J. R. R. Tolkien - Author of the Century

CHAPTER I THE HOBBIT:

RE-INVENTING MIDDLE-EARTH A moment of inspiration?

The story of how J.R.R. Tolkien came to be launched on his career, not as a writer of fiction – this had begun many years before – but as a writer of published fiction, is a familiar one. According to Tolkien’s own account, he was sitting one day, after he had become Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford, in his home in Northmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate papers: something, one should note, which was no part of his university duties, but which many academics then undertook as a summer-time extra to supplement their incomes. A boring job, then, engaging Tolkien’s intellect at well below its top level, but at the same time one which in decency to the candidates had to be done conscientiously, with full alertness: academic piece-work, but piece-work which, unlike sewing or standing on a production line, gave no opportunity for the mind to wander. In this circumstance (the strain of which only those who have marked, say, five hundred handwritten scripts on the same subject will fully appreciate) Tolkien turned over a page to find that a candidate:

had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. But that’s only the beginning.

(Biography, p. 172; see also Letters, p. 215)

Beginning it was, but it was also for Tolkien, as for Bilbo finding the ring on the tunnel-floor in chapter 5 of The Hobbit, ‘a turning-point in his career’. We know now that Middle-earth, in a sense, already existed in Tolkien’s mind, for since at least 1914 he had been writing the elvish and human legends which would appear, many years later and after his death, as the published Silmarillion and Book of Lost Tales. But Middle-earth would never have caught the public attention without hobbits.

So, what are hobbits? And how did Tolkien come to write the seminal sentence in that momentary gap when an alert concentration on tedium suddenly slackened, and allowed, one might imagine, something long repressed or long incubating to break free? Where did hobbits come from, as an idea?

To this last question there are several answers, of increasing levels of interest and complexity. Perhaps the simplest and least satisfying one is gained by looking the word ‘hobbit’ up in the dictionary – specifically, in the Oxford English Dictionary, a gigantic collective project more than a century old, which Tolkien had himself worked for and contributed to in his youth, but which he perhaps as a result continually disagreed with and even went out of his way (in Farmer Giles of Ham) to mock. The second edition of the OED, published in 1989, says only, ‘In the tales of J.R.R. Tolkien…one of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name’ (etc.), which gets us no further. However Robert Burchfield, former chief editor of the OED, reported with some pride in the Times for 31st May 1979 that hobbits had at last been run to earth. The word did exist before Tolkien. It is found, once, in a publication called The Denham Tracts, a series of pamphlets and jottings on folklore collected by Michael Denham, a Yorkshire tradesman, in the 1840s and 1850s, and re-edited by James Hardy for the Folklore Society in the 1890s. ‘Hobbits’ appear in Volume 2 (1895). There they come, by my count, 154th in a list of 197 kinds of supernatural creature which includes, with a certain amount of repetition, barguests, breaknecks, hobhoulards, melch-dicks, tutgots, swaithes, cauld-lads, lubberkins, mawkins, nick-nevins, and much, much else, along with the relatively routine boggarts, hob-thrusts, hobgoblins, and so on. No further mention is made of hobbits, and Hardy’s index says of them, as of almost all the items in the list, only ‘A class of spirits’. Tolkien’s hobbits, of course, are anything but ‘spirits’. They are almost pig-headedly earthbound, with (as Tolkien wrote in his very earliest account of them, on page 2 of The Hobbit):

little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large, stupid folk like you and me come blundering along making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off.

It is possible that Tolkien read The Denham Tracts, picked up the word ‘hobbit’, and then forgot all about it till the moment of the blank exam script, but whatever the Times may say, the single-word appearance can hardly be called his source, still less his ‘inspiration’. Philologists love words, true, but they also know what they are: the word is not the thing.

Not on its own, anyway, for we should remember that Tolkien was keenly interested in words, and names, and their origins, and knew more about some kinds of them than anyone alive (see further pp. 57-9 and 82-6 below). This thought leads to an only slightly more productive theory about hobbits, which is that they sound rather like and therefore might have something to do with rabbits. Shortly after The Hobbit came out, on 16th January 1938, the Observer printed a letter from an unknown correspondent suggesting some evidently unconvincing connections between hobbits and other real or rumoured furry creatures. Tolkien replied to the correspondent (he did not mean the Observer to print his letter, but they did), good-humouredly denying the suggestions, and rejecting both furriness and rabbits:

my hobbit…was not furry, except about the feet. Nor indeed was he like a rabbit…Calling him ‘a nassty little rabbit’ was a piece of vulgar trollery, just as ‘descendant of rats’ was a piece of dwarfish malice.

(Letters, p. 30)

One has to say, however, that it was not just the trolls. The eagle carrying Bilbo in chapter 7 tells him, ‘You need not be frightened like a rabbit, even if you look rather like one’. In the previous chapter Bilbo had himself started ‘to think of being torn up for supper like a rabbit’, and at the end of his stay in Beorn’s house Beorn picks him up, pokes his waistcoat disrespectfully, and remarks, ‘Little bunny is getting nice and fat again on bread and honey’. Thorin shakes him ‘like a rabbit’ in chapter 17. The opinion that hobbits are like rabbits is, it seems, pretty widespread among those who meet them. Just the same one can see why Tolkien so firmly rejected the connection. He did not want hobbits, and Bilbo in particular, to be equated with bunnies, or even coneys (another word for ‘rabbits’ which Bilbo uses): small, fluffy, harmless, irretrievably childish, never rising above the status of pet. The word ‘rabbit’ was probably professionally interesting to Tolkien, and may have had something to do with the relationship between hobbits and the other races of Middle-earth, for reasons to be explained later on. But whatever else might be said about them, hobbits had to be allowed to be people: not spirits, not animals, but people.

What kind of person? Here one can learn a lot, as might be expected, from the very careful and unexpectedly suggestive presentation of Bilbo right at the start of The Hobbit begins, indeed, with the famous sentence of inspiration, the sentence from the subconscious: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ But we are immediately told that this, on its own, would be totally misleading. Creatures that live in holes in the ground ought to be animals – rabbits, moles, snakes, gophers, badgers – and ‘hole’ conveys a poor impression as a place to live. ‘Don’t call my palace a nasty hole!’ says Thorin much later, in chapter 13. ‘You wait till it has been cleaned and redecorated!’ Bilbo’s hole, however, needs neither cleaning nor redecorating, for the description goes on, firmly and rhythmically negating all the suggestions of the sentence before it:

Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It is in fact, in everything except being underground (and in there being no servants), the home of a member of the Victorian upper-middle class of Tolkien’s nineteenth-century youth, full of studies, parlours, cellars, pantries, wardrobes, and all the rest.

Bilbo himself is furthermore fairly easy to place both socially and even chronologically. If one did not have the rest of the book to go on, one would have to place him, on internal evidence, from a time after the discovery of America, for he smokes a pipe, and indeed the last words of the whole book are ‘tobacco-jar’ (‘tobacco’ is not recorded in English by the OED till 1588). But one could be more precise than that, for when Bilbo wishes to discourage Gandalf he takes out ‘his morning letters’, which are clearly routinely delivered early every day. Bilbo must live, then, after the introduction of a postal service – our familiar system dates, in England, from 1837. In a more indirect way Bilbo might also be thought to date from a time after railway-engines, for though it is the narrator’s term not his own, when his nerve finally breaks he shrieks ‘like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel’ (the first freight-and-passenger steam railway in England opened in 1825, the first railway tunnel dating from five years later).

All this of course turns out to be completely wrong, and we are told point-blank that the story is set ‘long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green’. Tolkien, however, did not forget any of the points raised above, and would later go to some lengths to explain them away, or blur them. But the fact is that hobbits are, and always remain, highly anachronistic in the ancient world of Middle-earth. That indeed is their main function, for one might note that by their anachronism they engage a problem faced and solved in not dissimilar ways by several writers of historical novels. In setting a work in some distant time, an author may well find that the gap between that time and the reader’s modern awareness is too wide to be easily bridged; and accordingly a figure essentially modern in attitudes and sentiment is imported into the historical world, to guide the reader’s reactions, to help the reader feel ‘what it would be like’ to be there. An obvious example comes from the Hornblower novels of C.S. Forester, which began to be published at exactly the same time as The Hobbit. In them, as all readers of them will remember, the hard-headed and hard-hearted Bush stands for Nelsonian normality, firmly contrasted with the more intelligent, more squeamish, and much more twentieth-century figure of Hornblower, with his horror of flogging, belief in cold showers and cleanliness, and dangerously democratic notions. Bilbo, even more than his successor-hobbits from The Lord of the Rings, takes up this role as ‘reflector’. His failings are those which the child reader, and indeed the adult reader, would have if transported magically to Middle-earth. He is ‘used to having [his meat] delivered by the butcher all ready to cook’, has no idea how to ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl’, and has to cover up his inability to understand anything of bird language, whether ‘quick and difficult’ or not. He is a modern person, or at least a twentieth-century person, who seems again and again to be out of place in the archaic and heroic world into which he is drawn, or thrust, by Gandalf.

