The Riddles of The Hobbit Read Online Free PDF Page A

[Anglo-Saxon] riddles, therefore, enjoyable for their wit and its poetic expression, are also of crucial importance for the insight they offer into the intellectual structure of the Anglo-Saxon literary mind. The mentality that can engage with the sense of the
literal
statement and with the
implicit
and ‘truer’ import of the concealed meaning is a mentality alert to symbolism and allegory; and not surprisingly techniques of the riddle may be traced in poetry of other genres where ambiguity and systematic symbolism or allegory are deliberately cultivated. 1
    Anglo-Saxon was a riddling culture. By this I do not just mean that the Norse, the Icelanders and the Old English loved riddles—although they certainly did. Old English culture was threaded through with riddles, cryptograms, gnomic verses, charms and riddling modes of speech such as litotes, just as
Modern
English culture is (if you will forgive me) riddled with jokes and catch-phrases, crosswords and quizzes, irony and sarcasm. But there is more to it than that. I mean that the orientation of the Anglo-Saxons towards their world was ironic, often wittily or sardonically so. They were more minded than moderns to view life as a puzzle and a mystery. Anglo-Saxons tended to prize a particular combination of strength
and
wit. It was good to be brave, to fight fiercely, to stay true to your friends and your lord;but it was better still to do all these things
lightly
, with humour, gaily. This is not a matter of modesty. On the contrary,
boasting
was a valued skill. Boasting, such as those contests in which warriors traded insults called ‘flytings’, were opportunities to show your cleverness as well as your forcefulness. What was particularly admired was
good
boasting—boasts that were witty and clever, as well as boasts you were prepared to expend your life, if necessary, making true. In all this there is something of the riddle, but on a grander, more existential scale. Riddles are more than mere pastimes; they speak to the puzzling circumstances in which we find ourselves. Threading through all this is the sense of the riddle, the joke, the ironic understatement, as all modes of
extravagance
of speech. They are, in modern parlance, the bling of words.
    If this sounds as if I am granting riddles a more profound significance than mere word-games and children’s rhymes might merit, then indeed I am. In the introduction to their translation of the riddling legend-poetry of
The Elder Edda
, (itself a key source for Tolkien’s own imaginarium) Peter Salus and Paul Taylor begin with scholarly circumspection:
    Poetic composition of riddles was principally an exercise of scholastic wit throughout the Middle Ages. Hundreds of Latin riddles in poetic form have survived. In general they are puzzles in which some object of phenomenon is described; the reader or listener is expected to ‘solve’ the puzzle and state the object. Riddle making was equally popular in the vernacular. In Old English, for example, almost a hundred survive.
    But they go on to suggest that, for the Norse mind, riddles were much more than just this:
    Riddles suggest the Nordic fascination with the apparent relationship between the structure of language and the structure of the cosmos. For the Scandinavians the wisest man—he who knows most of the structure of the cosmos—is also the most skilful poet … there is in the Nordic mind a subtle relationship, and a necessary one, between an event and the language with which it is described or anticipated. 2
    That the nature of this relationship is
ironic
in a profound way is one of the starting premises of this book. I aim to trace the place of ‘theriddle’ in Tolkien’s fiction not just for the sake of it, and not because I consider such riddles as appear in
The Hobbit
to be diverting entertainments, but rather because it seems to me that riddling in this existential sense is crucial to Tolkien’s whole artistic project. In a nutshell we could put