The Riddles of The Hobbit

by Adam Roberts

  13. Maria Artamonova, ‘Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles’, in David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (eds), Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2000), 86.

  2 Cynewulf and the Exeter Book

  1. Gwendolyn Morgan, ‘Religious and Allegorical Verse’, in Laura C. Lambdin and Robert T. Lambdin (eds), A Companion to Old and Middle English Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 2002), 26–36; 32.

  2. Gregory K. Jember, The Old English Riddles: A New Translation (Denver, CO: Society for New Language Study 1972).

  3. A. J. Hawkes, ‘Symbolic Lives: the Visual Evidence’, in John Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer 1997), 339.

  4. Frederick Tupper (ed.), The Riddles of the Exeter Book (Boston: 1910), lxxix. Reviewing this volume in the same year, R. W. Chambers commented: ‘in the meantime Professor Tupper has become convinced that the so-called First Riddle, which in his edition he passed over as “demanding no place here,” is in reality an enigma which conceals the name of Cynewulf, and so shows us who is the author of the Riddles. The lot of a convert is seldom an easy one, and Professor Tupper has been involved in a good deal of controversy, which is by no means over yet.’ I dwell on this as indicative of the sorts of debates about the Exeter Book riddles that were being aired amongst scholars during Tolkien’s own youthful study of the topic.

  5. Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins 1995), 385.

  6. Carpenter (ed.), Letters, 148.

  7. In a letter to his son of 7–8 November 1944 Tolkien described a vision he had whilst praying at mass: ‘I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it … And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized. And I do not mean “personified”, by a mere figure of speech according to the tendencies of human language, but a real (finite) person’ (Carpenter (ed.), Letters, 99). His vision folds the theology of incarnation into a mystic vision of God as light.

  8. Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Exeter Book of Riddles (London: Penguin; revised edn 1993), 3.

  9. Carpenter (ed.), Letters, 347.

  10. Carpenter (ed.), Letters, 343.

  11. Crossley-Holland, Exeter Book of Riddles, 85–6. He adds: ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ love and fear of the sea is conveyed as well in these lines as anywhere in Old English literature’.

  12. ‘Roverandom’, in Tolkien, Tales from the Perilous Realm (London: HarperCollins 2008), 37, 83.

  13. This is Carolyne Larrington’s translation, minimally adapted, from The Poetic Edda (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), 13.

  14. To be clear—my proposed answers are: Jörmungandr; (F) Astitocalon; Niðhöggr (or perhaps Y Ddraig Goch).

  15. Carpenter (ed.), Letters, 134, 389. ‘Brightman’ is the theological scholar F. E. Brightman (1856–1932).

  16. See Ann Harleman Stewart, ‘Kenning and Riddle in Old English’, Papers on Language and Literature 15 (1979), 115–36.

  17. Old English Poems and Riddles (translated with an Introduction by Chris McCully; Manchester: Carcanet 2008), 27.

  18. McCully, Old English Poems and Riddles, 45.

  19. Two Robin Chapman Stacey essays say a great deal more on this intriguing matter: ‘Instructional Riddles in Welsh Law’ (in Joseph Falaky Nagy and Leslie Ellen Jones (eds), Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition: A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2005), 336–43) and ‘Speaking in Riddles’ (in Próinséas Ní Chatháin (ed.), Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle Ages: Texts and Transmission (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2002), 243–8).

  20. Fergus Kelly, ‘An Old-Irish Text on Court Procedure’, Peritia 5 (1986), 74–106.

  21. Christopher Guy Yocum, ‘Wisdom Literature in Early Ireland’ (2010), 24: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/v1cyocum/wisdom-literature.pdf.

  22. Robin Chapman Stacey, Dark Speech: the Performance of Law in Early Ireland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2007), 152. Radner is quoted from: J. N. Radner, ‘The Significance of the Threefold Death in Celtic Tradition’, in P. K. Ford (ed.), Celtic Folklore and Christianity: Studies in Memory of William W. Heist (Los Angeles: McNally and Loftin 1983), 180–99; 185.

  23. Tom Shippey, who edited and translated this poem in 1976, calls it ‘the best riddle-contest in Old English, and most like the Old Norse ones from the Eldar Edda and The Saga of King Heidrek’.

