The Riddles of The Hobbit (13 page)

Sixty men in company came

riding down to the estuary. Eleven

of those mounted men had horses

of peace, and four had pale great horses.

They could not cross the water

as they wished for the channel was too deep,

the shelf too abrupt, the current too strong

the choppy waves thronging. Then the men

and their horses climbed on to a wagon—a burden

under the cross-bar.

The riddle continues, describing how ‘a single horse’ pulls the wagon over the estuary, ‘no ox, nor carthorse, nor muscular men / dragged it with him’ and ‘he did not swim, / nor muddy the water, nor ride on the wind, nor double back.’ Scholars suggest two possible solutions to this riddle. One is that the sixty men in company are the stars surrounding the pole star, circling through the sky during the course of the night; and the fifteen mounted on horses are the specific constellation of the Great Bear, or ‘the Great Wain’ (sometimes called Charles’ Wain), that ‘crosses the estuary’ in the sense of being
reflected in its waters. The four ‘great pale horses’ are the four stars marking out the rectangular component of the constellation, which are visibily of a different intensity to the others.

A second answer, quite incompatible with the first, is that the sixty men are the half-days of the month of December (it was a common Anglo-Saxon habit to calculate by half-days, or half-years). The eleven riders on ‘horses of peace’ stand-in for the holy days—the month’s four Sundays and seven feast days. The ‘estuary’ is then taken as the divide between the old year and the new. As to whether we are supposed to take the ‘four’ as part of the eleven, or to add them
to
the eleven (the latter seems to me to make more sense), the question remains moot. And the fact that there are two possible answers seems to me a strength of the riddle rather than a weakness.

In Tolkien’s riddle, ‘fifteen’ crops up again, this time disposed into ‘five’ groups. Tolkien was attentive to the dates over which his fictional narrative was disposed, dates which can be calculated with reference to the descriptions of full, half and new moons. As Douglas Wilhelm Harder shows, the events of
The Hobbit
begin in April 2941; and Bilbo returns home in June 2942 (3rd Age): fifteen months.
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The ‘five’ may refer to the five stages of the journey: from Bag-End to Rivendell, Rivendell to Erebor, Erebor back to Beorn’s house (Harder shows that on the return journey they stay ‘approximately four months’, time for the snows to melt), then to Rivendell again and finally back home.
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I want to close this chapter with the suitably riddling suggestion that the answers to the nine Bilbo–Gollum riddles—mountain; teeth; wind; daisy; dark; egg; a fish; a fish being eaten; time; a golden ring—are bodied forth into the verse that surrounds the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter, and all occur elsewhere in
The Hobbit
. We might take this a number of ways: as mere coincidence (of course); as a sign that the answers to the Bilbo–Gollum riddles are so generalised and appropriate to the cultural idiom of a reinvented ‘Dark Age’ fantasy as to be ubiquitous; or—perhaps—as design.

Mountain
: The song the dwarves sing as they come to Laketown (
chapter. 10
):

The King beneath the mountains

    The King of carven stone,

The lord of the silver fountains

    Shall come into his own!

This
refers, in terms of its apparent reference or surface meaning, to Thorin coming home; he is ‘king of carven stone’ in the sense of having rule
over
the carven stones of the halls of Erebor. But I am proposing an alternate solution to this verse, taken as a riddle: that it is the mountain itself that is being described in royal terms.

Teeth
: Here I propose ‘teeth’ as an alternate answer to the Goblin song, quoted a few pages above, taken as a riddle:

Clash, crash! Crush smash!

Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!

Pound, pound…

…

Swish smack! Whip crack!

Batter and bleat! Yammer and bleat!

Work, work! Nor dare to shirk!

While Goblins quaff and Goblins laugh,

We might want to say that teeth, in the action of crushing, mashing, laughing and speaking, are constantly in motion in these lines.

Wind
: The song sung by the dwarves in Beorn’s house, begins:

The wind was on the withered heath,

but in the forest stirred no leaf:

there shadows lay by night and day,

and dark things silent crept beneath.

The wind came down from the mountains cold

And like a tide it roared and rolled.

