The Riddles of The Hobbit Read Online Free

dissent should emerge from the pages that follow. ‘
The Hobbit
’, as Tolkien wrote to Stanley Unwin in 1947, in a letter quoted as one of the epigraphs to this chapter ‘was after all not as simple as it seemed.’ I have decided to take him at his word. As for riddles: it is the process of engaging them, rather than the determining of any one ‘answer’, that is where their capacity for illumination is located.
    Light is the
fons et origo
of Tolkien’s imaginary cosmos, as it is of
our
cosmos (according, at least, to Genesis); and most of Tolkien’s art is concerned, in deep ways, with exploring the interactions between seeing and unseeing, visibility and invisibility, brightness and darkness. It is worth holding in mind that a riddle, formally speaking, is a small example of something unseen presenting itself to us and asking to be seen. It is, as it were, a thing wearing a ring of invisibility. Our wits are the mode by which it can be made visible again. ‘Blessed are the eyes’, Christ told his disciples, ‘which see the things which ye see. For I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them’ (Luke 10:23). To the extent that riddles are seen as a negligible, or even despicable, mode of poetry I have attempted, here, to take them much more seriously, as both examples of and tropes for the broader mystery of what is hidden and what revealed in literature.
    There is a danger, of which I am of course aware, that a critic working on a theme or topic for any length of time may become Casaubonised—that, in other words, s/he may come to believe that her pet subject actually is the key to all mythologies. The problem with riddles, it seems to me, is not that they are a trivial and marginal manifestion of culture; but on the contrary that they are rather
too
far-reaching and profound.
    In other words my argument is a little less banal than ‘reading is deducing things from the clues provided by the text’; or at least I hope it is. It is that even in texts that seem straightforward, interpretation is much more ironic than mimetic; more a process of openingdisclosure than a narrowing-down enclosure. One of the points of a poem like ‘A Martian Sends A Postcard Home’ is that it is only familiarity (or habitude) that stands between us and a vision of the world as a fascinating but baffling series of puzzles to be decoded. That, we could say, if the doors of perception were cleansed to a properly Martian cleanliness we should see the world as it truly is,
a riddle
.
    This in turn connects with the larger sense that human subjectivity—mind, personality, soul—is itself a riddle. Put like that the sentiment may come over as windy, the tawdry vatic in specie. But I mean it in a particular way. It is, after all, one of Freud’s key insights that human life is not simple or straightforward; that we do not know ourselves after the direct mimetic model of a photograph or a textbook, but rather that our self-knowledge is an ironic business, slant, full of obscurity and gaps. Freud proposes that we are a riddle unto ourselves, and sets up psychoanalysis as a means of unriddling the puzzle of psychosis, trauma, hysteria or plain old human unhappiness. A dream (say) may appear to be one thing, but it is in fact something else; it is, in short, a riddle to be decoded with access to the right sorts of reading competencies. In Chapter 9 below I say something about the complexities of our psychological fantasies, and the relation of the desire they encode to the body of writing that is called, largely for bookselling convenience, ‘Fantasy’—the genre of course to which
The Hobbit
belongs.
    The Hobbit
is not only a ‘Fantasy’ book; it is a book for children. This is also relevant to what I want to try and argue. It is, it seems to me, not coincidental that so many childrens’ and ‘Young Adult’ books are so full of puzzles and riddles, from