‘objet petit a’ to show us that the promise of satisfaction always reminds us of a lack … and that this lack, disclosed by our longings, sends a depth charge into our histories.1

  It would be almost fatuous to note that the ring, in Lord of the Rings, is an objet petit a; fatuous, really only because it is so extraordinarily obvious that this is what the ring is. But it is another phrase from that little passage that leaps out at me in the context of understanding the desire behind SF and Fantasy: ‘there is nothing at once more isolating and oceanic than falling for someone’. That is right, I think, as an account of what it is like to fall in love with someone. More than that, though, those two words, ‘isolating and oceanic’, seem to me wonderfully apt as a way of approaching how the best fantasy wins us.

  The core of Tolkien’s book, then, is its apprehension, through its concrete realisation, its worldbuilding and backhistory and characterisation and so on, of the radical undesirability of desire; or the desirability of the undesirable. The point is that the phrasal superposition of desire and undesired only looks like a paradox. Actually it is an articulation of something much more significant. Philips again:

  Anna Freud once said that in your dreams you can have your eggs cooked any way you want them, but you can’t eat them. The implication is clear: magic is satisfying but reality is nourishing … Indeed, we could reverse Anna Freud’s formulation and say that when it comes to sexuality it is the fact that you can’t eat the eggs that makes them so satisfying. The fact that, as Freud remarked, desire is always in excess of the object’s capacity to satisfy it is the point not the problem; it is the tribute the solitary desiring individual pays to reality. This is a problem only if you are a literalist rather than the ironist of your own desire. It’s not that reality is disappointing, it’s that desire is excessive. It’s not that we lack things, it’s just that there are things we want.

  In this passage I am tempted to replace ‘dreams’ with ‘Fantasies’, and to extend the observation to those novelistic excrescences of fantasy life booksellers label under that term. And I am tempted to suggest that ‘sex’, here, connects with the fundamentally libidinous energies that flow through our love for these narratives.

  There is one further point I want to make, to do with ‘escape’. A reason why people look down upon Fantasy is that they see it as evading moral and social responsibilities more realist modes of art press upon their readers. If a contemporary of Dickens read about the extreme poverty of Jo the Crossing Sweeper, he or she was being confronted with an emotionally engaging example of a real social phenomenon. Dickens’ humour and sentimentality were both designed to engage his readers in the problems of the world. We do not read about the (it seems weird even putting it in these terms, but you see what I mean) extreme poverty of Gollum in the same way. Gollum is extremely poor, in a material sense; I could believe that Smaug is a victim of Dragonism, his evident intelligence and many talents overlooked by those who are too prejudiced to see beyond the scales; I daresay many of the rank and file soldiers in the orc army come from broken homes, and had little opportunity for advancement except joining the military. But it would be ludicrous to read the books this way, because they frame their ideological concerns not linearly but metaphorically.

  This, however, is, in the popular idiom, a feature, not a bug. One reason Tolkien’s imaginary realm has proved so successful is precisely its structural non-specificity. What I mean is: Tolkien treats material that has deep roots in, and deep appeal to, various cultural traditions; but he does so in a way—as fictionalised worldbuilding rather than denominated myth—that drains away much of the poisonous nationalist, racist and belligerent associations those traditions have accumulated over the centuries. A thumbnail history would go like this: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wagner’s Ring melodramas spoke to a great many people about a particular northern-European cultural identity; about a group of linked, potent emotional attachments to history, landscape, to the numinous and the divine, to matters of heroism and everyday life. I am trying not to sound sneery as I say this (I mean melodrama in the strict sense of the word), because these things did, and do, matter intensely and genuinely to many people. But there is a reason, a room-filling elephant of a reason, why Der Ring des Nibelungen no longer has this general resonance. It is because the cultural reservoir from which it draws much of its power also supplied cultural capital to the worst regime ever to take charge in Germany, and therefore lubricated the most catastrophically destructive war ever to be waged in the world. In saying this I am not, of course, blaming Wagner for the Nazis. Indeed, the endless debates about Wagner’s own ideological ‘purity’ (‘was Wagner an anti-semite?’ Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes, like just about every other gentile in nineteenth century Europe) seem to me to miss the point. The restless churning through this question happens because we are desperate to acquit Wagner so that we can enjoy his music with a clean conscience. We ask the question, get the uncomfortable answer, and ask it again. In our guts resides the queasy comprehension that Wagner can not be acquitted. Politics can not be neatly separated out from the Ring cycle, leaving only a washed-and-scrubbed sequence of pretty orchestral tone poems behind. I love the Ring cycle, and listen to it regularly; but I would never try to deny that it is political all the way through, down to its very marrow. It is, to be precise, about the notion that history and myth are in some sense the same thing—a very dangerous notion indeed.