On the other hand, Bilbo is solidly placed in hobbit society, which requires no explanation at all (at least for the reader of 1937). Once his ‘hole’ has been dealt with, and any incorrect suggestions the word may have created have been explained away, the first thing we are told about Bilbo is his social standing: and this is unusually precise. Thus Bilbo is ‘well-to-do’, but not necessarily ‘rich’; most of his paternal relations are rich, but not as rich as his maternal ones. The OED, here an excellent guide, as to most Victorian or Edwardian usage, defines ‘well-to-do’ as ‘Possessed of a competency; in easy circumstances’, by which it means above all, not having to work. ‘Rich’ by contrast has several meanings, being an old word, but the relevant one is ‘Having large possessions or abundant means’ – abundant as opposed to competent. Bilbo then has enough and a bit over, but not more than that. What he and his family do have without qualification, however, is ‘respectability’, which in English society had and still has no correlation whatever with wealth. It is perfectly possible, indeed normal, to be a respectable member of the working classes, and just as normal to be a member of the upper classes with no respectability whatsoever. The OED defines ‘respectable’ carefully as ‘Of good or fair social standing, and having the moral qualities naturally appropriate to this’: note the words ‘or fair’, with which Tolkien would have agreed (there is no doubt later on that the Gamgee family is respectable, and capable of major social mobility, but without even a ‘competency’ to start with); and also the undefined and unconsidered ‘naturally appropriate’, which Tolkien would probably have regarded as yet another example of the dictionary editors’ incurable smugness. Bilbo is in short middle-middle to upper-middle class. Though there is one counter-indication to this, which is that his name is Baggins.

Baggins is incipiently vulgar. One of the trolls, who are very vulgar, as Tolkien said (see above), is called Huggins, indeed Bill Huggins, not so far from Bilbo Baggins. Huggins meanwhile – I repeat that Tolkien knew a great deal about names – is a diminutive form of a personal name (Hugh, Hugo), like the common surnames Watkins, Jenkins, Dickens, and so on. Baggins, however, isn’t, though it is a common word in two senses. It is ‘common’ in not being standard, therefore (in post-medieval England, but not earlier) vulgar, low-class, dialectal; and it was in common (i.e. general) use across the whole of Northern England to mean the food a labourer takes with him when he goes off to work, or anything eaten between meals, but especially, says the OED, afternoon tea ‘in a substantial form’. Tolkien certainly knew this, and knew also that the OED had tidied the word up from ‘baggins’ (which is what people really say) to ‘bagging’ (which is hyper-correct), for the word is cited and defined in the New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District to which he had written an appreciative prologue in 1928 – Tolkien was not a Northerner, but he remained all his life grateful and even ‘devoted’ to the University of Leeds (see Letters, p. 305), and appreciative of Northern dialect. The Hobbit indeed ends with a joke derived from the Glossary just mentioned, for in the Huddersfield dialect the word ‘okshen’ meant not ‘auction’ but ‘mess’. Walter Haigh, who compiled the Glossary, records the disapproving sentence, used seemingly by one woman of another, ‘Shu’z nout but e slut; er ees [her house] ez e feer okshen [a right mess]’. And when Bilbo returns home, what he finds is an ‘okshen’ in both senses, mess and auction at once.

To return to Bilbo Baggins, though, he is fond of all meals, as we soon learn, but most especially his tea. The ‘Unexpected Party’ of chapter 1 is definitely a tea-party, and undeniably substantial. This makes another anachronistic point about Bilbo, and about hobbits in general, which is that they are very specifically English. Tolkien was to rub this point in very firmly indeed in the ‘Prologue’ to The Fellowship of the Ring, in which he makes the whole history of the Shire correspond point for point with the history of early England. But it is clear enough from Bilbo’s first encounter with Gandalf. Not to make too much of it, Bilbo is something of a snob: not a terrible one, for he is prepared to offer a pipe to passing strangers, but certainly liable to draw a line between ‘his sort’ and other sorts. At several points he displays the social exclusiveness which has so often annoyed visitors to England. He dismisses the whole idea of ‘adventures’ with ‘I can’t think what anybody sees in them’, and then tries to get rid of Gandalf, whom he has decided is ‘not quite his sort’ by ignoring him. He goes on, with entirely insincere politeness, to try to send Gandalf away by repeating ‘Good morning!’ as a parting not a greeting, to try ‘thank you!’ in the same spirit, twice (it means, when said in clipped English tones, ‘no thank you’), and eventually to invite him to tea – but not now. It is obvious that much of what Bilbo says is socially coded to mean its opposite, as when a few pages later he says to the dwarves, ‘in his politest unpressing tones’, ‘I suppose you will all stay to supper?’ (which means, to those who know the code, ‘you have overstayed your welcome, go away’).

None of this is unfamiliar at all to the English reader, and of course it is comic to find Gandalf repeatedly ignoring the social code, and acting, as only someone foreign to it would, as if Bilbo meant what he said by phrases like ‘I beg your pardon’. There is in fact a word which sums Bilbo up, often used of the English middle-class to which he so obviously belongs: ‘bourgeois’. This is not an English word but a French one, and Tolkien does not use it – he regretted, again for professional reasons, the medieval take-over of the English language by Norman French, and always tried to reverse it as far as he could. But he may well have been thinking of just that word, as is indicated by a couple of running private jokes. Later on, in The Lord of the Rings, it will be disclosed that the road Bilbo’s hole is on is called Bag End: very appropriate for someone called Baggins, perhaps, but an odd name for a road. And yet in a sense a very familiar one. As part of the ongoing and French-oriented snobbery of English society in Tolkien’s day (and later), municipal councils were (and still are) in the habit of indicating a street with no outlet as a ‘cul-de-sac’. This is French, of course, for ‘bag end’, though the French actually call such a thing an impasse, while the native English is ‘dead end’. ‘Cul-de-sac’ is a silly phrase, and it is to the Baggins family’s credit that they will not use it. The Tolkien family’s too, for his Aunt Jane Neave’s house was down a lane with no exit, also defiantly called ‘Bag End’ (see Biography, p. 106). It is a very bad mark for the socially aspiring branch of the Baggins family that they have tried to Frenchify themselves and disguise their origins: they call themselves the Sackville-Bagginses, as if they came from a ville (or villa?) in a cul-de-sac(k) (Bag End). They, then, are really bourgeois. Bilbo is just heading that way.

Gandalf means, however, to turn him back, and that is why he makes him a burglar. ‘Burglar’ is another odd word, and English speakers who use it tend to assume that the -ar on the end is the same as -er. Accordingly, just as a worker is someone who works, so a burglar must be someone who burgles. But this derivation is false, and exemplifies two things Tolkien yet again knew a great deal about, ‘back formation’ and ‘folk etymology’. The root of ‘burglar’ is in fact the same as that of ‘bourgeois’, Old English (and probably Old Frankish too) burh, ‘borough, town, fort, stockaded mansion’. A burgulator, as the OED points out, is someone who breaks into mansions, a bourgeois is someone who lives in one. They are connected opposites, like Sackvilles and Bagginses. Gandalf means to move Bilbo from the one side, the snobbish side, to the other.

In doing this Bilbo will not become less English, but more so. We should note, in view of the bad press which ‘Englishness’ has had for most of the twentieth century, that Tolkien was quick to point out some of Bilbo’s native virtues, in terms quite similar to those of George Orwell, another contemporary of Tolkien’s, and another example of English ‘self-fashioning’ (for Orwell’s real name was Blair, which he abandoned because he thought it sounded Scottish, just as Tolkien, aware that his own name was originally German, tended to identify himself with his mother’s Worcestershire family name of Suffield, Letters, p. 218). The narrator comments, once Bilbo has recognized Gandalf and responded with genuine excitement and interest, ‘You will notice already that Mr. Baggins was not as prosy as he liked to believe, also that he was very fond of flowers’. Hobbits, then, like the English middle class to which they clearly belong, may aspire to be bourgeois and boring, but it is not natural to them. Tolkien indeed had nothing against middle-class Englishmen, for he was one himself: and, unlike so many of the English-speaking writers of his time, Lawrence, Forster, Woolf, Joyce, he did not feel in any way alienated, nor have any urge to reinvent himself as working-class, non-English, in internal exile, or any other glamorous pose. It is one reason why he has never found any favour with the determinedly cosmopolitan British intelligentsia (to use another foreign term).