  24. Dieter Bitterli, Say What I Am Called: the Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2009), 112.

  25. The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise (translated from the Icelandic with Introduction, Notes and Appendixes by Christopher Tolkien; Cheltenham: Thomas Nelson and Sons 1960). The translations of the riddles that follow in this chapter are my own.

  26. Robin Chapman Stacey, Dark Speech, 153.

  27. Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins 2000), 173.

  28. This is quoted from the website Europrogocontestovision.

  29. ‘Suntory launches calcium-enriched water’: http://www.nutraingredients.com/Consumer-Trends/Suntory-launches-calcium-enriched-water.org

  30. French writer Pierre Delalande, who is cited in the epigraph to the preface of the present volume, responded to ‘Riddle 69’ with a little rhyme of his own, ‘O’, composed in English:

  Sometimes we sound the consonant;

  Sometimes we mark its loss;

  The water-becomes-a-bone riddle

  When eau becomes an os.

  31. Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011), 77; 26. Murphy also points up AD 4th-century rhetorician Donatus’s ‘definition of riddling as revealing the occultum similitudinem rerum, the hidden similarity of things’ (26; quoting Donatus, Ars Grammatica, 3:6).

  3 Riddles in the Dark

  1. For a detailed discussion of the riddles, see Douglas Anderson’s impressively comprehensive The Annotated Hobbit (London: Unwin Hyman 1988).

  2. Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda (translated by Jesse Byock; London: Penguin 2005), 40.

  3. To go off at a slight tangent, we might want to make the argument that this section of the Prose Edda records a riddle to which the answer was originally not a fetter for holding a wolf, but a horse—a steed as swift, quiet and strong as all the items listed. The ‘-nir’ suffix in ‘Gleipnir’ means ‘horse’ (compare ‘Sleipnir’, “swift-horse”, Odin’s eight-legged mount, or Slungnir, King Adil’s horse. Gleipnir would mean something like ‘gripping horse’, or ‘steady-footed horse’.

  4. This and the following two remedies are quoted from T. Anderson, ‘Dental treatment in Anglo-Saxon England’, British Dental Journal 197 (2004), 273–4.

  5. Vafthruthnismal (Poetic Edda), stanzas 11–12. Translated by Craig Williamson in A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011), 15.

  6. John D. Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit: Mr Baggins (London: HarperCollins 2007), 169.

  7. ‘Gnomic Verses’, in Gavin Bone, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Oxford 1943), 49.

  8. Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins 2000), 24.

  9. Douglas Anderson, The Annotated Hobbit (London: Unwin Hyman 1988).

  10. Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins 1995), 32.

  11. Carpenter (ed.), Letters, 123.

  12. Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Exeter Book of Riddles (London: Penguin; revised edn 1993), 31.

  13. Douglas Wilhelm Harder, ‘Timeline and Chronology for The Hobbit’, https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/Personal/Hobbit
<
br />   14. Counting the Preface (which begins ‘This is a story of long ago’) The Hobbit is disposed into 15+5 sections.

  4 The Riddles of the All-Wise

  1. Noting that Gollum ‘does not hiss at all when reciting his riddles; they are anomalous to his normal habits of speech’, John Rateliff speculates whether this fact indicates that ‘these riddles predate the book’ (John D. Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit: Mr Baggins (London: HarperCollins 2007), 106–7). Though it cannot be proved, it is certainly possible that Tolkien drafted all the riddles before he began writing The Hobbit.

  2. James Carey’s translation; James Carey and John T. Koch (eds), The Celtic Heroic Age: Literary Sources for Ancient Celtic Europe and Early Ireland and Wales (Malden, MA: Celtic Studies Publications 1994), 265.