Daisy
: Amongst the songs sung by the rejoicing elves in the last chapter is one that describes stars as flowers scattered in the lawn: ‘the stars are in blossom, the moon is in flower … Dance all ye joyful, now dance all together! / Soft is the grass, and let foot be like feather!’ (
Hobbit
, 279).

Dark
: The dwarves’ song from the first chapter seems to describe them:

Far over the misty mountains cold

To dungeons deep and caverns old

We must away ere break of day.

But
we could also ask; what lives over the mountains before the break of day, and dwells in deep dungeons and old caverns? Dark.

Egg
: The song the wood-elves sing as they roll the barrels through the hatch and into the river:

Roll—roll—roll—roll,

Roll-roll-rolling down the hole!

Heave ho! Splash plump!

Down they go, down they bump!

Read as a riddle, this invites the answer: eggs being boiled in a pan of water.

The two
Fish
riddles are particularly interesting. The second song the wood-elves sing seems to refer as well to spawning salmon as to barrels:

Down the swift dark stream you go

Back to the lands you once did know!

But I wonder if the two little rhymes Bilbo sings to taunt the giant spiders have more to them than meets the eye:

Old fat spider spinning in a tree!

Old fat spider can’t see me!

   Attercop! Attercop!

   Won’t you stop,

Stop your spinning and look for me?

Lazy Lob and Crazy Cob

Are weaving webs to wind me.

I am far more sweet than other meat

but still they cannot find me!

Each of these could be recontextualised as riddles spoken by fish mocking fishermen who are either spooling their line (spinning in a tree) or weaving a net. Both ‘lob’ and ‘cob’ are names for fish—the saltwater pollack and and freshwater gudgeon (sometimes called ‘The Miller’s Thumb’) respectively. Of course, ‘lob’, ‘attercop’ and ‘cob’ are all ancient names for spiders as well—the latter survives in the word
cobweb
. Indeed, ‘attercop’ is an interesting word: a disparaging way
of referring to a spider of great antiquity:
attor
or
ater
is the OE for ‘poison’, and
cop
means cup.

A golden ring
: This, I think, is the answer to the riddle enclosed in the last rhyme in the book; Bilbo’s rhyme—‘Roads go ever ever on’ (which he reprises in
The Lord of the Rings
as ‘the road goes ever on and on’). The rhyme describes Bilbo’s journey, a round-trip away from home through danger and adventure and back again to home. But the answer to a riddle ‘what road goes on for ever and for ever?’ is, of course,
a circle
.

Bilbo
and Gollum’s exchange takes place in the chapter called ‘Riddles in the Dark’. It is an appropriate location for a riddling game, since the point of riddles is precisely to leave you ‘in the dark’. In this chapter I intend taking the answers to these nine Bilbo and Gollum riddles as a sort of meta-riddle, a larger, darker puzzle, to which I propose an answer. I do so in the spirit of riddling proposed at the end of the last chapter. I am proceeding, in other words, from the notion that riddles are more than simple puzzles, mapping one answer onto one question; that riddles, on the contrary, are rebuses that open larger and more profound questions about the mysteries of story, art, life and afterlife. I can only ask you to bear with me.

To recap: the answers to the ten riddles Gollum and Bilbo asked one another are: mountain; teeth; wind; daisy; dark; egg; a fish; a fish being eaten; time; a golden ring. We may wish to believe, of course, that Tolkien simply selected riddles at random, either recalling riddles from his wide reading, or perhaps making them up himself, and that this list of items has no further significance.
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Or we might want to go a little further that the riddles, over and above posing interesting questions for the reader to answer, do extra work in the text by characterising Gollum and Bilbo. Tom Shippey makes this case, and persuasively too, pointing out that Gollum’s riddles tend to be more ancient, darker, about hidden or more terrifying things like darkness, all-devouring time and the roots of mountains. The answers to Bilbo’s riddles, on the other hand, tend to be more quotidian, above-ground, cheery (daisies, eating a fish-supper sitting at a table and so on). And perhaps that is as far as it goes: the riddles
work as entertainments in their own right, and as ways of obliquely characterising the two speakers, and nothing more.

