The Riddles of The Hobbit Read Online Free Page A

the
Alice
books to the anagrams and spell-puzzles of Harry Potter. These are books about ‘growing up’.
The Hobbit
is likewise about Bilbo ‘growing up’, or least growing into something more than he previously was. As a hobbit he combines a child’s stature with a middle-aged man’s set-in-his-ways mind, and his adventures challenge both aspects of him. The point is that the world is more of a riddle when we are growing up—indeed, ‘growing up’ is in large part (inevitable physiological changes aside) a process of unriddling the many puzzles, larger and small, that experience joyfully showers upon us. One of the ways the unexamined wisdom of children manifests in the world, one of the ways in which the child
is
father to the man, is the way kids ask riddles all the time: why is the sky blue? Why is water wet? Why is that man crying? Whyare that woman and that man cuddling so close? You might object that these are simple questions, not riddles; and certainly children do ask a great many questions. But ‘why is the sky blue?’ is more than a question (after all: could
you
supply a 5-year old child with an answer in a way that did not merely baffle her?) It is a way of reaching out towards the way beauty and wonder overroof our mundane worlds. It is to take the step beyond merely registering the glory of a blue sky, into the realm of wanting to comprehend that glory. It is, that is to say, intensely human.

    In what follows a great many riddles are cited, and to many of these I offer solutions—if possible, I try to offer more than one. This is in the nature of what I am doing, and for it I make no apology. Riddling is as much as anything about ingenuity, and I value ingenuity very highly—find it baffling, in fact, how little regard most people have for it as a human skill. At any rate, I take it that a mode that prizes invention and ingenuity is best discussed
ingeniously
. A reader may ask: ‘ah, but is what you are arguing here
true
?’ That is a valid and important question, but it is not, I submit, a
simple
question. Truth is a riddle whose premises may not be what you thought, at first, they were; and whose answer may only be another, further riddle. Kierkegaard once defined truth as a leap of faith, a subjective and paradoxical thing. I might prefer ‘riddle’ to ‘paradox’, because the former term implies a process—a launch pad for the leap of faith—where the latter makes me think of knots and blockages. But that is only a personal quirk. More to the point, Kierkegaard’s famous subjectivised truth (‘an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for the individual’) famously distinguishes between approximation and appropriation, the former akin to the scientific approach to veracity, the latter necessarily personal and subjective. It would be fair to say that I appropriate Tolkien’s great novel in this little book, and it may be worth noting that I do so from a position of love. I first read
The Hobbit
as a young child, and fell deeply for it from the beginning (I am hardly alone in that, of course). My account can hardly be other than subjective. I say so not to try and exculpate myself, but to draw attention to the sense in which thetruth-claims contained between these covers are themselves both subjective and bounded by the rubrics of the riddle. Kierkegaard puts into the mouth of his sockpuppet Johannes Climacus the more extreme version of this idea: that ‘the supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking, even in the thinking of the individual, in so far as in thinking he participates in something transcending himself. But habit dulls our sensibilities, and prevents us from perceiving it.’ 11 Riddles force us to look again at those things dulled by the habit of our sensibilities.