Bilbo is then defined from the start by time, class, and culture. He is English; middle class; and roughly Victorian to Edwardian. Hobbits in general will prove to be all these things even more definitely than Bilbo, except that some of them will be working class (the Gamgees), though none quite reach the upper class, not even the Tooks and Brandybucks. But he and they are also repeatedly marked as anachronisms in the world they inhabit. On the surface at least – the issue is explored all the way through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – they do not fit at all into Middle-earth, the world of dwarves and elves, wizards and dragons, trolls and goblins, Beorn and Smaug and Gollum. The world of fairy-tale

This world is not, in origin, Tolkien’s invention: though it is perhaps his major achievement to have opened it up for the contemporary imagination. In 1937 (though not now) the world and its personnel were best known from a relatively small body of stories taken from an again relatively small corpus of classic European fairy-tale collections, those of the Grimm brothers in Germany, of Asbjørnsen and Moe in Norway, Perrault in France, or Joseph Jacobs in England, together with literary imitations like those of H.C. Andersen in Denmark, and literary collections like the ‘colour’ Fairy Books of Andrew Lang; and from the many Victorian ‘myth and legend’ handbooks which drew on them. These tales made concepts like ‘dwarf or ‘elf or ‘troll’ familiar to most people from early childhood. Dwarves, for instance, figure prominently in ‘Snow White’, and share some of the characteristics of Thorin’s people, like their mining profession and their fascination with wealth. Trolls were not so well-known in English (the word is a Scandinavian one), but just the same have entered English consciousness through ‘The Three Billy-Goats Gruff, a tale recorded by the Norwegians Asbjørnsen and Moe. Elves appear in the tale of ‘The Little Elves and the Shoemaker’, and goblins in the literary fairy-tale imitations of George MacDonald. Few children grow up without encountering some of these stories, and others like them.

These traditional fairy-tales, however, have severe limitations in at least two ways. One is that they are detached from each other. There may be a vague sense that they all take place in something like the same world, a dimly-perceived far past which, as Bilbo says of Gandalf’s stories, is all about ‘dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons’. But this world is connected to no known history or geography, and furthermore there is no connection between any of the tales themselves. They cannot, then, be developed. They stimulate the imagination, but do not entirely satisfy it – not, at least, in the way that modern readers expect, with a full plot and developed characters and, perhaps most of all, a map.

And there is another problem with fairy-tales which Tolkien sensed very keenly. This is that from their very beginning, from the time, that is, when scholars began to take an interest in them and collect them, they seemed already to be in a sense in ruins. The Grimm brothers, in the nineteenth century, quite certainly had as a main motive for making their collection of Haus-und Kindermärchen the wish to do a kind of literary rescue archaeology. They were convinced that the tales they collected, brief as they were and deep sunk in the social and literary scale, still preserved fractions of some older belief, native to Germany but eventually suppressed by foreign missionaries, foreign literacy, and Christianity. Jacob Grimm, the elder brother, indeed tried to fit the pieces together, or at least collect as many as he could, in his extensive work Deutsche Mythologie, or ‘Teutonic Mythology’. The attempt has since then been generally ignored or derided, but there were some true observations behind it. One was that in some cases, like ‘dwarf (see pp. xiv-xv above), all Germanic languages had preserved the same word; though they had clearly not borrowed it from each other, because the word had always changed as the languages had changed, over the millennia. Accordingly English speakers said ‘dwarf, Germans Zwerg, and Icelanders dvergr. What this seemed to indicate was that the word was very old, much older than the fairy-tales in which it was preserved. But it must have been used in fairy-tales all along. What could those old tales have been like, before the whole mythology had been downgraded to children and their nursemaids?

Strong confirmation of this theory furthermore came from the rediscovery, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of fragments of the old adult and aristocratic literature of Northern Europe. It should be noted that this had been totally lost and forgotten for many centuries – Shakespeare, for instance (though he clearly knew something about fairy-tales, more than he was prepared to show) can have known nothing about the higher literature that lay behind them. The one surviving copy of the Old English epic Beowulf, with its strong interest in monsters, elves and orcs included, lay as far as we can tell unread and almost unnoticed from the Norman Conquest in 1066 till its eventual publication in Copenhagen in 1815. The Old Norse poems of the Elder Edda likewise lay unknown and for the most part in one manuscript in an Icelandic farmhouse, till they were rediscovered and slowly and patchily republished by scholars including the Grimms. The Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its very similar interest in elves and ettins, was hardly known and certainly not a part of university syllabuses till it was edited by Tolkien himself and his junior Leeds colleague E.V. Gordon in 1925. To those, however, who did read these poems and their many badly-preserved analogues, there came a feeling that their authors had indeed known something, something consistent with each other and with the much later fairy-tales of modern times: and that you might just possibly be able to work out what it was. This is the philological activity of ‘reconstruction’, as discussed in the Foreword above, p. xv.

In two ways, then, fairy-tale and its ancestors provoked the imagination, suggested a wider world which they then did not explore. You could work back from the dwarves of ‘Snow White’; or you could work out from the dwarves of Ruodlieb (a poem written in Latin by a German poet of the twelfth century) or of the Elder Edda (a collection of poems written in Old Norse, some of them probably even older than Ruodlieb). This is what Tolkien was doing: as is proved, for instance, by his stubborn insistence on writing, and making the printers print the word ‘dwarves’, even though (as he says in his opening note to The Hobbit) ‘In English the only correct plural of dwarf is dwarfs’. If that is the only correct form, why use an incorrect one? Because the -ves ending is a sign of the word’s antiquity, and so its authenticity. Even in modern English, old words ending in -f make their plural with -ves, as long as they have remained in constant use: so hoof/ hooves, life/lives, sheaf/sheaves, loaf/loaves. Dwarf/dwarves might have developed the same way, but clearly fell out of general use, and so was assimilated (probably by literates, schoolteachers and printers) to the simpler pattern of tiff(s), rebuff(s), and so on. Tolkien meant to turn back this particular clock. The Grimms had done exactly the same with their insistence that the German plural for ‘elf’ ought to be Elben, not Elfen (a form borrowed late on from English, itself by that time historically mistaken). Tolkien furthermore quite clearly had in mind from the start of The Hobbit a poem from the Elder Edda. It gave him all the names of ‘Thorin and Company’.

There are, one might note, surprisingly few names in The Hobbit, certainly by comparison with The Lord of the Rings. Most natural features have names which are just common nouns and adjectives with capital letters, like The Hill, The Water, Dale, the Long Lake, the River Running, the Lonely Mountain, Ravenhill and indeed The Carrock. To Bilbo’s timid question about the meaning of the last Gandalf replies crushingly that ‘[Beorn] called it the Carrock, because carrock is his word for it. He calls things like that carrocks, and this one is the Carrock because it is the only one near his home’. In addition to this we have a few hobbit-names (Baggins and Took, Hobbiton, and the auctioneers Grubb, Grubb, and Burrowes); rather more names from Tolkien’s already developed but here only hinted-at elvish mythology (Elrond, Gondolin, Girion, Bladorthin, Dorwinion, and more doubtfully Orcrist and Glamdring); and a few incidentals (Radagast, Bolg and Azog the goblins, Care and Roäc the ravens, Bard). But when it comes to dwarf-names, Tolkien gives full measure.

He found them in the poem Völuspá, ‘The Sybil’s Vision’, one section of which is called the Dvergatal, ‘the Tally of the Dwarves’. In the original Old Norse, this contains rather more than sixty names, mostly strung together as a simple rhythmic list, repeated in slightly different form in Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century guide to Norse mythology, the Skaldskaparmál, the ‘Treatise on Skald-ship’, or one might say, ‘Art of Poetry’. Part of Snorri’s version goes as follows, and one can see immediately the connection with Tolkien:

Nár, Náinn, Nípingr, Dáinn,

Bífur, Báfur, Bömbur, Nóri,

Órinn, Ónarr, Óinn, Miöðvitnir,

Vigr og Gandálfr, Vindálfr, Porinn,

Fíli, Kíli, Fundinn, Váli,

Þrór, Þróinn, Þettr, Litr, Vitr…

Eight of the thirteen dwarf-names of Tolkien’s Thorin and Company are here, along with the name of Thorin’s relative Dain, his grandfather Thror, and something close to his father Thrain. Four of the other five (Dwalin, Gloin, Dori, Ori) are not far away, as are Durin, in both The Hobbit and Völuspá the dwarves’ legendary ancestor, and Thorin’s nickname Oakenshield, or Eikinskjaldi. Only Balin – a famous name in Arthurian story, though that is perhaps a coincidence – is not in Snorri’s list.

