Solomon said:
‘Old age has power over everything on earth. She reaches far and wide with her ravaging slave-chain, her fetters are broad, her rope is long, she subdues everything that she wants to. She smashes trees and breaks their branches, in her progress she uproots the standing trunk and fells it to the ground. After that she eats the wild bird. She fights better than a wolf, she waits longer than a stone, she proves stronger than steel, she bites iron with rust; she does the same to us.’
—Poems of Wisdom and Learning [1976], pages 91 & 93.
Taum Santoski, on the other hand, suggested the following Icelandic riddle as a source:
I am without beginning, yet I am born
I am also without ending, and yet I die
I have neither eyes nor ears, yet I see and hear
I am never seen, and yet my works are visible
I am long conquered, I am never conquered,
and yet I am vanquished
I labor ever, but am never tired
I am wise but dwell among the foolish
I am a lover of Providence, and yet it
may appear to me that it hates me
Often I die before I am born, and yet I am immortal
Without being aware of it, I often take by surprise
I live with Christians, I dwell among the heathen
among the cursed in Hell I am cursed, and I reign in the
Kingdom of Glory.
—Árnason, riddle #105: Time.
Tolkien would also have been familiar with the odd scene in the Prose Edda where Thor wrestles with, and is bested by, an old woman named Elli who turns out to be Old Age itself – in the words of Thor’s wily host, ‘there never has been, nor ever will be anyone (if he grows old enough to become aged) who is not tripped up by old age’ (Prose Edda, ‘The Deluding of Gylfi’, pages 76 & 78). Finally, the strange little story that ends ‘The Hiding of Valinor’ in The Book of Lost Tales tells how the three children of Aluin (or Time), Danuin, Ranuin, and Fanuin (Day, Month, and Year), wind invisible chains that bind the sun and moon:
‘. . . and so shall all the world and the dwellers within it, both Gods and Elves and Men, and all the creatures that go and the things that have roots thereon, be bound about in the bonds of Time.’
Then were all the Gods [i.e., the Valar] afraid, seeing what was come, and knowing that hereafter even they should in counted time be subject to slow eld and their bright days to waning, until Ilúvatar at the Great End calls them back.
—BLT I.219.
Beside this ferocious abstract riddle, the fish-riddle’s source is simple: here Tolkien is quoting directly from The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, where at one point Gestumblindi (the disguised Odin) asks King Heidrek
What lives on high fells?
What falls in deep dales?
What lives without breath?
What is never silent?
This riddle ponder,
O prince Heidrek!
‘Your riddle is good, Gestumblindi,’ said the king; ‘I have guessed it. The raven lives ever on the high fells, the dew falls ever in the deep dales, the fish lives without breath, and the rushing waterfall is never silent.’
—The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise,
tr. Christopher Tolkien, page 80; italics mine.
