by Adam Roberts
16. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954–55; 1 Vol. edn, London: HarperCollins 2012), 130.
17. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, 120. Tolkien stresses the sense of Tom’s house as a safe circle through which the Hobbits pass. They enjoy their only contented nights’ sleep in Tom’s beds. His house has windows ‘at either end … one looking east and the other looking west’ (LotR, 126). It is repeatedly described as suffused with golden light.
8 The Lord of the Rings and the Riddle of Writing
1. Humphrey Carpenter, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins 1995), 344. The letter goes on to note ‘I typed out The Hobbit.’
2. Tolkien, The Lord the Rings (1954–55; 1 Vol. edn, London: HarperCollins 2012), 524.
9 The Volsung Riddle: Character in Tolkien
1. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso 1987).
2. Tolkien, Sigurd and Gudrún, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins 2009), 176–7.
3. Tom Shippey has an excellent discussion on the linguistic and semantic connections between ‘bourgeois’, ‘borough’ and ‘burglar’ as they pertain to Hobbits in his Tolkien: the Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins 2002).
4. George Philip Krapp and Elliot van Kirk (eds), The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (New York: Columbia University Press, 6 vols 1931–53), 3: The Exeter Book, 156.
5. Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins 1995), 66.
10 The Enigma of Genre Fantasy
1. Adam Phillips, Side Effects (London: Penguin 2006), 59. The passage quoted a little further on is from 65.
2. Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968; London: Gollancz 1971), 191.
11 … And Back Again?
1. John D. Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit: Mr Baggins (London: HarperCollins 2007), 107.
2. Another reason Tolkien may have been drawn to the Alvíssmál is linguistic. As Charlie Anderson notes, ‘the Poetic Edda poem Alvissmal is fascinating, because it gives glimpses into the dialects / languages of these beings. For example, the human himinn (“sky”) is hlyrnir to the Aesir, vindofni to the Vanir, uppheimto the Jotnar, fagraræfr to the Elves and drjupansal to the Dwarves. Tolkien … lived and breathed the sources of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic myth, which are related to Norse myth. As a professional linguist, Tolkien must have seen that some translations of Alvissmal, for example Bellows’ (1936), failed to show that the different dialects / languages might be unintelligible, and that the common language between the Aesir and the Dwarves was the language of humans’, Anderson, ‘Norse Mythology, Fantasy and Lord of the Rings’: http://wbrondtkamffer.com/tag/j-r-r-tolkien (30 October 2012).
3. John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: the Threshold of Middle Earth (London: HarperCollins 2003), 307–8.
4. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954–55; 1 Vol. edition; London: HarperCollins 2012), 1172. Might kûd-dûkan carry some echo of Tolkien’s classical education? The Greek κυδ- is the root of words meaning ‘renown, glory, esteem’; το δυικαν is Greek for ‘the dual number’. Perhaps the Hobbits are ‘twice renowned’ in the sense that they appear in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
5. Tom Shippey, J. R .R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins 2000), 46. Shippey also speculates that ‘hobbit’ may owe something to the word ‘rabbit.’
6. The Old Norse Saga King Heidrek the Wise—which I talk about above, on account of its lengthy riddle context—begins with King Garðaríki, Heidrek’s father, obtaining from the dwarfs the magic sword Tyrfingr, ‘hét ok allra var bitrast’, ‘of all swords the sharpest’. ‘Bitrast’ might be translated ‘bitterest’, provide we keep this etymological sense of the meaning of ‘bitter’ alive.
7. Iona and Peter Opie’s Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (2nd edn; Oxford: Clarendon Press 1971), 215. Opie goes on to quote Lewis Carroll: ‘ “It is very provoking to be called an egg—very” as Humpty admits in Through the Looking Glass, but such common knowledge cannot be gainsaid.’
8. ‘E. G. Withycombe (Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names) also associates a human being with the name [Humpty-Dumpty], suggesting that it echoes the pet forms of Humphrey which were Dumphry and Dump.’ Opies, Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, 215. Both ‘hombetty’ or ‘hobbety’ are variants noted in the OED. There is, of course, no actual medieval Romance entitled Ringe.