However Tolkien did not just copy the ‘Tally of the Dwarves’, or quarry it for names. He must rather have looked at it, refused to see it, as most scholars do, as a meaningless or no longer comprehensible rigmarole, and instead asked himself a string of questions about it. What, for instance, is ‘Gandálfr’ doing in the list, when the second element is quite clearly álfr, ‘elf, a creature in all tradition quite distinct from a dwarf? And why is ‘Eikinskjaldi’ there, when unlike the others it does not seem to be a possible name, but looks like a nickname, ‘Oakenshield’? In Tolkien of course it is a nickname, the origin of which is eventually given in Appendix A (III) of The Lord of the Rings. As for Gandálfr, or Gandalf, Tolkien seems to have worked out a more complex explanation. In early drafts of The Hobbit Gandalf was the name given to the chief dwarf, while in the first edition what Bilbo sees that first morning is just ‘a little old man’. Even in the first edition, however, the little old man’s staff soon comes into the story, while by the third edition – Tolkien made significant changes in both the second and third editions, 1951 and 1966, some of them discussed later on – Gandalf has become ‘an old man with a staff’ (my emphasis). This seems highly suitable. Even now the ‘magic wand’ is the common property of the stage-magician, while in all popular and learned literary tradition, from Shakespeare’s Prospero to Milton’s Comus or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the staff is the distinguishing mark of the wizard. It looks as if Tolkien sooner or later interpreted the first element of ‘Gandálfr’, quite plausibly, as ‘wand’ or ‘staff, while the second element, as said above, obviously means ‘elf. Now Gandalf in Tolkien is definitely not an elf, but then it turns out that he is not just an ‘old man’ either; one can see that to those who knew no better (people like Éomer in The Lord of the Rings much later on) he might well seem distinctly ‘elvish’. Tolkien seems to have concluded at some point that ‘Gandálfr’ meant ‘staff-elf, and that this must be a name for a wizard. And yet the name is there in the Dvergatal, so that the wizard must in some way have been mixed up with dwarves. Could it be that the reason the Dvergatal had been preserved was that it was the last fading record of something that once had happened, some great event in a non-human mythology, an Odyssey of the dwarves? This is, anyway, what Tolkien makes of it. The Hobbit, one might say, is the story that lies behind and makes sense of the Dvergatal, and much more indirectly gives a kind of context even to ‘Snow White’ and the half-ruined fairy-tales of the brothers Grimm. The author’s voice

The two sides of The Hobbit are, then, fairly clear: on the one side there is modern middle-class English Bilbo, on the other the archaic world which lies behind both vulgar folk-tale and its aristocratic, indeed heroic ancestors. The former is represented by clocks and fussiness – Bilbo gasping out, ‘I didn’t get your note till after 10.45 to be precise’, and feeling he cannot leave home without a pocket-handkerchief. The latter is created by poetry and the Misty Mountains and Bilbo feeling how grand it would be to ‘wear a sword instead of a walking-stick’. Naturally the two sides are going to clash, and much of The Hobbit is about the clash of styles, attitudes, behaviour patterns – though in the end one might conclude that they are not as far apart as they first seemed, and that Bilbo has just as much right to the archaic world and its treasures as Thorin or Bard. However the pressing problem for Tolkien was perhaps not to introduce the archaic world – much of which, as has been said above, has long been familiar at least in its personnel even to child readers – as to give it intellectual coherence, to make the reader feel that it had a sort of existence outside the immediate narrative. Tolkien solved this problem, in The Hobbit, if quite differently in The Lord of the Rings, by flexible and intrusive use of the authorial voice.

The general strategy is shown several times in the first few pages. At the start of paragraph four Tolkien imagines a question from a reader, ‘what is a hobbit?’, and replies as if hobbits are not unknown but may have escaped some readers’ attention: ‘I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays’ (my emphasis both times). As soon as that parenthesis is over, we are told that Bilbo’s mother was ‘the famous Belladonna Took’ (my emphasis again), the implication again being that the author is only selecting from a body of pre-existing information. Her distinction is partly explained by the theory that ‘one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife’, immediately corrected – in the 1966 edition, previous editions being slightly different – by ‘That was, of course, absurd’. This time the word ‘absurd’ implies that there are well-known ways of judging such statements, so well-known that the author has no need to give them, while the ‘of course’ assumes that the reader must know these too. In every case the suggestion is that there is story outside the story, so to speak, a whole wider world of which one is seeing only some small fraction. The point is made totally explicit on page 3, when the narrator interjects ‘Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale’.

All these devices are furthermore repeated, sometimes again and again – in his essay on ‘Some of Tolkien’s Narrators’ in the very recent collection Tolkien’s ‘Legendarium’ (for which see the final ‘List of References’), Paul Edmund Thomas lists some 45 cases of direct address by the narrator of The Hobbit, and this does not include some of the types of interjection discussed here. ‘The famous Belladonna Took’ is echoed by ‘the great Thorin Oakenshield himself (the reasons for his fame and nickname given only in a footnote in Appendix A (III) of The Lord of the Rings, seventeen years and a thousand pages later). Even in the first edition Tolkien used the ‘of course’ trick at least three more times in exactly the same way as with the ‘fairy wife’ theory: ‘They were elves of course’, in chapter 3, ‘The feasting people were Wood-elves of course’ (chapter 8), and ‘That of course is the way to talk to dragons’ (chapter 12). Very similar is the trick of suddenly producing a piece of totally unexpected and unpredictable information from the heart of the fairy-tale world, and pretending it is common knowledge. The most dramatic example is the climax of the troll episode, when the light comes over the hill and the birds twitter, and the trolls turn to stone: ‘for trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of’. The idea is indeed an ancient one, with Odin playing the same trick as Gandalf (though on a dwarf) in the Old Norse poem Alvíssmál. But in context it is totally unexpected, though Tolkien had prepared for it with earlier direct addresses to the reader, once again invoking prior knowledge: ‘Yes, I am afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each…it is nearly always worth while, if you can manage it…Trolls’ purses are the mischief, and this was no exception’. There is a kind of unfairness in it, for the author naturally knows everything and the reader nothing about the world being introduced, but the voice assumes a kind of complicity; and every time another piece of the picture is being filled in, another part of the mental map disclosed. By the end of The Hobbit – and this was one of the reasons for the immediate demand for a sequel – a detailed and consistent picture of the fairy-tale world, and of many of its inhabitants, had been generated. Tolkien had to set the scene, indeed to guarantee that there was a scene to set, before the story could be allowed to unroll.

The story itself is highly episodic, and so not easy to summarize. Briefly, one may say that the book’s nineteen chapters divide approximately half and half into the adventures which Bilbo and the dwarves have before they reach the Lonely Mountain and the lair of Smaug the dragon; and the complexities surrounding the gaining, guarding and sharing of the dragon’s treasure once the Lonely Mountain has been reached. Chapters tend to come in threes, with numbers 1 to 3 getting the company as far as the Misty Mountains, where they are captured by the goblins; 4 to 6 dealing with the crossing of the mountains, including Bilbo winning the magic ring of invisibility; and 7 to 9 set in Mirkwood, where Bilbo uses his ring twice to rescue the dwarves first from the giant spiders, and second from the Wood-elves’ prison. Chapters 12 to 14 deal with Bilbo’s first two attempts to ‘burgle’ Smaug, the dragon’s attempted revenge and final death at the hands of Bard the Bowman; and chapters 15 to 17 with the quarrels over the treasure, between dwarves, elves, men and eventually goblins. The last two chapters are an evident coda, returning Bilbo to his home; while the two central chapters 10 and 11 mark a kind of transition, as Bilbo emerges for a short while from an entirely archaic and romantic world to a world once more dominated by human beings, humdrum ideas of ‘business’ and the Master of Laketown, even more of a bourgeois than Bilbo.

None of these divisions, of course, is vital, and it is quite likely that Tolkien did not plan them or pay any attention to them. They do show, however, how Tolkien fed in the fairy-tale elements one at a time, introducing them separately for many chapters before making much attempt to combine them, so that they go, in order of chapters: dwarves (and a wizard); trolls; elves; goblins; Gollum; wargs and eagles; Beorn; wood-elves and spiders (so chapters 1 to 8), with after that only one entirely novel figure introduced – Smaug in chapter 12 – and the interaction of all the creatures previously mentioned, apart from Gollum and the trolls, in the negotiations over the treasure and the Battle of the Five Armies. The other aspect of this one-at-a-time presentation, though, is the steady rise of Bilbo’s status, and the increasing evenness of the confrontation between the modern values he represents and the ancient ones he encounters. The contest for authority

At the start of the book Bilbo, as befits his bourgeois status and anachronistic nature, is helpless and, if not contemptible, at least open to contempt from those around him. Thorin’s casually gloomy speech, which takes the violent death of some or all of his company as a matter of course, frightens him into a screaming fit which even Gandalf has difficulty explaining away. Glóin’s ‘He looks more like a grocer than a burglar’ might not be much of a condemnation in other circumstances, but in the heroic world it is. No one in any medieval epic or Norse saga could possibly behave like Bilbo. The cook who begs for his life in the Eddic poem Atlamál (said to have been written in Greenland) is regarded as nothing but a figure of fun; the old man who bursts into tears in The Saga of Hrafnkel Priest of Frey (edited a few years before The Hobbit by Tolkien’s former colleague, E.V. Gordon) is viewed so scornfully that the place where he cried is still, the saga-author says, called Grátsmýrr, ‘Greeting-moor’ (‘greet’ remains the northern English and Scottish dialect word for ‘weep’). It is true that Bilbo recovers himself and gets back on his dignity, abetted by Gandalf, but he still has to be apologized for: ‘He was only a little hobbit you must remember’.