  3. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (amended and enlarged edition; London: Faber and Faber 1961), 13. Graves’s huge, idiosyncratic book is explicitly an attempt to ‘unriddle’ the puzzles of myth and poetry. ‘A historical grammar of poetic myth has never previously been attempted’, he claims in the book’s Preface, ‘and to write it conscientiously I have had to face such “puzzling questions, though not beyond all conjecture” as Sir Thomas Browne instances in his Hydriotaphia: “what song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid amongst the women”.’ Graves goes on to list some of the mythological riddles the book addresses, predominantly two lengthy riddling texts attributed to the Welsh bard Taliesin, but also encompassing the number of the beast in the Biblical Revelation of Saint John (Graves treats the number, written in Latin, as an acrostic riddle), and a variety of English poems.

  4. This is from Brian Jacques’ popular children’s fantasy, Redwall (London: Hutchinson 1986). The answer, of course, is ‘BARREL’.

  5. Alan Garner’s Thursbitch (London: Vintage 2004), 1.

  6. If we go beyond poetry we can add the Abbot of Aldheim and later Bishop of Malmesbury, best known as a a writer of theological prose, but a man who also riddled. ‘He also delighted in elaborate forms of word-play embodied in riddles, an amusement that proved consistently popular to the Anglo-Saxons in the vernacular as well as in Latin’, H. R. Lyon, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest (2nd edn; Harlow: Longman 1991), 281.

  7. Tolkien’s runes, unlike his various ‘elvish’ alphabets, are based on actual Anglo-Saxon runic script, although some letters are reversed, assigned different phonetic qualities and otherwise adapted. ‘Tolkien used the Anglo-Saxon runic symbols and variations, reversals and inversions for the alphabet called Cirth or Angerthas, meaning runes, or, more literally, “engraved” letters. The forms of Tolkien’s adapted runes signify linguistic sound relationships. An extra stroke is added to the voiced sound where there are pairs of voiced and unvoiced sounds’ (Ruth S. Noel, The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1974), 43).

  8. Ralph W. V. Elliot, Runes: an Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1980), 43.

  9. Ralph W. V. Elliott, ‘Cynewulf’s Runes in Juliana and Fates of the Apostles’, in Robert E. Bjork (ed.), Cynewulf: Basic Readings (London: Routledge 1996), 294. Elliot’s thesis is that the disruption of the order of letters in Cynewulf’s name reflects his spiritual disarrangement as a mortal sinner before God’s perfect grace.

  10. The word for ‘fish’ in Tolkien’s Eldar or Sindar Elvish languages is nowhere recorded, but it would not surprise me if it began with an ‘s’. Elvish is well supplied with sinuous ‘s’ words that pertain to the same semantic field, including sîr, river; sir ‘flowing’ and súrinen ‘winding’.

  11. Noel, Languages of Tolkien, 50.

  12. ‘The word Alb meaning lofty in the Celtic language; on which account the Alps, Apennines, Mount Albis, &c, got their names’ (Godfrey Higgins, The Celtic Druids (1827), 394). The Scots Gaelic name for Scotland, ‘Alba’, means ‘the mountainous country’.

  13. Translated by Carolyne Larrington, The Poetic Edda (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), 110.

  14. The ‘staf’ part of the word may be cognate with the modern English word ‘staff’; and it is not a stretch to imagine that a kenning for a stalk of grain might be a word that compares it to a kind of staff. Perhaps the parallel with the ocean comes from not the individual stalk of grain, but rather a whole field. You will have seen, as I have, the wind moving over a full-grown field of wheat or barley and making the surface ripple like a sea.

  15. Australian poet Peter Porter’s 1989 lyric ‘A Chagall Postcard’ (from Possible Worlds) comes close to riddling this:

  Is this the nature of all truth,

  The blazing god, the bride aloof,

  The riddle cutting like a tooth,

  The dwarf that crows?

  The god has seen the standing grain,

  The bride is shrouded by her train,

  The mystery is strung with pain,

  A cold wind blows.

  To compare this version of Porter’s poem with the words Porter actually wrote (Porter, Possible Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989), 17) is to grasp the slipperiness of specific vocabulary in the debatable realm both of riddles and discussion of riddles.

  16. Jonathan Wilcox, ‘Mock-Riddles in Old English: Exeter Riddles 86 and 19’, Studies in Philology 93 (1996), 180–7.

  17. It is perfectly possible to connect this belief to Tolkien’s own Christian faith. After all the fish, IXTHUS, is a key Christian trope; any believer in Christ would have no difficulty in seeing him as, metaphorically, ringing the cosmos.