  Tolkien’s story is not the same as the Ring cycle; his ‘ring’ (as he crossly reminded correspondents) not the same as Alberich’s ring. But a considerable amount of the heft and force of Lord of the Rings derives from the way Tolkien draws on the same broader cultural, mythic, northern-European heritage. What saves Lord of the Rings is that it is not about Germany, or about England; or to be more precise, that it is about England and Germany only secondarily, in an eloquently oblique (a cynic might say: in a plausibly deniable) manner. Tolkien found a way of articulating the same deep-rooted cultural concerns in a way that avoids being poisoned by the cultural specificity of European Fascism. I offer these thoughts not as a value judgement of his fiction, so much as an explanation for why Lord of the Rings has done so extraordinarily well—resonated so powerfully with so many people—in the postwar period. It rushed in to fill the gap that more culturally specific art had supplied before that kind of art was discredited by the 1940s.

  This is part of the appeal, but also of the strength, of Fantasy as a modern phenomenon. We prefer stories of Marvel superheroes to actual stories of ‘crime fighters’ (policemen, soldiers and so on) because we have lost faith in the latter, or more precisely lost faith that the latter can ever exhibit the kind of perfect heroism we want our stories to articulate. Hogwarts, being fictional, can apprehend something very important—school—without being tangled in the messy specificity of actual real-world schooling. A sequence of novels set in Eton would be noisome; although that is, in effect, what Rowling has written.
The twentieth century has cured us of our attachment to a certain kind of ideology-text; and the cure we have chosen is: worldbuilt fiction. I could add lots of other examples, from West Wing to Westeros. But I have probably said enough.

  I said at the beginning of this chapter that I intended to dodge what would be the onerous duty of listing all the figures who have written novels in the Tolkienian mode. But I do want to add, as a pendant, an observation about one writer of post-Tolkien fantasy, because she happens to be so very good—and because a riddle relevant to our purposes here is fashioned in her greatest novel. I am talking about Ursula Le Guin.

  Le Guin’s Earthsea series, beginning with The Wizard of Earthsea (1968) is not only amongst the finest examples of post-Tolkien fantasy, it is explicitly and directly influenced by Tolkien himself. Le Guin creates a world of myriad islands located in a huge, perhaps endless, ocean. Each island has, in addition to its regular inhabitants, a resident wizard, and these individuals (all male) are trained at a wizard university in the central island of Roke.

  The Wizard of Earthsea tells of the early life of Earthsea’s greatest wizard, Ged; and the story is continued in Le Guin’s several sequels, The Tombs of Atuan (1972), The Farthest Shore (1974), Tehanu (1990) and The Other Wind (2002). One of the things Le Guin borrows from Tolkien is his nominalism—which is to say, his belief that the world is ‘named’ into existence, and that words and languages therefore have profound power. In Le Guin’s books, this is manifested by the convention that, where people from various cultures and various geographical locations speak various languages, there is underlying everything a ‘true speech’ that directly names reality. Magic is performed by invoking objects in this ur-language. To be more precise, the distinction is made early on in The Wizard of Earthsea between two kinds of magic, ‘true magic’ and ‘illusion’. The latter is a trick easily played, but the object conjured has the appearance but not the substance of reality. ‘Why do wizards get hungry then?’ one character asks Ged. ‘When it comes to suppertime at sea, why not say, Meat-pie and the meat-pie appears and you eat it?’ ‘Well’, Ged replies: ‘we could do so. But we don’t much wish to eat our words, as they say. Meat-pie is only a word after all … we can make it odorous, and savorous, and even filling, but it remains a word. If fools the stomach and gives no strength to the hungry man.’2 What is called in the book ‘true magic’, however, is the power to step outside the simulacra of ‘only words’. To know an object’s true name is to have actual power over it. Wizards, accordingly, frame their charms in the Old Speech.

  The riddle of Earthsea has to do with this nominalist belief in the apprehending power of language. What (the riddle says) is Earthsea? We must look to the Old Speech, which Le Guin’s Ged starts to learn first at the Wizard University. The novel vouchsafes us a few examples of the true tongue. We discover, for instance, that the true word for ‘rock’ is tolk—this refers to ‘the dry land on which men live’. The word for ‘sea’ in the true speech, on the other hand, is inien. So the answer to the riddle can be found, neatly enough, by translating it into Le Guin’s true-tongue. What is Earth-sea? It is tolk-inien. The riddle is: what is Earthsea? Le Guin is far from the only writer of Fantasy who acknowledges that her creations are Tolkinien, of course.

  11

  … And Back Again?

  C. S. Lewis opens his study of the Psalms by declaring his relative incompetence for the task.

  It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. When you took the problem to a master, as we all remember, he was very likely to explain what you understood already, to add a great deal of information which you didn’t want, and say nothing at all about the thing that was puzzling you. I have watched this from both sides of the net; for when, as a teacher myself, I have tried to answer questions brought me by pupils, I have sometimes, after a minute, seen that expression settle down on their faces that assured me that they were suffering exactly the same frustration which I had suffered from my teachers. The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren’t.