Straightforward as this would seem, it also reveals something interesting about Tolkien’s sources. As T. A. Shippey has noted, Tolkien seems drawn to the grey areas of scholarship – that is, his creative inspiration was sparked by debatable points. Thus the cup-stealing episode in Beowulf, which inspired the chapter ‘Inside Information’ (see p. 533), is based on a scholarly reconstruction of a badly-damaged section of the manuscript. Similarly, the name Éomer in The Lord of the Rings is borrowed, not from Beowulf, but from a scholar’s emendation of the word which actually occurs in the Beowulf manuscript.25 While The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise and its riddle-contest are well-known among Norse scholars, this particular riddle is found in only one of the three main versions of the saga, that found in the Hauksbok of Haukr Erlendsson (d. 1334). Furthermore, the page containing this riddle is lost from the original manuscript and only survives in two seventeenth-century copies made before the damage occurred – in short, making this exactly the kind of elusive, nearly-lost bit of ancient lore that Tolkien seems to have found most appealing.26
Finally, there is Bilbo’s last, unanswerable question. It is true that it is not a riddle, but then Gollum’s words – ‘It’s got to ask us a question, my precious, yes yes just one more question to guess, yes, yes’ (italics mine) – open the door for a non-riddle: he asks for a question, and that is exactly what he got. This very neatly evades a problem: if, as Tolkien later said, ‘the riddle game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it’, then it is important that Bilbo himself not lie open to the accusation of cheating, that he win ‘pretty fairly’. Comparison with Tolkien’s sources is once again illuminating. In Vafthrúthnismál, the two contestants exchange questions to prove their knowledge; Bilbo’s final question would be perfectly fair by the standards of that contest. By contrast, in The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise Odin (Gestumblindi) asks riddles and the king answers them all – until Odin asks a non-riddle that is unanswerable, ‘winning’ by an underhanded method that drives his opponent into a rage. As Christopher Tolkien notes, ‘it is inapposite as the last question of a riddle-match, since it is not a riddle’ and suggests that ‘it was brought in . . . as the dramatic conclusion because it had become the traditional unanswerable question’ (The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise p. 735). To be blunt, Odin wins by a cheat, just as Gollum accuses Bilbo of having done in the revised version of this chapter (see p. xx). But Tolkien has forestalled that objection by Gollum’s careless wording just before the final puzzle, providing his hero with a valid out from the sticky situation.
One final curious feature about the riddles should be pointed out before moving on: as the narrator himself points out in a passage that did not survive into the published book, ‘You notice he [Gollum] was hissing less as he got excited’ (p. 157). In fact, he does not hiss at all when reciting his riddles; they are anomalous to his normal habits of speech. This fact, and the fact that all the riddles are written directly into the manuscript, in their final order, with little hesitation and with no preliminary drafting on scrap pages or the backs of pages (as is the case with the majority of the other poems in the book) – or at least none that survives – suggests that all these riddles predate the book. If this is the case, they may date from the Leeds period, like the two Anglo-Saxon riddles published in 1923, but the evidence is too slight to prove this one way or the other.
(iii)
The Ring
The most important point of connection between The Hobbit and its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, is the Ring itself. Just as hobbits, Gollum, the wizard, and the whole setting of Middle-earth grew and were transformed for the more ambitious requirements of the latter book, so too did the ring. For Bilbo’s ring is not the same as Frodo’s in its nature nor its powers, although the alteration was so smoothly done, with such subtlety and skill, that few readers grasp the extent of the change; many who read or re-read The Hobbit after The Lord of the Rings unconsciously import more sinister associations for the ring into the earlier book than the story itself supports. It is important to remember that Tolkien did not just expand the ring’s effects for the sequel; he actually altered them. Bilbo’s and Gollum’s ring is a simple ring of invisibility with rather limited power – it cannot make its wearer’s shadow disappear, for instance, and Bilbo has to be careful to avoid being given away by this flaw in the ring’s power. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, this limitation has completely disappeared; the descriptions of its use there by Frodo give no hint that his shadow remains behind. Rather than simply making the wearer disappear, putting on the Ring plunges Frodo into an invisible, ethereal world, most notably in the scene on Weat
hertop, where it enables him to see the hitherto invisible features of the Ringwraiths. Bilbo experiences nothing of the kind; his remains a simple ring of invisibility, a ‘very fine thing’ (DAA.228) for a burglar to have, useful but limited in scope.
There is also in the original book no connection between Gollum’s ring and The Necromancer who lurks on the fringes of the story – and indeed in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ this character had no special affinity with magical rings; only later, when Tolkien pondered possible connections between the various loose ends of Mr. Baggins’ first adventure, did he forge a relationship between the elusive Necromancer and Gollum’s ring. What’s more, in the later tale he created a malign aura for the ring totally absent from the original book. The brooding presence Tolkien gives the One Ring throughout The Lord of the Rings – a masterstroke, insofar as its character can only be judged indirectly by the effect it has on the thoughts of its possessor – is absent here. Significantly, the curious episode of the ring’s betrayal of its new master near the end of this chapter was not part of the original story and only came in with the revised version of 1947; in the original, the goblins saw Bilbo not because the ring had vanished from his finger without his knowledge but because he had taken it off immediately after playing his trick on Gollum to test its powers (contrast p. 161 with page 735). No shadow of murder hangs over it; the whole scene with Déagol had yet to be thought of. It is simply a magical ring that makes you (mostly) invisible: Gollum’s birthday-present, given to him ‘ages and ages before in old days when such rings were less uncommon.’
Tolkien’s source for the ring has been much debated.27 His exact source will probably never be known for the simple reason that he probably didn’t have one in the sense of a single direct model. Magical rings are, after all, common in both literature and folk-lore, among the most famous being Aladdin’s genie ring (with the same power as his magical lamp, and almost as powerful), Odin’s Draupnir (which ‘drops’ eight identical gold rings every ninth night – cf. The Prose Edda p. 83), and the cursed Ring of the Nibelungs (which, like the Seven Rings of the dwarves, breeds wealth – cf. The Prose Edda pp. 111ff), none of which have the power to make their wearers invisible. Similarly, magical items that make one invisible are so common that Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature has three full pages (rev. ed. [1955–8], Vol. II, pages 195–8) listing various forms such an item might take: a feather or herb, a belt or cap or hat, a sword or jewel or helmet, pills or a salve, a wand or staff or ring, a mirror or boots or stone or ashes, or any of a number of stranger means (such as being pregnant with a saint, or holding a Hand of Glory). The combination of these two motifs, however, are surprisingly rare: of the vast number of items that confer invisibility, and the huge number of magical rings, there are surprisingly few rings of invisibility before Tolkien popularized the idea.28
Of these rings the earliest, and widely (though I think mistakenly) thought the likeliest to have influenced Tolkien, is the Ring of Gyges. In Book II of Plato’s The Republic [circa 390 BC], Plato’s brother Glaucon tells Socrates a fable in order to make a point about power corrupting:
They relate that he [the ancestor of Gyges the Lydian]29 was a shepherd in the service of the ruler at that time of Lydia, and that after a great deluge of rain and an earthquake the ground opened and a chasm appeared in the place where he was pasturing; and they say that he saw and wondered and went down into the chasm; and the story goes that he beheld other marvels there and a hollow bronze horse with little doors, and that he peeped in and saw a corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature, and that there was nothing else but a gold ring on its hand, which he took off and went forth. And when the shepherds held their customary assembly to make their monthly report to the king about the flocks, he also attended wearing the ring. So as he sat there it chanced that he turned the collet [i.e., setting] of the ring towards himself, towards the inner part of his hand, and when this took place they say that he became invisible to those who sat by him and they spoke of him as absent; and that he was amazed, and again fumbling with the ring turned the collet outwards and so became visible. On noting this he experimented with the ring to see if it possessed this virtue, and he found the result to be that when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, and when outwards visible; and becoming aware of this, he immediately managed things so that he became one of the messengers who went up to the king, and on coming there he seduced the king’s wife and with her aid set upon the king and slew him and possessed his kingdom. If now there should be two such rings, and the just man should put on one and the unjust the other, no one could be found, it would seem, of such adamantine temper as to persevere in justice and endure to refrain his hands from the possessions of others and not touch them, though he might with impunity take what he wished even from the market-place, and enter into houses and lie with whom he pleased, and slay and loose from bonds whomsoever he would, and in all other things conduct himself among mankind as the equal of a god. And in so acting he would do no differently from the other [i.e., unjust] man, but both would pursue the same course. And yet this is a great proof, one might argue, that no one is just of his own will but only from constraint . . .
—Plato, The Republic, ed. & tr. Paul Shore [1930].
Were it not for the absence, in the manuscript and first edition of The Hobbit, of any hint that the ring corrupts its possessor, Plato’s little tale would seem the obvious source for Tolkien’s One Ring. Tolkien certainly knew his Plato – he had, after all, originally entered Oxford as a Classical scholar, and the whole Númenor story was, ultimately, inspired by passages in two others of Plato’s dialogues30 – and the story has a mythical air to it likely to catch in the memory and re-emerge years or decades later. Indeed, Gandalf’s words in ‘The Shadow of the Past’ (‘A mortal . . . who . . . often uses the Ring to make himself invisible . . . sooner or later – later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last – sooner or later the dark power will devour him’) could almost be taken as a gloss on Plato’s passage. But there is a fatal flaw in this theory: the One Ring ‘to bring them all and in the darkness bind them’ did not exist in The Hobbit. Tolkien might well have been inspired by Plato, or by H. G. Wells’ Invisible Man [1897], which makes much the same point, when he was casting about in 1936–7 for a way of continuing the ‘series’ of Mr. Baggins’ adventures at his publisher’s request, but neither is likely to have inspired the original creation: the defining characteristics, the whole point of those stories – the inevitably corrupting nature of the power to move about invisibly – is totally absent from Tolkien’s original conception. It seems much more likely, therefore, that the affinities between the Ring of Gyges and Sauron’s ring are due to this passage having been drawn to Tolkien’s attention after the publication of The Hobbit in 1937.31
Much more likely is the second possible source, occurring some millennium and a half later: Chrétien de Troyes’ Ywain: The Knight of the Lion. In this Arthurian romance [circa 1177], Ywain is trapped in the castle of a man he has just mortally wounded, and escapes his foe’s enraged retainers only because a maiden he had once befriended, the Lady Lunete, loans him a
little ring, explaining that it had the same effect as the bark of a tree which covers the wood so that one cannot see it at all. It was necessary that one wear the ring with the stone inside the fist. Whoever had the ring on his finger need not be wary of anything, for no man could see him however wide his eyes were open any more than he could see the wood covered by the bark growing over it.
—Ywain: The Knight of the Lion, tr. Ackerman, Locke, & Carroll
[1957 & 1977], p. 18.
Ywain uses the ring to escape from a gatehouse (a good parallel to Bilbo’s escape from the goblins’ guardpost, although the knight makes his way into a stronghold filled with enemies, rather than escaping from one), easily evading their searches as they grope blindly for the unseen intruder in terms reminiscent of th
e goblin-guards at the Back Gate:
. . . There was much floundering about, and they set up a great turmoil with their clubs just as does a blind man who stumblingly goes tapping about searching for something . . .
—ibid., p. 19.
Like Plato’s ring, and unlike Bilbo’s, simply wearing this ring has no effect: the ring must be turned so that its stone or setting, which would normally rest on top of the finger, instead faces towards the palm (like turning a watch so that the face is on the inside of the wrist). It is implied, but not explicitly stated, that the hand wearing the ring must then be closed in a fist, concealing the stone within its grasp. There is thus no need to take the ring off to appear or to search frantically for it in a pocket when the sudden need to disappear arises, as when Bilbo encounters the goblin-guards.
The same is true of the magic rings in two romances directly based upon Chrétien’s work, Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein [circa 1210] and the anonymous ‘The Lady of the Fountain’ [mid-fourteenth-century or earlier]. Hartmann’s romance is a translation of Chrétien’s (Old) French story into his own Middle High German,32 as comparison of the ring-description shows:
‘. . . Sir Iwein, take this ring and you will be safe from harm. The stone is of such a nature that whoever holds it in his bare hand cannot be seen or found as long as he keeps it there. You don’t need to worry any longer: you will be hidden like wood under bark.
‘. . . Close your hand on the stone I gave you, and I’ll pledge my soul that you won’t be harmed, because truly no one will see you. What could be better? You will see all your enemies standing near you and going around you with ready weapons and yet so blinded that they can’t find you even though you are right in their midst.’
The History of the Hobbit Page 25