He does only slightly better in the scene with the trolls, for though he does try to intervene in the fight – ‘Bilbo did his best’ – it is so ineffectual that no one notices. He does feel a kind of pressure to conform to the expectations of the fairy-tale world (which includes stories like the Grimms’s ‘The Brave Little Tailor’, rather similar to this scene, and Asbjørnsen and Moe’s ‘The Master-Thief, which is what Bilbo would like to be), for he tries to pick the troll’s pocket, because ‘somehow he could not go straight back to Thorin and Company emptyhanded’. But his complete ignorance about trolls’ purses makes that a failure, while the one physical ability we do hear about, that ‘hobbits can move quietly in woods, absolutely quietly’, is counterbalanced by his inability to do another thing the dwarves take for granted, ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl’. Bilbo does not show himself up this time, and he does find the trolls’ key, but he remains comically out of place.

The pattern is repeated in chapter 4, where Bilbo has to be carried in the escape from the goblins, and where both he and Bombur agree that he is out of place quite literally, with their antithetical ‘why did I ever leave my hobbit-hole!…why did I ever bring a wretched little hobbit on a treasure-hunt!’ However, just as it was conceded that hobbits could at least move quietly, so here it is conceded that Bilbo does at least do something useful, in waking up and letting out the yell that warns Gandalf. But so far it is fair to say that he has done nothing that might seem impossible for a child-reader imagining a similar situation.

This changes with Bilbo’s discovery of the ring, ‘a turning point in his career, but he did not know it’, as Tolkien notes (with a certain irony, since it was a turning point for Tolkien too, though in 1937 he was even less aware of this than was Bilbo). After he has found it, Bilbo continues to think of his hobbit-hole and ‘himself frying bacon and eggs in his own kitchen’, a characteristically modern and characteristically English menu, while he also, with yet another anachronism, gropes for matches for his pipe (friction matches were invented in 1827). But then he remembers his sword, draws it, realizes ‘it is an elvish blade’ like Orcrist and Glamdring, and feels comforted. ‘It was rather splendid to be wearing a blade made in Gondolin for the goblin-wars of which so many songs had sung’, says the narrator, and though this romantic sentiment is immediately qualified by a practical one – ‘and also he had noticed that such weapons made a great impression on goblins that came upon them suddenly’ – it marks perhaps the first stage in Bilbo’s winning a place in the world of fairy-tale. The narrator follows this up by distancing Bilbo a little from modern times and from the child-reader. He was in a tight place, yes, ‘But you must remember it was not quite so tight for him as it would have been for me or for you’. Hobbits, after all, ‘are not quite like ordinary people’. They do live underground; they move quietly (which we knew already); recover quickly; and most of all ‘they have a fund of wisdom and wise sayings that men have mostly never heard or have forgotten long ago’.

Bilbo’s riddle-exchange with Gollum actually falls mostly into the latter category, of things forgotten, for the whole idea of testing by riddles, and some of the actual riddles, come from the ancient and aristocratic literature of the Northern world rediscovered in the nineteenth century by Tolkien’s professional predecessors. Gollum asks five riddles and Bilbo four – his fifth being the non-riddle ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ – and of these nine, several have definite and ancient sources. They probably all have sources – Tolkien’s 1938 letter in the Observer had teasingly said as much, see Letters (p. 32), and Douglas Anderson’s Annotated Hobbit of 1988 identifies as many as possible – but Gollum’s riddles, unlike Bilbo’s, tend to be ancient ones. Thus his last riddle, delivered when he thinks ‘the time had come to ask something hard and horrible’, derives from a poem in Old English, the riddle-game, or more precisely the wisdom-testing exchange, between Solomon and Saturn. In this, Saturn, who represents heathen knowledge, asks Solomon, ‘What is it that…goes on inexorably, beats at foundations, causes tears of sorrow…into its hands goes hard and soft, small and great?’ The answer given in Solomon and Saturn is, not ‘Time’ as in Bilbo’s desperate and fluky reply, but ‘Old age’: ‘She fights better than a wolf, she waits longer than a stone, she proves stronger than steel, she bites iron with rust: she does the same to us’. This is a more laboriously dignified version of Gollum’s:

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays king, ruins town,

And beats high mountain down.

Gollum’s ‘fish’ riddle:

Alive without breath,

As cold as death;

Never thirsty, ever drinking,

All in mail, never clinking

is echoed by a riddle set in the Old Norse wisdom contest in The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise (to be edited many years later by Tolkien’s son Christopher), and has a further slight analogue in a medieval poem from Worcestershire which Tolkien admired, Layamon’s ‘Brut’: in this dead warriors lying in a river in their mail are seen as strange fish. Gollum’s ‘dark’ riddle – ‘something a bit more difficult and more unpleasant’ – again has an analogue in Solomon and Saturn, though there the answer (and Tolkien was to remember this later) is not ‘dark’ but ‘shadow’. Gollum’s riddles, cruel and gloomy, associate him firmly with the ancient world of epic and saga, heroes and sages.

But Bilbo can play the game too; though his riddles are significantly different in their sources and their nature. Three of them, ‘teeth’, ‘eggs’, and ‘no-legs’, come from traditional nursery-rhyme (versions of them are printed in The Annotated Hobbit). But where, one might ask, does traditional nursery-rhyme come from? Tolkien had certainly asked himself this question, which relates directly to the point made above about the sources of traditional fairy-tale, long before he began to write The Hobbit. In 1923 he had published a long version of the familiar ‘man in the moon’ nursery-rhyme, ‘Why the Man in the Moon Came Down too Soon’, eventually reprinted as number six in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. In the same year he published ‘The Cat and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked’; this became the hobbit-poem which Frodo sings in the Prancing Pony in Bree, in The Lord of the Rings, and was also reprinted in Tom Bombadil. Later on, his 1949 short story Farmer Giles of Ham (which was originally written over about the same period as The Hobbit, see Wayne Hammond and Douglas Anderson’s Descriptive Bibliography, pp. 73-4) is set firmly in the land of nursery-rhyme, of Old King Cole and ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men’. Tolkien notes in a letter to Stanley Unwin in 1938 that a friend and Oxford colleague had written a long ‘rhymed tale in four books’ called Old King Coel – Coel, note, not Cole, for there is a ‘King Coel’ in old Welsh tradition. It may seem surprising that anyone should find nursery-rhymes worth quite so much time and trouble, if it does not quite extend to taking them seriously. But behind all these rewritings and reminiscences lies the philologist’s conviction that, just as the children’s fairy-tales of elves and dwarves had some long-lost connection with the time when such creatures were material for adults and poets, so modern playground riddles and rhymes were the last descendants of an old tradition. Tolkien had furthermore tried to fill the gap of time, as he often did, in this case by writing a version of the children’s ‘eggs’ riddle in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon. He published this too in 1923, as one of the ‘Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo’ (‘Two Anglo-Saxon Riddles recently Discovered’). Ten lines long, it starts:

Meolchwitum sind marmanstane

wagas mine wundrum frætwede…

‘My walls are adorned wondrously with milk-white marble-stones…’ This, one might say, is what the modern children’s riddle’s ancient ancestor must have looked like. It is (see p. xv above) an ‘asterisk-riddle’.

When Bilbo replies to Gollum’s ancient riddles with modern ones, then, the two contestants are not so very far apart. As Gandalf was to say to Frodo many years later (by which time the concept of Gollum had admittedly changed a good deal), ‘They understood one another remarkably well…Think of the riddles they both knew, for one thing’. What this suggests, though, is that while Bilbo remains an anachronism, a middle-class Englishman in the fairy-tale world, he is indeed ‘not quite like ordinary people’. The difference is that he has not quite lost his grip on old tradition. Nor, of course, have all ‘ordinary people’. But they have downgraded old tradition to children’s tales and children’s songs, become ashamed of it, made it into ‘folklore’. Bilbo and hobbits are in this respect wiser. Their unforgotten wisdom puts Bilbo for the first time on a level with a creature from the world into which he has ventured.