  (C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (Houghton Mifflin 1958), 1)

  ‘The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less’ looks like a riddling kind of observation, but in fact it touches on something important about riddles. In some of the riddles of The Hobbit we are given the answer; but others (what is a burrahobbit? What does Good Morning mean?) we are not. But having the answer is less important than engaging with the process of thinking them through.

  In the fourth chapter of the present study I took up John Rateliff’s suggestion that, as far as the enigmata that Gollum and Bilbo swap between them, ‘these riddles predate the book’.1 It is possible to imagine Tolkien (of course this is mere speculation) setting out at some point in the 30s to compose nine riddles, some adapted from existing sources, some invented from whole cloth, by way of constructing an acrostic meta-riddle to which the answer is, precisely, a famous riddle contest between a god and a dwarf, the Alvíssmál. If Tolkien engaged in this riddling game, he did not include the answer in The Hobbit itself. But perhaps he felt he did not need to.

  To pick up the thread from that fourth chapter: what might have drawn Tolkien to the Alvíssmál? It is, obviously, a riddle-contest; and there is something nicely symmetrical in coding a riddle contest so that the riddles in it make reference to another riddle contest.2 But I wonder if there is something more. Recall that the story of the Alvíssmál is that the dwarf Alvíss has come to Thor’s house claiming that he was promised the god’s daughter in marriage. Thor tells the dwarf he may have the girl if he can answer all of the god’s riddles. This Alvíss does, drawing on a genuinely impressive knowledge-base—not for nothing does his name mean ‘all-wise’. But he has been tricked; like Gandalf with the trolls, Thor has distracted him long enough for the sun to come up and petrify him.

  Why might Tolkien be drawn to this particular riddle contest? Why might he have repurposed his nine riddles for The Hobbit? What is at stake in the contest between Gollum and Bilbo is not a divine marriage, but a plain gold band with magical properties. In Chapter 7 I explored the similarities between this (malign) gold ring and the example of the (good) wedding band, also magical in a religiously sacramental sense. Gollum, like Alvíss, can answer all the riddles Bilbo throws at him; save only the last one. But his knowledge does not save him.

  Alvíss the dwarf is clever, but—despite his name—he is not wise. Indeed, his proud delight in his own cleverness and knowledge prevent him from seeing that he is being tricked. This in turn is an important distinction in Tolkien’s work. Saruman is very clever, and very knowledgeable, but he is not wise. Gandalf knows less, and is sometimes baffled, but he possesses wisdom. Tolkien understands that it is better to be wise than clever. In this he is true to his religious beliefs; for one of the valences of Christ’s instruction that we ‘become as little children’ (Matthew 18:3) is the greatness of untutored faith over mere adult cleverness. And like C. S. Lewis’s schoolchildren, it is better for us to turn out hearts to the mysteries of life together than passively to take on board the intellectual knowledge of adults. The Hobbit is a book that lives in the heart before it exists in the head, howsoever ingeniously that head—in this case, mine—addresses the riddle: what is a hobbit?

  What, then, is the solution? What is the answer to the riddle of The Hobbit? The intention, in framing the question this way, is not intend to suggest that there could be only one answer, only one way of decoding this beautifully entertaining, suggestive, playful novel. It is, rather, a matter of wondering to what extent it is possible to think of the novel as a riddle. It seems to present a straightforw
ard adventure story; but the meat of the whole is much more debatable.

  Bilbo the hobbit is a respectable, solid, middle-class fellow; familiarly English, and indeed (in the author’s own words) the sort of man who belongs to a community that is ‘more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee’. The hobbit, in other words, has the background and values of Tolkien himself, and the stature of Tolkien’s own youth—I mean, Bilbo, as an adult, is about as tall as Tolkien himself was as a child on the verge of adolescence. But Bilbo is more than this. He is pitched out of his comfortable, parochial hole, and forced to travel to a far country to fight a war. Something similar happened to Tolkien himself. John Garth’s study of Tolkien’s own experiences in World War One is cautiously suggestive:

  It would be misleading to suggest that The Hobbit is Tolkien’s wartime experience in disguise; yet it is easy to see how some of his memories must have invigorated this take of an ennobling rite of passage past the fearful jaws of death. The middle-class hero is thrown in with proud but stolid companions … the company approaches the end of their quest across a desolation, a once green land with now ‘neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished.’ Scenes of sudden, violent ruin ensue … we visit the camps of the sick and wounded and listen to wranglings over matters of command and strategy.3

  It does not hazard anything too revolutionary to suggest that a ‘hobbit’ is, in a sense, a bit of Tolkien’s own youth—of his own home. What about the word, ‘hobbit’? Tolkien provides one etymology for it in the appendices with which The Lord of the Rings concludes: