The Riddles of The Hobbit Read Online Free PDF

it like this: for Tolkien the connection between words and the world is a deep one, not to be gainsaid or ignored. Riddles are a truer representation of the nature of reality than simple declarative statements. This is because, putting it simply, the world is not a simple or transparent business, but a mystery to be plumbed. Riddles themselves talk about ordinary objects or phenomena in an ironic way: they are sly, allusive, misleading. ‘The point’, in Carolyne Larrington’s words, ‘is not what is being said, but what is being concealed.’ 3 And this in turn embodies the subtle, necessary link, between anything in-the-world and the language with which it is described.
    This speaks, in the largest way, to the way the Old Northmen lived their lives. Irony is a way of expressing a sense that there is a gap between oneself and one’s world, a mismatch between will and thing. This idea shaped Norse culture in ways from small to large. Take, for example, death. The Old English approach to this existential universal was a grim sort of acceptance that we must inevitably die, combined with a wry sense of the ironic mismatch between how much life we have in our doomed hearts. For the Anglo-Saxons the crucial thing was that death be met bravely. Their gods were capricious, puzzling creatures, because life is often that way; and those same Norse gods were themselves doomed to die (at the impending apocalypse the Northmen called Ragnarokr) because human life is so doomed. The question as to why that is poses one of the most profound riddles of all.
    Take Tolkien’s posthumously published tale
The Children of Húrin
(2006), perhaps the most uncompromisingly tragic thing he ever wrote. The story is set in the First Age of Middle Earth, thousands of years before the events of
The Lord of the Rings
. There are no hobbits, wizards, ents or Tom Bombadils in this book, although there are elves, men and orcs. Sauron appears as a minor character, for at this point in Tolkien’s imaginary history Sauron was only the lieutenant of a far greater evil, Morgoth (also known as Melkor), a character of positively Satanic scope and wickedness. The tale opens with Húrin, a man from Mithrim, who fights in the battle of Nirnaeth Arnoediad, in which elves and men confront Morgoth, a very large number oforcs, and various assorted meanies such as Balrogs. The bad guys win. Captured by Morgoth Húrin is tormented by having his whole family cursed, and then being placed in a magic chair that not only preserves him from death but compels him to watch as this curse works its malign influence over his wife, son and daughter. This functions as a prologue to the rest of the tale; the bulk of the book is given over to Húrin’s son Túrin, with a little bit to his daughter Niënor. In fact, Tolkien adapts his narrative from two celebrated mythic precedents—the story of Kullervo from the Finnish epic cycle known as the
Kalevala
on the one hand, and the better known Sigfried legend from the Nibilungen epic on the other.
    That story traces the increasingly terrible lives of Húrin’s children under the withering curse of Morgoth. Túrin is high-minded, noble, taciturn, and darkly charismatic. His sister Niënor is beautiful and virtuous and nothing more (something that does little to counter the idea that Tolkien was not skilled at portraying complex women in his writing). Túrin flees his northern home and takes refuge for a time with the elves, who love him; but his haughty manner and his disinclination to speak up for himself leads to him being—unjustly—banished. Armed with a terrible and magical black sword he takes up with some outlaws, leads men, becomes a prince of the hidden city of Nargothrond, and finally, in some very powerful chapters given added heft by the sheer density and momentum accumulated by Tolkien’s lean prose, fights and kills the terrible dragon Glaurung.
    But despite his strength and bravery, Túrin’s destiny is consistently