The Riddles of The Hobbit

by Adam Roberts

  Hobbit is an invention. In the Westron the word used, when this people was referred to at all, was banakil ‘halfling’. But at this date the folk of the shire and of Bree used the word kuduk, which was not found elsewhere. Meriadoc, however, actually records that the King of Rohan used the word kûd-dûkan ‘hole-dweller’. Since, as has been noted, the Hobbits had once spoken a language closely related to that of the Rohirrim, it seems likely that kuduk was a worn-down form of kûd-dûkan. The latter I have translated, for reasons explained, by holbytla; and hobbit provides a word that might be a worn-down form of holbylta [i.e. ‘hole builder’] if that name had occurred in our own ancient language.4

  Tom Shippey discusses this invented etymology and suggests a different one:

  Hol, of course, means hole. A ‘bottle’, even now in some English place-names, means a dwelling, and Old English bytlian means to dwell, to live in. Holbytla then, = ‘hole-dweller, hole-liver’. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hole-liver.’ What could be more obvious than that?5

  So, ‘hole-builder’ and ‘hole-dweller’ are two possible cod-etymological roots for the word hobbit. I want to suggest a third.

  Tolkien considered himself wholly English, but he was well aware that he bore a German surname. He knew too what his name meant—I mean, the semantic content of the elements of his name. The ‘tol’ part of ‘Tolkien’ means ‘foolish, stupid, rash’ (Tölpel is modern German for ‘fool’). The ‘kien’ part is a version of the German word Kühn which means ‘brave’ or ‘bold’. Indeed, Tolkien himself played on the meaning of his own name: he wrote a character called ‘John Jethro Rashbold’, a version of Tolkien himself, into his ‘The Notion Club Papers’ (published posthumously in Sauron Defeated). ‘Rashbold’ is one way of articulating the—to Tolkien, pleasing—oxymoron of his surname. Another might be ‘Dull-keen’, which has the advantage of retaining much of the sound of the original. ‘Dull’, another linguistic descendent from the Old High German tol, ‘foolish’, originally meant ‘foolish’ or ‘stupid’, and later came to be applied to edges and blades, meaning blunt. ‘Keen’ is, in a way, more interesting. Originally this word meant ‘sharp’, as in sharp-witted, clever, skilled—and of course it still means literally sharp, having a sharp edge, for we still talk of a ‘keen blade’, just as Chaucer talked of ‘a knyfe as a rasour kene’ in 1385. But ‘keen’ also means eager, bold, brave. Indeed, the OED thinks the latter ‘sharp’ meaning precedes the ‘brave’ one (‘this ON sense [‘sharp’] is the original one, the connecting link with the other [‘bold, brave’] being the idea of “skilled in war” “expert in battle”.’)

  Foolish-sharp. Dull-keen. Tolkien. In Old Norse (a language in which Tolkien was, of course, expert) the word for ‘sharp’ or ‘keen’ is: bitr. The modern English word ‘bitter’ retains a spectral sense of this; for something is bitter, originally—like a bitter wind, or a bitterly cold morning—because it bites; because it is sharp, because it is keen.6 Similarly the Old English bîtan means ‘biting, cutting, sharp’. Hob, on the other hand, means originally ‘rustic’, ‘homely’, ‘clownish’. Spenser calls the simple-minded rustic peasant in his pastoral poem The Shepheard’s Calender (1579) ‘Hobinall’ with this meaning in mind; and clumsy, awkward, absurd fellows were called ‘hobbledehoys’ well into the nineteenth century. The dullness of the ‘hob’ is of a rural, homely sort; but it is a dullness for all that. And it would be as oxymoronic as linking ‘dull’ and ‘keen’ to put the two forms together into: hob-bitr.

  It seems to me that this particular riddling answer (‘what is a hobbit?’ ‘he is dull-keen’—that is, ‘he is Tolkien’) accords with the larger logic of the tale. We connect to the story through the ordinariness of Bilbo; and Bilbo’s experiences are Tolkienian. More, this manner of etymological decoding, the reading through of modern words and names to get at their aboriginal significances, was meat and drink to Tolkien. To ask ‘what is a hobbit?’ is to ask both ‘what does the word hobbit mean?’ and to ask ‘what is the hobbit “about”? What does it signify in the largest sense?’ The answer to both questions is: hob-bitr is cognate with Tol-kien.