Bilbo also, after this point, has the ring: in The Hobbit, not yet the Ring, but still a potent force to help him gain the grudging respect of the dwarves. He has two other qualities besides. One is luck. The dwarves notice this more than once, with Thorin for instance saying, as he sends Bilbo down the tunnel to the dragon, that Bilbo is ‘full of courage and resource far beyond his size, and if I may say so possessed of good luck far exceeding the usual allowance’ (chapter 12). Earlier on, after Bilbo had rescued them from the spiders, ‘[the dwarves] saw that he had some wits, as well as luck and a magic ring – and all three were useful possessions’ (chapter 8). This belief that luck is a possession, which one can own, and perhaps even give away or pass on, may seem to be characteristically dwarvish, i.e. old-fashioned, pre-modern: it is a commonplace of Norse saga, for instance, where there are many lucky and unlucky cloaks, weapons, and people. But people do not think that way about luck any more. Or do they? In fact, superstitions about the nature of luck remain surprisingly common – they are a repeated sub-theme in Patrick O’Brian’s long series of historical novels about the nineteenth century, though one should note that they are there presented as definitely beliefs from the ‘lower deck’, from the seamen not the officers, the non-educated classes.(It would be a difficult business to extract all the mentions of luck from O’Brian’s twenty-volume sequence of ‘Aubrey and Maturin’ novels, but I note an especially prominent statement in The Ionian Mission (1982), chapter 9, which distinguishes ‘luck’ carefully from ‘chance, commonplace good fortune’, and calls it ‘a different concept altogether, one of an almost religious nature’.)

Tolkien probably thought that the very word ‘luck’ was Old English in origin (the OED insists that the ‘ultimate etymology…is obscure’, but see the discussion on p. 145 below); and that once again ancient belief had survived into modern times unnoticed (just like hobbits). As with his riddles, Bilbo’s ‘luck’ makes him seem more at home in the fairy-tale world, without being at all inconsistent with his modern English nature.

Bilbo’s other quality, meanwhile, as noted by Thorin above, is courage, as he is to show again and again. But it is a significantly different type or style of courage from the heroic or aggressive style of his companions and their allies and enemies. Bilbo remains always unable to fight trolls, shoot dragons, or win battles. At the Battle of the Five Armies, even after he has grown in stature as far as is at all possible, Bilbo stays ‘quite unimportant…Actually I may say he put on his ring early in the business, and vanished from sight, if not from all danger’. However, after Gollum and his escape from the goblins, Bilbo does show that he has a kind of courage, and one which is comparable with and even superior to that of the dwarves. Now he has the ring, should he not ‘go back into the horrible, horrible tunnels and look for his friends’? ‘He had just made up his mind that it was his duty, that he must turn back’ when he hears the dwarves arguing; they are arguing about whether they should turn back and look for him, and one of them at least says no: ‘If we have got to go back now into those abominable tunnels to look for him, then drat him, I say’. Gandalf, of course, might have made them change their minds, but Bilbo is here for the first time shown as actually superior to his companions. His courage is not aggressive or hot-blooded. It is internalized, solitary, dutiful – and distinctively modern, for there is nothing like it in Beowulf or the Eddie poems or Norse saga. Just the same, it is courage of a sort, and even heroes and warriors ought to come to respect it.

The dwarves do indeed start to respect Bilbo from this point on, and Tolkien marks the stages through which this grows. In chapter 6, ‘Bilbo’s reputation went up a very great deal with the dwarves’. In chapter 8, ‘Some of them even got up and bowed right to the ground before him’, while in chapter 9 Thorin ‘began to have a very high opinion [of Bilbo] indeed’. In chapter 11 he has more spirit left than the others, and by chapter 12, ‘he had become the real leader in their adventure’. None of this stops the dwarves from returning to their earlier opinion of him – ‘what is the use of sending a hobbit!’ – and much of the time he reverts to being a passenger, as in the scenes with Beorn. But Bilbo’s kind of courage is increasingly insisted on, always in scenes of solitude, always in the dark. Bilbo kills the giant spider ‘all alone by himself in the dark’, and it makes him feel ‘a different person, and much fiercer and bolder’. After he has done it he gives his sword a name, ‘I shall call you Sting’, something much more likely for a saga-hero to do than for a modern bourgeois. His great moment, however, is to go on by himself in the dark tunnel after he has heard the sound of Smaug the dragon snoring:

Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in that tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.

In all these ways Tolkien insists that Bilbo, or ‘Mr. Baggins’ as he is still often called, remains a person from the modern world; but that people from that world need not feel entirely alien in or inferior to the fairy-tale world. Philological fictions

One aspect of the structure of The Hobbit, then, consists of Bilbo becoming more and more at home in the world of fairy-tale, in Middle-earth as it was to become. Another aspect, though, and one which Tolkien was uniquely qualified to create, consists simply of making that world more and more familiar: one might say, of making it up, though Tolkien himself might have rejected that description. Much of The Hobbit works, as has been said, by simply introducing a new creature (Gollum, Beorn, Smaug), a new species (dwarves, goblins, wargs, eagles, elves), or a new locale (the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, Laketown), generally one or two to a chapter. Some of these innovations are inventions. There is no known source for Gollum other than Tolkien’s own mind; it was his idea, and a brilliant one, to mark Gollum out by his strange use of pronouns. After his very first remark, ‘I guess it’s a choice feast’, Gollum never again, in The Hobbit – The Lord of the Rings is a different matter – uses the word ‘I’. He always calls himself ‘we’ or ‘my preciouss’. He never says ‘you’ either, though, as with the trolls’ distinctive speech, printers have done their best to ‘make sense’ of the abnormal, for instance by quietly rewriting ‘we’ as ‘ye’. (Proof-reading errors and printers’ errors continued to vex The Hobbit for many years. Only in very recent editions has the contradiction over ‘Durin’s Day’ been resolved, which owners of earlier editions will find at the end of chapter 3 [‘last moon of Autumn’] and the start of chapter 4 [‘first moon of Autumn’]. It should be ‘last’.) Gollum’s consistent verbal oddity gives a distinctive sense of personality, or lack of personality, which is entirely original. Similarly, though Tolkien said, or is said to have said, many years later that the giant spiders were a borrowing from Germanic legend, this is not true. They too are purely Tolkienian.

Gollum and the spiders are the exception, however. Most of Tolkien’s creations in The Hobbit as in The Lord of the Rings are the product of Tolkien’s professional discipline. The ‘wargs’ are a very plain case. There is a word in Old Norse, vargr, which means both ‘wolf and ‘outlaw’. In Old English there is a word wearh, which means ‘outcast’ or ‘outlaw’ (but not ‘wolf’), and a verb awyrgan, which means ‘to condemn’, but also ‘to strangle’ (the death of a condemned outcast), and perhaps ‘to worry, to bite to death’. Why did Old Norse feel the need for another word for ‘wolf, when they had the common word too, úlfr? And why should Old English give the word somehow a more eerie and less evidently physical sense? Tolkien’s word ‘Warg’ clearly splits the difference between Old Norse and Old English pronunciations, and his concept of them – wolves, but not just wolves, intelligent and malevolent wolves – combines the two ancient opinions.

Beorn is another case in point. Here one might imagine Tolkien working a slightly different way. He had to teach the Old English poem Beowulf probably every year of his working life, and one of the elementary data about that poem (like most things about the poem, it took half a century to be noticed) is that the hero’s name means ‘bear’: he is the bee-wolf, the ravager of the bees, the creature who steals their honey, hence (as every reader of Winnie the Pooh would recognize), the bear. Beowulf however, though he is immensely strong and a keen swimmer, both ursine traits (for polar bears in particular are semi-amphibious), remains human all the way through his story, with only very occasional hints that there may be something strange about him. His adventures are paralleled, though, in an Old Norse work for other reasons to be connected with Beowulf, The Saga of Hrolf Kraki, sometimes called The Saga of King Hrolf and his Champions. The head of King Hrolf’s champions is one Bothvarr Bjarki, a clear analogue to Beowulf in what he does. Böthvarr is an ordinary name (it survives in the Yorkshire village of Battersby), but his nickname Bjarki means ‘little bear’. Since his father’s name is Bjarni (which means ‘bear’) and his mother’s is Bera (which means ‘she-bear’), it is pretty clear that Bothvarr is in some way or other a bear: in fact, a were-bear. Like many Old Norse heroes he is eigi einhámr, ‘not one-skinned’. In the climactic battle he turns into a bear, or rather projects his bear-fetch or bear-shape out into the battle – till he is foolishly disturbed and the battle lost.

