The Riddles of The Hobbit Read Online Free PDF Page B

infelicitous. His pride contributes to the fall of the city of which he is prince; he inadvertently kills his best friend (who had just rescued him from orcs); and later he inadvertently marries and impregnates his sister who, when she learns what has happened, drowns herself in remorse. At various moments in the narrative Túrin comprehends what he has done, and is driven from his wits; but he always recovers them, propelled as he is by the ferocity of his will-to-revenge against Morgoth. But this last incestuous transgression is too great for him. The dragon Glaurung, dying, reveals Túrin’s incest to him, and Túrin can bear no more. He draws his sword, addressing it (‘what lord or loyalty do you know, save the hand that wields you? Will you slay me swiftly?’) and the sword replies with cold certainty: ‘yes’. Then Túrin sets the hilt of the sword upon the ground and throws himself upon the blade.
    The
Children of Húrin
is a tragedy not in the Aristotelian sense, for there is precious little catharsis here; but rather in the northern-European sense of humans encountering an overwhelming fate with unyielding defiance. And that is at the heart of Tolkien’s conception of heroism: precisely not achievement, but a particular and noble-hearted encounter with failure. Success in Túrin’s world is always local and short-term, and always happens within the larger context of inevitable failure. What matters is not how one triumphs, but the spirit with which one resists the terrible fate one knows to be unavoidable. The mismatch between will and thing is, here, at its most biting. Death cannot be avoided, or bought off, or conquered; it can only be defied. And defiance is the properly heroic response to that inevitability. This is a dramatisation of Freud’s famous ‘riddle’, ‘the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found, nor probably will be’. 4
    In his fiction Tolkien proposes two complementary solutions to Freud’s deep riddle.
The Children of Húrin
embodies what we could call an Anglo-Saxon solution—that defiance in the teeth of an inevitable doom is the strength give to humans. But there is a Christian answer to this riddle too, that the riddle of death is ‘solved’ in Christ. Indeed, the extent to which Tolkien was able to constellate his deep fellow-feeling for the Anglo-Saxon code with his heartfelt Christianity is perhaps the key index to the success of his art overall. The Tolkienian notion of the eucatastrophe attaches a last-minute-reprieve happy-ending to the darker, older trajectory of inevitable loss heroically encountered; and, more, takes force and unexpectedness precisely from the fact that the preceding tale so unremittingly follows its Anglo-Saxon trajectory.
    There are riddles in Christianity too, although communicants usually refer to them by the less trivial-sounding term ‘mysteries’. I discuss some of those below as well; but for the moment I am interested in the pre-Christian, or early-Christian, ground upon which Tolkien’s fantasies erect their eventual moments of consolation.
    Not everybody shares Tolkien’s view of the Anglo-Saxons. John M. Hill deplores (though courteously) the sense of Old English culture found in the work of scholars such as Ker, Raymond Wilson Chambers (a friend of Tolkien) and Tolkien himself, with their stress upon ‘the angst of Germanic heroes caught in the chains of circumstance or their own character, torn between duties equally sacred, dying with their backs to the wall’. These perspectives, Hill suggests,‘endure without apparent half-life … well into the last decades of the twentieth-century’, and quotes Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson by way of illustration:
    A pagan warrior brought up in this tradition would show a reckless disregard for his life. When he was doomed or not, courage was best, for the brave man could win
lof
[‘glory’] whilst the coward might die before his time. This is the spirit