Bibliography
Works by Tolkien
Carpenter, Humphrey (ed.), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1985; London: HarperCollins 1995)
Tolkien, J. R. R., The Hobbit (1937; London: HarperCollins 2012)
——, The Lord of the Rings (1954–55; 1 vol. edition; London: HarperCollins 2012)
——, Tree and Leaf (London: Allen & Unwin 1964)
——, Unfinished Tales (ed. Christopher Tolkien; London: Allen & Unwin 1980)
——, Morgoth’s Ring (ed. Christopher Tolkien; The History of Middle Earth, vol. 10: London: HarperCollins 1994)
——, The Children of Húrin (ed. Christopher Tolkien; London: HarperCollins 2006)
——, Sigurd and Gudrún (ed. Christopher Tolkien; London: HarperCollins 2009)
——, Tales from the Perilous Realm (London:HarperCollins, 2008)
Other works
Beowulf (ed. A. J. Wyatt; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1914)
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)
The Poetic Edda (trans. Carolyne Larrington; Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996)
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)
Anderson, Charlie, ‘Norse Mythology, Fantasy and Lord of the Rings’: http://wbrondtkamffer.com/tag/j-r-r-tolkien (30 October 2012)
Anderson, Douglas (ed.), The Annotated Hobbit (London: Unwin Hyman 1988)
Anderson, Earl R., ‘Grendl’s glof (Beowulf 2085b–88) and Various Latin Analogues’, Mediaevalia 8 (1982) 1–8
Artamonova, Maria, ‘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), 71–88
Bates, Brian, The Real Middle-Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages (London: Pan Books 2002)
Bergonzi, Bernard, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel’, in The Myth of Modernism and the Twentieth Century (Brighton: Harvester Press 1986), 172–87
Bitterli, Dieter, Say What I Am Called: the Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2009)
Bone, Gavin, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Oxford 1943)
Bradley, S. A. J., Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Dent, Everyman 1982)
Brown, Devin, The Christian World of The Hobbit (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press 2012)
Caldecott, Stratford, Secret Fire: the Spiritual Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: Darton, Longman and Todd 2003)
Carey, James, 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)
Carter, Lin, Tolkien: a Look Behind the Lord of the Rings (1969; updated edn, London: Gollancz 2003)
Cross, F. L. (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd edition; Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997)
Crossley-Holland, Kevin, The Exeter Book of Riddles (London: Penguin; revised edn 1993)
Cumming, Valerie, C. W. Cunnington, and E. Cunnington (eds), The Dictionary of Fashion History (Oxford: Berg 2010)
Davies, Brian, Aquinas: an Introduction (London: Continuum 2002)
Delalande, Pierre, Le Livre de Neant (Paris: Inexistant 2012)
DiGaetani, John Louis, Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel (London: Associated University
Presses 1978)
Elliot, Ralph Warren Victor, Runes: an Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1980), 43
——, ‘Cynewulf’s Runes in Juliana and Fates of the Apostles’, in Robert E. Bjork (ed.), Cynewulf: Basic Readings (London: Routledge 1996)
Garth, John, Tolkien and the Great War: the Threshold of Middle Earth (London: HarperCollins 2003)
Graves, Robert, The Crowning Privilege: Collected Essays on Poetry (London: Doubleday 1960)
——, The White Goddess (amended and enlarged edition; London: Faber and Faber 1961)
Gummere, Francis, The Popular Ballad (1907; Dover Publications 1959)
Hawkes, A. J., ‘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), 311–44
Heanry, Seamus (trans.), Beowulf (London: Faber and Faber 1999)
Hill, John M., The Anglo-Saxon Warrior Ethic: Reconstructing Lordship in Early English Literature (Gainesville: University of Florida Press 2000)
Jacobs, Alan (ed.), Auden: For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2013)
Jember, Gregory K., The Old English Riddles: a New Translation (Denver, CO: Society for New Language Study, 1972)
Ker, W. P., The Dark Ages (Oxford 1904)
Kierkegaard, Søren, Philosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy (trans. David F. Swenson; Princeton: Princeton University Press 1962)
Lewis, C. S., Reflections on the Psalms (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1958)
Lyon, H. R., Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest (2nd edn; Longman 1991)
Manlove, Colin, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975)
McCully, Chris, Old English Poems and Riddles (Manchester: Carcanet 2008)
Milbank, Alison, ‘The Riddle and the Gift: the Hobbit at Christmas’, ABC Religion and Ethics (24 December 2012): http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/12/24/3660152.htm
Morgan, Gwendolyn, ‘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
Moseley, Charles, J. R. R. Tolkien (Tavistock: Northcote House/British Council 1997)
Murphy, Patrick J., Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011)
Noel, Ruth S., The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1974)
Olsen, Corey, Exploring J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 2012)
Opie, Peter, and Iona Opie, Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (2nd edn; Oxford: Clarendon Press 1971)