  Here is a related speculation. Amongst other things, hobbits are humpty-dumpty. I do not mean that they are eggs (although, to go right back to the beginning of this book: ‘a box without hinges key or lid / yet golden treasure inside is hid’ describes Bilbo pretty well, provided only we read the ‘treasure’ not as actually descriptive of yolk but metaphorically descriptive of the courage and endurance our hero discovers locked away within himself). No, I mean an earlier meaning of the term: for, to quote the OED again, a ‘humpty-dumpty’ is ‘a short, dumpy person’; and means, as an adjective, ‘short and fat’. Nowadays ‘humpty dumpty’ is most likely to make us think of the famous nursery rhyme; but as we have been exploring in this book, nursery rhymes are very often riddles. Indeed, to quote from Iona and Peter Opie’s Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the very familiarity of this verse tends to occlude it.

  Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

  All the king’s horses,

  And all the king’s men,

  Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

  ‘Humpty Dumpty has become so popular a nursery figure and is pictured so frequently that few people today think of the verse as containing a riddle.’ Of course it does: it is just that the solution—‘egg’—is, as the Opies note, ‘known to everyone’.7 Alternate answers to the riddle have been proposed: Richard III is one, on account of his hump-back and his defeat at the Battle of Bosworth. Another popular answer is a large cannon, allegedly so-called, used during the English Civil War. In the spirit of Tolkien’s own Lord of the Rings appendices I would like to suggest another solution to this familiar riddle, and it goes like this: etymologically ‘humpty’ is distantly related, via the forms ‘Humphrey’ and ‘Humbert’, to ‘hobbity’. Describing somebody as ‘hombetty’ or ‘hobbety’ was to call them short and stout; and the early medieval Romance Ringe describes its hero as ‘ane hubbity-duppety fellowe yclepit Fraodo, þat wiþ greete heorte did þi Ringe of powre destrowe’.8

  At the end of the novel, Balin reports that the new prosperity at Laketown means ‘they are making songs which say the rivers run with gold’. ‘Rivers run with gold’ is a riddle to which the answer is: ‘sunset’, when the setting sun turns the waterways golden with its light. And sunset is the appropriate note on which to end any novel, just as dawn (we recall the first meeting in The Hobbit between its titular hero and Gandalf: ‘“Good morning!” said Bilbo’) is the appropriate note on which to begin one. Indeed, it is worth going back for a moment to the little-noticed riddle with which The Hobbit opens:

  ‘Good morning!’ said Bilbo, and he meant it….

  ‘What do you mean?’ [Gandalf] said. ‘Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not, or that you feel good this morning, or that it is a morning to be good on?’

  Bilbo’s answer (‘all of them at once!’) is not really a very satisfactory answer to what is, in fact, a rather profound question. How do our words mean? How—for instance—do those strings of words, bound between boards, that we call books manage to generate specific reactions, images and emotions in the minds of readers? Gandalf suggests four ways of understanding words—his example is ‘good morning’, but his approach can be expanded to include any and all verbal communications. He suggests that we can interpret words intersubjectively, descriptively, personally or ethically. The first case is subjunctive, in the sense that when I say something I am expressing an unfulfilled wish or condition about your state of being. The second and third are indicative, descriptions either of outer reality or inner mood. The fourth is the least idiomatic of all. To greet somebody with ‘good morning’ and thereby to mean ‘I wish you to take the opportunity of this morning to do good, not evil, in the world’ would be a strange way of proceeding. Which is to say, addressing somebody as ‘good morning’ is
not usually a riddle, and even if we take it as one it is poorly answered by saying ‘Intersubjective! Descriptive! Personal! Ethical!’ But all these things apply to the novel. The novel (the novel called The Hobbit for example) establishes a specific relationship with its reader—indeed the narrator of The Hobbit actually addresses the reader directly at various places in the text. The novel describes the world through which its character move, and the state of minds of those characters themselves. And most importantly of all, for Tolkien and writers like him, novels have a moral imperative. It is the business of novels to make the world better, not worse; to give people paradigms for good behaviour not wicked. To show that even ordinary people can, if they persevere and tap their reservoirs of bravery and duty, prevail against crushing circumstances. That they can be heroes.

