The Riddles of The Hobbit Read Online Free Page B

Intervening into the large body of academic criticism about Anglo-Saxon riddles, Patrick J. Murphy rehearses the various proffered solutions to ‘Riddle 69’ of the
Exeter Book
(I look at this riddle myself below). But then he takes a step too few academics do: he asks not only what the answer is, but what the answer
does
:
    We might then ask what this solution
does
. Among other things, the solution snaps the text into sudden focus and reveals the great wonder of a commonplace thing. This sense of the miraculous in the mundane is at the heart of Old English riddling. 12
    This is very well put, and gains in insightfulness when we apply it (as Murphy does not) to Tolkien, because for him the category of ‘the miraculous’ is so profound, and so central to his art. Riddles stimulate and empower us, and they do more than that. In the largest sense they attempt to think the things thought cannot think.
    In what follows I quote from a variety of Old English texts, sometimes citing the Anglo-Saxon, more often, since my concern is only rarely specific to that language, in modern English translation. I have decided to quote from a variety of translations, including on occasion my own—Kevin Crossley Holland’s version of the
Exeter Book
riddles (Penguin, revised edition 1993) is a marvel of graceful precision and poetic effect, but although I do cite it in the pages that follow it did not seem fair to cite only him. It felt a little like I was picking on him. Accordingly, I quote a variety of other translations, of the riddles and of other OE texts. I have sometimes quoted Seamus Heaney’s celebrated translation of
Beowulf
; unattributed translations from the Old English (including
Beowulf
) are my own.
    A book about
The Hobbit
can hardly avoid quoting from Tolkien’s own works. The Tolkien estate is, quite properly, protective of itsvarious copyrights, and one of the processes of revising this book during its various drafts has been the removal of too generous quotation from Tolkien’s own words, replacing some passages with paraphrase—not an ideal compromise, from my point of view, but necessary. I have tried to keep quotation from Tolkien to a minimum, and certainly to keep it within the bounds of the provision for scholarly and critical ‘fair use’. I would have liked to quote a lot more.
    Irony can be serious, but even at its most serious there is something playful—something crooked, something riddling—in the nature of it. The present book is written in that spirit. Most of its ironies are serious ones, and I am genuinely attempting to get to the bottom of what seem to me serious questions about Tolkien, about fantasy and about riddling. But sometimes that seriousness finds expression in more deliberately ingenious and playful mode than at others. The first two chapters aim to contextualise Tolkien’s own riddling practice by looking at the prevalence, and nature, of riddles in Anglo-Saxon culture. The two chapters that follow (‘Riddles in the Dark’ and ‘The Riddles of the All-Wise’) read the riddle-contest between Bilbo and Gollum from chapter 8 of
The Hobbit
in some detail. There follows a chapter on The Hobbit as a whole, and another that considers how puzzling it is that a character inhabiting a pre-modern, medieval or Dark-Age world has
pockets
. Chapters 7 and 8 (‘The Riddle of the Ring’ and ‘The
Lord of the Rings
and the Riddle of Writing’) move into a broader discussion of
The Lord of the Rings
; and Chapters 9 and 10 (‘The Volsung Riddle: Character in Tolkien’ and ‘The Enigma of Genre Fantasy’) range more widely still, looking at the genre of ‘Tolkienian’ fantasy as a whole in an attempt to suggest reasons why it has proved so popular and enduring. For the final chapter I return to
The Hobbit
, and suggest a new answer to the most obvious riddle of all: ‘what is a hobbit’?

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The Anglo-Saxon Riddleworld
    Riddles are in origin a folk-art, ancient and worldwide …