O’Prey, Paul (ed.), Robert Graves: Selected Poems (London: Penguin 1986)
Orchard, Andrew, Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2003)
OED: The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn; Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989)
Pearce, Joseph, Tolkien: Man and Myth (London: HarperCollins 1998)
Phillips, Adam, Side Effects (London: Penguin 2006)
Porter, Peter, ‘A Chagall Postcard’, Possible Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989), 17
Radner, J. N., ‘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
Rateliff, John D., The History of the Hobbit: Mr Baggins (London: HarperCollins 2007)
Rothfuss, Patrick, The Name of the Wind (New York: Daw 2006)
Shippey, Tom, The Road to Middle-Earth: how J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (2nd edn; London: HarperCollins 1992)
——, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins 2002)
Stacey, Robin Chapman, ‘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
——, ‘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
——, Dark Speech: the Performance of Law in Early Ireland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)
Stewart, Ann Harleman, ‘Kenning and Riddle in Old English’, Papers on Language and Literature 15 (1979), 115–36
Sturluson, Snorri, The Prose Edda (trans. Jesse Byock; London: Penguin 2005)
Tupper, Frederick (ed.), The Riddles of the Exeter Book (Boston: 1910)
Wilcox, Jonathan, ‘Mock-Riddles in Old English: Exeter Riddles 86 and 19’, Studies in Philology 93 (1996), 180–7
Index
Aldheim, 80–1
Aldiss, Brian, 137, 147
Alvísmál, The, 85–9, 136, 161
Anderson, Charlie, 178–9
Anderson, Douglas, 68
Anderson Earl Robert, 106
Aquinas, Saint, 119
Artamonova, Maria, 29–30
Auden, Wistan Hugh, For the Time Being: a Christmas Oratorio, 11
Augustine, Saint, 119
Austen, Jane, 25–6
Emma, 25, 138
‘Battle of Maldon, The’, 23
Beowulf, 26–7, 39, 42, 51, 68, 103–7
Bergonzi, Bernard, 120
Bersani, Leo, 154
Bitterli, Dieter, 47
Bolaño, Roberto, 169
Bretherton, Christopher, 36, 126
Brightman, Edgar Sheffield, 41
Brown, Dan, The Da Vinci Code, 2
Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress, 36
burrahobbit, nature of, 89–90
Caldecott, Stratford, 177
Carey, James, 78–9, 80
Chambers, Raymond Wilson, 22
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 164
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 12, 133
Crossley-Holland, Kevin, 16, 37, 39, 70–2
Cynewulf, 31, 82–3
Davies, Brian, 119
Delalande, Pierre, 1, 150, 173
Delany, Samuel, 153
Derrida, Jacques, 130
Dickens, Charles, 156
DiGaetani, John Louis, 116
Donne, John, ‘A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning’, 10
Elgar, Eileen, 38
Elliot, Ralph, 83
Empson, William, 51
Ents, riddle of, 26–8, 133
Exeter Book, The, 16, 31–55 passim, 70–3, 81–3, 91, 125, 149
Freud, Anna, 155
Freud, Sigmund, 14, 22, 146, 151, 155–6
Garner, Alan, 82
Garth, John, 162–3
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 138
Graves, Robert
‘She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep’, 10–11
The White Goddess, 79–81, 174
Greene, Graham, 41, 120
Harder, Douglas Wilhelm, 73
Hardy, Thomas, 3, 135
Heaney, Seamus, 16, 106, 112
Hill, John Michael, 22
Historia Brittonum, 39
Homer, 62
Hooper, Walter, 41
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 35
House (TV Show), 2
Jackson, Peter, 130, 137, 154
Jacobs, Alan, 170
Jacques, Brian, 82
James, Henry, 26
Jember, Gregory, 31
Johnson, Samuel, 53
Kelly, Fergus, 45
Kennings, 42–3, 53
Ker, William Paton, 6–7, 22, 23, 105–6
Kierkegaard, Søren, 15–16
Kipling, Rudyard
‘The Changelings’, 7–8
‘The Egg Shell’, 8–9
Larrington, Carolyne, 20
Le Guin, Ursula, 158–9
Leechbooks of Bald, 59–60
Leofric (Bishop), 32
Lewis, Clive Staples, 12, 41, 122–3, 160, 162
Mabinogion, 39
/> Manlove, Colin, 120–1
Martin-Clarke, Daisy Elizabeth, 29
Marx, Karl, 127
McEllen, Ian, as Gandalf, 132
McGully, Chris, 43–4
Milton, John, 38, 132
Mitchell, Bruce, 23
Mitchison, Naomi, 41
Moretti, Franco, 138–9
Morgan, Gwendolyn, 31
Morris, William, 140, 145
Murphy, Patrick, 16, 55
Murray, Robert Fr., 119
Olsen, Corey, 92–3
Opie, Iona, 165
Opie, Peter, 165
Orchard, Andrew, 106–7
Paul (Saint), 2–3
Peppe, Roger, 9
Phillips, Adam 154–6
Porter, Peter, 175–6
Radner, Joan, 46
Raine, Craig
‘The Onion, Memory’, 10
‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’, 14
Rateliff, John, 65–6, 161, 174
Renard, Jules, 169
Richardson, Samuel, Pamela, 138
Robinson, Frederick, 23
Rothfuss, Patrick, The Name of the Wind, 101–2
Rowling, Joanne, 158
Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, The, 47–51, 63–4, 68
Salus, Peter, 19
Shakespeare, William
Hamlet, 138, 145–6
Macbeth, 27
Shippey, Tom, 4, 49, 50, 68, 77, 117, 163, 169, 170–1, 178
Solomon and Saturn, 46–8
Stacey, Robin Chapman, 46, 50, 172
Stevens, Wallace, 11
Symphosius, 81
Taylor, Paul, 19
Tolkien, Christopher, 144
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, 1
very unHardyesque, 3, 43
writes to Shippey, 4
meets Robert Graves, 11
cordially dislikes allegory, 12
moved by two lines of Cynewulf, 32–3
haunted by Atlantis, 36
fascinated by dragons, 41
on the source of his riddles, 68–9
writes 2000–page commentary on Beowulf, 104
repudiates any debt to Wagner Ring, 116, 157
on marriage, 122
liked typewriters, 126