  The Old English for Good Morning would be Gód Morwe (Chaucer’s Miller says brightly ‘Hayl, maister Nicholay! Good Morwe!’); or else godne dæie (‘good day’). Indeed, the word ‘morn’ is the occasion for one of those interesting mini-essays with which the OED is so well supplied. The OE is ‘morgen’; the ON ‘myrginn’.

  The affinities outside Teut. are doubtful. Some refer the word to the pre-Teut. root *merk- to be dark; but the absence of consonant-ablaut, as well as the inappropriateness of the sense, seems to render this view less probable than the alternative hypothesis that the root is *mergh-, represented by the Lith. mirgu, to twinkle, margas parti-coloured. (OED 9:1086)

  Also relevant is the entry on ‘Morrow’, a word (now archaic) that comes via the ME ‘morwe’ or ‘moru’, both shortened forms of morwen, ‘the morn’. Morning as ‘the time of darkness’, in the sense that it is the time when darkness dwindles, ‘darkloss’, does not seem so farfetched to me. But like the anonymous OED etymologist, I am rather struck as the morning as twinkletime, howsoever twee that makes me. And perhaps there is a deeper riddle here. It looks counterintuitive to think of ‘morning’ as the time of dwindling, because we think of dawn as the opposite of this: the time when the sunlight grows stronger, and the day begins. But in a larger sense we are all always dwindling, and time is chasing away. The strong streak of plangent beauty that runs through both The Hobbit and (especially) The Lord of the Rings has to do the inevitable passing away of the old times. It is this above all that makes both novels Losingsromans. Even the immortal elves diminish, and go into the west; mortals fade and die, ages pass, and whole ways of life trace out an elegiac diminuendo. It was Tolkien’s sense of himself as untimely, as born into an inhospitable modernity of machines, haste and noise, that informed his acute sense of both the poignancy and the beauty of this sense of dwindling. It is simultaneously dull and keen, both an infuriating stubbornness in the grain of existence (hob) and something that sharply pierces through mere appearance to reveal a keenly shining truth beyond the veil of life (bitr). It gives his novels a plangency that raise them far above the usual Fantasy fare, and it—Tolkien’s unique vision, his sense of himself as both a mortal man, doomed to die, and a spirit promised hidden, mysterious glory—addresses, in the most profound sense, the riddle that is The Hobbit.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. I can think of almost no exceptions to this convention, actually—I mean, crime novels that do not include the solution to their own riddle—except amongst the postmodern experimentalists of novel writing. For example, there is Roberto Bolaño’s masterful 2666 (2004); a profound meditation upon crime and mystery that deliberately withholds the satisfactions of solution and closure.

  2. F. E. Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928 (1930), 54. Jules Renard’s Journal for 1906 contains a similar, though more exasperated, reaction to the notion that the universe is a riddle: ‘our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane. Less merciful than man, God never opens the window’; (‘Notre rêve se heurte au mystère comme la guêpe à la vitre. Moins pitoyable que l’homme, Dieu n’ouvre jamais la croisée’; Léon Guichard and Gilbert Sigaux (eds), Jules Renard, Journal 1887–1910 (Paris: Gallimard 1982), 1067).

  3. Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created A New Mythology (2nd edition; London: HarperCollins 1992), xv. Ellipses in original. Shippey goes on to, as it were, ‘solve’ the riddle of Tolkien’s polite expression of thanks and admiration: ‘the Professor’s letter had invisible italics in it, which I now supply. “I am in agreement with nearly all that you say, and I only regret that I have not the time to talk more about your paper: especially about design as it appears or may be found in a large finished work, and the actual events or experiences as seen or felt by the waking mind in the course of actual composition”.’ One advantage of the politeness-language of Old Western Man is that it enables the speaker to express a genuine ambiguity, neither falsely praising nor discourteously dispraising, in a way that is creatively riddling rather than hypocritically dissembling.