  18. Corey Olsen, Exploring J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 2012), 106.

  5 The Puzzle of the Two Hobbits

  1. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’, in Tree and Leaf (London: Allen & Unwin 1964), 25.

  2. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales (ed. Christopher Tolkien; London: Allen & Unwin 1980), 322.

  3. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, 325.

  6 The Riddle of Bilbo’s Pocket

  1. According to pleasingly alliterative trio V. Cumming, C. W. Cunnington and E. Cunnington (The Dictionary of Fashion History (Oxford: Berg 2010), 86) the earliest recognisable ‘interior’ pocket dates from the sixteenth century. It was known originally as a French pocket: ‘the earliest form of horizontal slit pocket with the opening covered by a flap’.

  2. Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (New York: Daw 2006), 427.

  3. Beowulf (ed. A. J. Wyatt; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1914), i.

  4. This is Seamus Heaney’s translation: Beowulf (London: Faber and Faber 1999), p. 67. Heaney’s translation is used throughout this chapter.

  5. Andrew Orchard, Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2003), 121–2.

  6. Earl R. Anderson, ‘Grendl’s glof (Beowulf 2085b–88) and Various Latin Analogues’, Mediaevalia 8 (1982) 1–8.

  7 The Riddle of the Ring

  1. Tolkien was angered by a Swedish translator’s assumption that ‘the Ring is in a certain way “der Nibelungen Ring”’. He wrote to Allen & Unwin on 23 February 1961, that ‘both rings were round and there the resemblance ceases’ and adding that ‘the “Nibelung” traditions … [have] nothing whatsoever to do with The Lord of the Rings’ (Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1985; London: HarperCollins 1995), 306–7).

  2. John Louis DiGaetani, Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel (London: Associated University Presses 1978), 78.

  3. Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (2nd edn; London: HarperCollins 1992), 126.

  4. Relatively few critical studies have addressed the novel in these terms, although one exception is Stratford Caldecott’s Secret Fire: the Spiritual Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: Darton, Longman and Todd 2003). Caldecott quotes from the Catholic catechism (para 1147: ‘God speaks to man through the visible creation’) and argues that ‘a sense of divine providence, of things meaning more than we know, of coincidences needing to be understood, is of course one of the strongest and m
ost lasting impressions one receives from Lord of the Rings’ (63). Caldecott has a different reading of the Ring to mine, however; seeing it as ‘the archetypal “Machine” ’ which ‘exemplifies the dark magic of the corrupted will’ (60).

  5. Brian Davies, Aquinas: an Introduction (London: Continuum 2002), 210.

  6. Davies, Aquinas, 215–18.

  7. ‘The theological significance of the sacraments lies in: (1) the exhibition of the principle of Incarnation. By the embodiment of spiritual reality in material form an appropriate counterpart of the union of God with man in the Person of Christ is made patent (2) Their expression of the objectivity of God’s action on the human soul … (3) As ordinances mediated through the Church, their essentially social structure’ (The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross (3rd edn, ed. E. A. Livingstone; Oxford 1997), 1435). Sacraments work ex opere operato, which is to say it is the Grace itself, and not the person administrating them, that validates them. A sacrament administered by a priest is not invalidated should it transpire that the particular priest was married, a murderer or mad.

  8. See for instance Shippey’s Road to Middle-Earth, 177–84.

  9. Carpenter (ed.), Letters, 145.

  10. Bernard Bergonzi, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel’, in The Myth of Modernism and the Twentieth Century (Brighton: Harvester Press 1986), 175.

  11. Colin Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975), 176.

  12. Carpenter (ed.), Letters, 51.

  13. Carpenter (ed.), Letters, 60. Italics in original.

  14. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, ed. Christopher Tolkien; The History of Middle Earth, Vol. 10 (London: HarperCollins 1994), 210.

  15. Something similar was the case with hobbits as well: ‘As far as I know hobbits were universally monogamous (indeed they very seldom married a second time, even if wife or husband died very young)’, (letter to A. C. Nunn, drafted probably late 1958–early 1959; Carpenter (ed.), Letters, 293).