Tolkien put these pieces together – all of them, note, completely familiar to any Beowulf scholar, let alone one of Tolkien’s eminence. If there is one thing clear about Beorn in The Hobbit, it is that he is a were-bear: immensely strong, a honey-eater, man by day but bear by night, capable of appearing in battle ‘in bear’s shape’. His name, Beorn, is the Old English ‘cognate’, or equivalent, of Böthvarr’s father’s, Bjarni, and in Old English it means ‘man’: but it used to mean ‘bear’, taken over and humanized just like, for instance, ordinary modern English ‘Graham’ ( < ‘grey-hame’ < Old English ^*grceg-háma = ‘grey-coat’ = ‘wolf’). Yet as with the ‘Tally of the Dwarves’ Tolkien went beyond these merely verbal puzzles to ask himself, given all the data above, what would a were-bear actually be like? And the answer is Beorn, that strange combination of gruffness and good-humour, ferocity and kind-heartedness, with overlaying it all a quality which one might call being insufficiently socialized – all caused, of course, by the fact that he has ‘more than one skin’, is ‘a skin-changer’. Gandalf insists on this duality from the beginning: ‘He can be appalling when he is angry, though he is kind enough if humoured’; and it is kept up throughout, till they find the goblin-head and warg-skin nailed up outside his house: ‘Beorn was a fierce enemy. But now he was their friend’. He remains a conditional sort of a friend, of course, as the dwarves would have found out if they had dared to take his ponies into Mirkwood. Beorn comes from the heart of the ancient world that existed before fairy-tale, a merciless world without a Geneva Convention. The surprising and charming thing about him, perhaps, and by no means inconsistent with his origins, is that he is at the same time a vegetarian, a model of co-operative ecology, and readily amused. In Beorn Beowulf and Hrolfs saga have been assimilated and naturalized.

Tolkien took not only riddles, and characters, but also settings from ancient literature. In another poem from the Elder Edda, the Skírnismál, there is a stanza which seems to have been as suggestive for him as the stanzas from the Dvergatal mentioned above. Just before it the god Freyr, passionately in love with a giantess, has decided to send his servant Skirnir to woo her for him, lending him his horse and his magic sword to help him. With heroic resignation Skírnir says – to the horse, not to Freyr:

‘Myrct er úti, mál qveð ec ocr fara

úrig fiöll yfir,

pyr[s]a þióð yfir;

báðir við komomc, eða ocr báða tecr

sá inn ámátki iötunn.’

I translate, keeping as close to the original as possible:

‘It is mirk outside, I call it our business to fare

over the rainy mountains,

over the tribes of thyrses;

we will both come back, or he will take us both,

he the mighty giant.’

It was characteristic of Tolkien in a way to ignore contexts, to seek suggestion instead in words, or names. Here he makes no use of Freyr, or Skírnir, or love for giant maidens, but he seems to have asked himself, ‘what does úrig really mean? And what are these “tribes of thyrses”’? One answer to the last question is that they are a kind of ore – there is an Old English compound word orc-pyrs, which suggests that orcs are the same as thyrses. As for úrig, the German editors of the poem suggest as translations ‘damp, shining with wet’. Tolkien seems to have preferred ‘misty’, with its suggestion of hidden landscapes. In The Hobbit Bilbo does exactly what Skírnir says he is going to do: he crosses the Misty Mountains, and passes over the tribes of orcs. But both are brought into sharp focus, instead of being forever on the edge of meaning, as in the Norse poem.

Tolkien derived Mirkwood in exactly the same way. Myrcviðr is mentioned several times in the Eddie poems. The Burgundian heroes ride through it, Myrcvið inn ókunna, ‘Mirkwood the unknown’, on their disastrous visit to Attila the Hun. Hlothr the Hun claims it as part of his patrimony from his Gothic half-brother in the poem The Battle of the Goths and Huns, Hrís pat it mœta, er Myrcviðr heitir, ‘the splendid forest that is called Mirkwood’ – the poem forms part of The Saga of King Heidrek already mentioned. There seems to be general agreement among Norse writers that Mirkwood is in the east, and forms a kind of boundary, perhaps between the mountains and the steppe. But once again it is never brought into focus. Tolkien reacted, again, by bringing it into focus; by making it ‘unknown’, and almost literally pathless; by keeping it as a place one has to go through to get to a destination in the east; but also by populating it with elves.

He had, as we now know, been creating an elvish world and an elvish mythology for more than twenty years before The Hobbit, in the string of tales which were to become The Silmarillion, and which have been published in much greater detail in successive volumes of The History of Middle-earth. In 1937, though, he used these sparingly, mentioning them only with reference to Elrond in chapter 3, ‘one of those people whose fathers came into the strange stories before the beginning of History’, to ‘the language that [Men] learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful’ in chapter 12, and most of all in the long paragraph discussing the Wood-elves, High Elves, Light-elves, Deep-elves and Sea-elves in chapter 8. Tolkien drew his immediate inspiration for the Wood-elves of The Hobbit from, once again, a single passage from the Middle English romance Sir Orfeo, his complete translation of which was to appear many years later, in 1975. This contains a famous section in which King Orfeo, wandering alone and crazy in the wilderness after his wife has been abducted by the King of Faerie – the romance is a thoroughly altered version of the Classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice – sees the fairies riding by to hunt. Tolkien’s version of the lines goes:

There often by him would he see,

when noon was hot on leaf and tree,

the king of Faerie with his rout

came hunting in the woods about

with blowing far and crying dim,

and barking hounds that were with him;

yet never a beast they took nor slew,

and where they went he never knew.

The first sign of the elves in chapter 8 of The Hobbit is the flying deer which charges into the dwarves as they try to cross the water of oblivion in Mirkwood. After it has leapt the stream and fallen from Thorin’s arrow:

they became aware of the dim blowing of horns in the wood and the sound of dogs baying far off. Then they all fell silent; and as they sat it seemed they could hear the noise of a great hunt going by to the north of the path, though they saw no sign of it.

Orfeo’s hunt is ‘dim’ because it is not clear he is in the same world as the fairies, who chase beasts but never catch them. The dwarves’ hunt is ‘dim’, more practically, because they are after all in Mirk-wood and cannot see or even hear clearly. But the idea is the same in both places, of a mighty king pursuing his kingly activities in a world forever out of reach of strangers and trespassers in his domain. Tolkien expanded this very much, with ideas both from his own mythology (the underground fortress) and from traditional fairy-tale (the fairies who disappear whenever strangers try to intrude on them), but he continued to use the same technique as with riddles and Beorn and dwarf-names and place-names: he took fragments of ancient literature, expanded on their intensely suggestive hints of further meaning, and made them into coherent and consistent narrative (all the things which the old poems had failed, or never bothered, to do).

There is one final obvious use of old heroic poetry in The Hobbit, this time one which shows Tolkien especially clearly playing with anachronism, with the contrast of old and new: Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug. For Tolkien’s taste there were too few dragons in ancient literature, indeed by his count only three – the Miðgarðsorm or ‘Worm of Middle-earth’ which was to destroy the god Thor at Ragnarök, the Norse Doomsday; the dragon which Beowulf fights and kills at the cost of his own life; and Fafnir, who is killed by the Norse hero Sigurd. The first was too enormous and mythological to appear in a story on anything like a human scale, the second had some good touches but remained speechless and without marked character (though Tolkien did take from Beowulf the idea of the thief stealing a cup, and then returning, eventually in a company of thirteen). For the most part, though, Tolkien was left with the third dragon, Fafnir. In the Eddic poem Fdfnismdl Sigurd stabs it from underneath, having dug a trench in the path down which it crawls – this is perhaps one of the ‘stabs and jabs and undercuts’ which the dwarves mention while they are discussing ‘dragon-slayings historical, dubious, and mythical’ in chapter 12 – but Fafnir does not die at once. Instead, for some twenty-two stanzas the hero and the dragon engage in a conversation, from which Tolkien took several hints.