At the end of the previous chapter I suggested that these answers—mountains, fish, wind, flowers, dark and so on—were important enough symbols to Tolkien’s imagination to figure not only in the riddles themselves, but in the majority of other pieces of verse included in the book—as well (of course) as props and settings in the novel itself: the misty mountain (and Erebor); the fish Gollum catches and so on. I also pointed up the curious, rather beguiling unclarity of Tolkien’s responses to the question whether he invented the riddles himself or adapted them from ancient sources: claiming both the former and the latter. This in itself seems to me a significant thing. In effect, it is Tolkien riddling about the riddles. Taking my cue from this, I hope in this chapter to advance an argument about, as it were, the meta-riddling aspect of Tolkien’s novel.

We might begin by noting that the answers to the nine, or ten, questions Bilbo and Gollum swap—depending on whether we wish to take ‘what have I got in my pocket?’ as a ‘proper’ riddle, or not—take the form of a sort of riddle in their own right. We could write it out this way:

I am a mountain;

I am teeth;

I am the wind;

I am a daisy;

I am the dark;

I am an egg;

I am a fish;

I am a fish;

I am time;

I am a golden ring.

What am I?

There are plenty of ancient riddles that take this form; ‘The Song of Amairgen’ from the eleventh-century old Celtic
Book of Leinster
is one; supposed spoken by Amairgen Glúngel son of Míl as he first arrived in Ireland.

I am a wind in the sea

I am a sea-wave upon the land

I
am the sound of the sea

I am a stag of seven combats

I am a hawk upon a cliff

I am a tear-drop of the sun

I am fair

I am a boar for valour

I am a salmon in a pool

I am a lake in a plain

I am the excellence of arts

I am a spear that wages battle with plunder.

I am a god who forms subjects for a ruler

Who explains the stones of the mountains?

Who invokes the ages of the moon?

Where lies the setting of the sun?

Who bears cattle from the house of Tethra?

Who are the cattle of Tethra who laugh?

What man, what god forms weapons?
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This ancient Celtic riddle enjoyed a vogue during the early years of the twentieth century (Yeats’s Lady Gregory translated it, amongst others) although its answer or answers are the subject of some debate. Robert Graves spends a good portion of his monumental study of poetry and myth
The White Goddess
(1946) trying to solve it. Here is his ‘reconstruction’ of the poem:

I am a stag:
of seven tines
,

I am a flood:
across a plain
,

I am a wind:
on a deep lake
,

I am a tear:
the Sun lets fall
,

I am a hawk:
above the cliff
,

I am a thorn:
beneath the nail
,

I am a wonder:
among flowers
,

I am a wizard:
who but I

Sets the cool head aflame with smoke
?

I am a spear:
that roars for blood
,

I am a salmon:
in a pool
,

I am a lure:
from paradise
,

I am a hill:
where poets walk
,

I am a boar:
ruthless and red
,

I
am a breaker:
threatening doom
,

I am a tide:
that drags to death
,

I am an infant:
who but I

Peeps from the unhewn dolmen, arch
?

I am the womb:
of every holt
,

I am the blaze:
on every hill
,

I am the queen:
of every hive
,

I am the shield:
for every head
,

I am the tomb:
of every hope
.
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This is powerfully written stuff, certainly better poetry than James Carey’s duller rendering; but it brings us no closer to an answer. It is true that Graves thought he had got to the bottom of it, although the mournful truth Gravesphiles (and I would describe myself as one) have to confront is that few professional scholars of Celtic literature think that his speculations have any scholarly or intellectual merit whatsoever. This does not dismay me, however, since one of the things this book is trying to do is precisely to engage imaginative
ingenuity
as the proper idiom of riddles—and
The White Goddess
is certainly an ornately ingenious book. Graves takes his cue from a number of other old Celtic riddles that encode alphabet solutions, and over many pages teases out his theory that ‘The Song of Amairgen’ is a poetic expression of an ancient ‘alphabet of the trees’, spelling out a particular message. The details of Graves ‘solution’ need not concern us here. What is relevant is that he takes it as an acrostic at all. This brings us to the large topic of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic ‘acrostic’ riddles.