  4. W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages (Oxford 1904), 64–5.

  5. ‘I thought of you when some Kipling surfaced at Christmas dinner—“The Egg Shell”. My aunt recited it, “a nice piece of nonsense,” only for my ex-Naval dad to point out that it wasn’t nonsense at all, but a resonant description of naval warfare in WW1, the Whitehead being a torpedo. I found it interesting how one person’s metaphor, or nonsense, could be another’s highly specific depiction.’ Roger Peppe, private correspondence.

  6. Paul O’Prey (ed.), Robert Graves: Selected Poems (London: Penguin 1986), 154.

  7. Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins 1995), 353. Tolkien attended the lectures Graves gave during his stint as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1964, finding them ‘ludicrously bad’.

  8. The omitted stanzas and other variants are recorded in Alan Jacobs (ed.), Auden: For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2013).

  9. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954–55; 1 Vol. edition; London: HarperCollins 2012), 11.

  10. It was a dislike he repeated in several places, although sometimes in more qualified form. In a letter to Milton Waldman (probably written in 1951) he wrote ‘I dislike Allegory—the conscious and intentional allegory—yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.’ An earlier letter to Stanley Unwin (31 July 1947), responding to Stanley’s son Rayner’s report on the first book of The Lord of the Rings, tempered anxiety that the book not be treated as an allegory—‘do not let Rayner suspect “Allegory” … the actors are individuals’—with a very general concession: ‘of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is real life’ (Carpenter, Letters, 145, 121).

  11. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy (trans. David F. Swenson; Princeton: Princeton University Press 1962), 46.

  12. Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press 2011), 7.

  1 The Anglo-Saxon Riddleworld

  1. S. A. J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Dent, Everyman 1982), 367–8.

  2. The Elder Edda: A Selection (trans. Paul B. Taylor and W. H. Auden; Introduction by Peter H. Salus and Paul B. Taylor; London: Faber and Faber 1969), 20, 22. The volume’s dedication is: ‘for J. R. R. Tolkien’.

  3. Carolyne Larrington, A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993), 86.

  4. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (trans. W. D. Robson-Scott; London: Hogarth Press 1927), 16.

  5. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, A Guide to Old English (1986); quoted in John M. Hill, The Anglo-Saxon Warrior Ethic: Reconstructing Lordship in Early English Literature (Gainesville: University of Florida Press 2000), 8.

  6. The translation is by Gavin Bone, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Oxford 1943).

  7. W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages (Oxford 1904), 44.

  8. Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien (1985; London: HarperCollins 1995), 172.

  9. Della Hook’s Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer 2010) exhaustively explores the many ways trees figured ‘life, death and rebirth’ in Anglo-Saxon culture.

  10. ‘Ents had interested Tolkien since he first wrote on Roman roads in 1924 and identified them with the orþanc enta geweorc, the “skilful work of ents” mentioned in the poem Maxims II. Anglo-Saxons believed in ents … what were they? Clearly they were very large, great builders, and clearly they didn’t exist any more. From such hints Tolkien created his fable of a race running down to extinction’ (Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (2nd edn; London: HarperCollins 1992), 119). My reading is rather different to Shippey’s. After all, Tolkien’s ents have no interest in making roads.

  11. Similarly, the charm that protects Macbeth against ‘man of woman born’ ought surely to have been proof against Macduff. From his mother’s womb untimely ripped he may have been, but Caesarian section is still a mode of birth, and from a woman too. I once published a story in which Macbeth lives on for centuries, until twenty-second century reforestation expands the extent of Burnham Wood to encompass Macbeth’s castle, and a robot is finally able to kill him. This may strike you as a limiting pedantic literalism, of the sort that did not encumber Shakespeare’s imagination, and I would not disagree with you. But the point I am making is that there is a similarly concrete, precise streak in Tolkien’s imagination too.

  12. Daisy Elizabeth Martin-Clarke, Culture in Early Anglo-Saxon England (1947; Johns Hopkins University Press Reprints 1979), 33.