The first is that in the Eddic poem Sigurd, to begin with, will not give his name, but replies riddlingly, calling himself both motherless and fatherless. Tolkien entirely remotivates this, explaining ‘This of course is the way to talk to dragons…No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk’. Sigurd’s motive was that Fafnir was dying, and ‘it was the belief in old times that the word of a dying man had great power, if he cursed his enemy by name’. But then the Eddie poem is, as often, a disappointment to a logical mind, for Sigurd does give his name very shortly after this, and Fafnir indeed seems to know all about him. Tolkien used the start of the conversation, then, and ignored its later development. He took a second hint from Fafnir’s wily and successful attempt to sow discord between his killers, for Fafnir gives Sigurd unsought advice: ‘I advise you, Sigurd, if you will take the advice, and ride home from here…Regin betrayed me, he will betray you, he will be the death of both of us’. In the same way Smaug tells Bilbo to beware of the dwarves, and Bilbo (with less reason than Sigurd) is for a moment taken in. There is a third hint after the dragon is dead, for Sigurd, tasting the dragon’s blood, becomes able to understand bird-speech, and hears what the nut-hatches are saying: that Regin does indeed mean to betray him. In The Hobbit, of course, it is the thrush who proves able to understand human speech, not the other way round, and his intervention is fatal to the dragon, not to the dwarves. One can say only that Tolkien was well aware of the one famous human-dragon conversation in ancient literature, and admired the sense it creates of a cold, wily, superhuman intelligence, an ‘overwhelming personality’, to use Tolkien’s entirely modern terminology. However, as often, Tolkien took the hints, but felt he could improve on them.

Much of the improvement comes from a kind of anachronism, which as so often in The Hobbit creates two entirely different verbal styles. Smaug does not, initially, talk like Beorn, or Thorin, or Thranduil the elf-king, or other characters from the heart of the heroic world. He talks like a twentieth-century Englishman, but one very definitely from the upper class, not the bourgeoisie at all. His main verbal characteristic is a kind of elaborate politeness, even circumlocution, of course totally insincere (as is often the case with upper-class English), but insidious and hard to counter. ‘You seem familiar with my name’, says Smaug, with a hint of asperity – being ‘familiar’ is low-class behaviour, like calling people by their first names on first meeting – ‘but I don’t seem to remember smelling you before’. Smaug could be a colonel in a railway carriage, spoken to by someone to whom he has not been properly introduced, and freezing him off with hauteur. He goes on with a characteristic mix of bluntness and the pretended deference which indicates offence: ‘Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?’ (my emphasis). Bilbo then launches into his riddling introduction, but when Smaug talks at length again he has become in his turn familiar, even colloquial: ‘Don’t talk to me!’ (this means, ‘Don’t try to fool me!’). ‘You’ll come to a bad end, if you go with such friends’ (‘friends’ is entirely sarcastic). ‘I don’t mind if you go back and tell them so from me’ (my emphasis again: Smaug is still talking casually, but the understatement is clearly contemptuous). As he oozes confidentially on, his speech fills up with interjections, ‘Ha! Ha!…Bless me!…eh?’, and with further roundabout mock-courtesy, ‘you may, perhaps, not altogether waste your time…I don’t know if it has occurred to you that…’ This is nothing like Fafnir, or Sigurð, or indeed any character from epic or saga, but it is convincingly dragonish: threatening, but cold, and horribly plausible. It is no wonder Bilbo is ‘taken aback’.

However, this is not the only speech-mode Smaug has available. When Bilbo finally mentions to him the heroic motive of ‘Revenge’ – and Bilbo throughout the conversation talks in a much more elevated style than is usual for him – Smaug replies more archaically and more heroically than anyone has done in The Hobbit so far. ‘I have eaten his people like a wolf among sheep, and where are his sons’ sons that dare approach me…My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt’. His language here approaches that of the Old Testament, and it is matched by the narrator’s in describing him. After Bilbo’s first theft, when Smaug wakes and finds he has been robbed, ‘The dwarves heard the awful rumour of his flight’ – ‘rumour’ here has the distinctly old-fashioned sense of ‘far-off noise’, not the weak modern one of ‘gossip’. A couple of times Tolkien uses the device of substituting adjectives for adverbs, ‘Slow and silent he crept back to his lair…floated heavy and slow in the dark like a monstrous crow’, again creating an antique effect. Smaug’s last boast to himself, at the end of chapter 12, ‘They shall see me and remember who is the real King under the Mountain’, uses the archaic third-person ‘shall’ of warriors’ boasts in Old Norse and Old English, now condemned or marked as abnormal by modern school-grammarians. Smaug in fact seems to have a foot, or a claw, in two worlds at once. And in this at least he is like Bilbo the hobbit. The clash of styles

Getting rid of Smaug remained, perhaps, Tolkien’s major plotting problem in The Hobbit. His ancient sources were not much use to him. Thor’s son Viðar kills the Miðgarðsorm by putting one foot on its lower jaw, seizing the upper jaw, and tearing it in half. There seems no likelihood of anyone in Middle-earth following suit. Sigurd’s ‘undercut’ against Fafnir was too obvious to be used again, and Beowulf’s self-sacrificing victory and death would involve creating a ‘warrior’, a character undeniably and full-time heroic, difficult to fit into the company of Bilbo. Tolkien solved his problem, as often, by a kind of anachronism, in the figure of Bard.

In some ways Bard is a figure from the ancient world of heroes. He prides himself on his descent, from Girion Lord of Dale. He re-establishes monarchy in Laketown, which till then seems to have been a kind of commercial republic. The proof of his descent lies in an inherited weapon which he speaks to as if it were sentient, and as if it too wanted vengeance on its old master’s bane: ‘Black arrow!…I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!’ And it is this arrow, of course – shot by Bard, but directed by the thrush, and ultimately by Bilbo – which kills the dragon, in a way not entirely dissimilar to Sigurth or Beowulf.

The death of Smaug is, however, presented for the most part and up to the final shot in a way which seems much more modernistic. It is above all a crowd scene. When the dragon-fire first appears in the sky, what Bard does is not prepare his own armoury, like Beowulf, but start to organize a collective defence, like a twentieth-century infantry officer. He has the whole town filling pots with water, readying arrows and darts, breaking down the bridge – the Middle-earth equivalent of digging trenches, collecting ammunition, organizing damage-control parties. Smaug is met by a fortified position and by volley-fire, with Bard running to and fro ‘cheering on the archers and urging the Master to order them to fight to the last arrow’. The last word shows up the mixed nature of the scene, for the phrase one might expect is ‘fight to the last round’, a phrase from an era of musketry. In the same way ‘there was still a company of archers who held their ground among the burning houses’. ‘Hold one’s ground’ is another modernistic phrase, suggesting maps and front lines – the Old English version of it would be something like ‘hold one’s stead’, i.e. the ground one stands on. The whole scene in fact, though transmuted into an era of bows and arrows, seems more like the First World War which Tolkien himself fought in than any legendary battle from the Dark Ages. Though victory does in the end turn on a single man and an ancestral weapon, the vigour of the description comes from collective action, from forethought and organization: in a word, from discipline.

I have commented elsewhere on the nineteenth-century idealization of this quality as the most prized of British imperial virtues (Road, 1992), and Tolkien was no stranger to it in real life. When, in his Beowulf lecture of 1936, he mentioned men in the present day ‘who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them’, he must have been referring to his own war service – I have no doubt that he knew, as a matter of regimental pride, that his own regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, won more Victoria Crosses (seventeen) during the First World War than any other. But when one talks of modern war-heroes, and then of ancient ones, the contrast of styles is very marked, the latter (for instance) having almost no conception of concern for others – no one is ever praised in saga literature, let alone decorated, for rescuing the wounded under fire – the former (by convention) without the personal and self-aggrandizing motives which so often, in epic or saga, come over nowadays as boastfully immodest. And yet, Tolkien must have thought, was there after all no connection, no connection at all? Could the relationship between Dark Age battles and the First World War not perhaps be like the one between Gollum and Bilbo: different on the surface, with a deeper current of similarity? That is what seems to be the case with Bard.

Superficial clash of styles leading to a deeper understanding of unity is in the end the major theme (even the major lesson) of The Hobbit. The superficial clash is exploited comically from the beginning, as when Bilbo’s ‘business manner’ runs into the narrator’s, and into Thorin’s, in chapters 1 and 2. Bilbo speaks from the heart of the bourgeois world when he says obstinately, ‘I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required, and remuneration, and so forth’, and the narrator immediately mocks him by putting the commercial language into plain speech – ‘by which he meant: “What am I going to get out of it? And am I going to come back alive?”’ Thorin then trumps even this with his letter which says, in a parody of business English, ‘Terms: cash on delivery, up to and not exceeding one fourteenth of total profits (if any); funeral expenses to be defrayed by us or our representatives, if occasion arises and the matter is not otherwise arranged for’. Words and phrases like ‘cash on delivery’, ‘profits’, ‘defrayed’, were not and could not be used in medieval times (the word ‘profit’ is not even recorded in its modern sense by the OED till 1604). But on the other hand few modern contracts qualify profits with the gloomy phrase ‘if any’, or assume the likelihood that there will be no funeral expenses, because the contracting party or parties will have been eaten (though Beowulf says exactly that in lines 445-55 of the epic). Even the signature on the letter, ‘Thorin & Co.’, is ambiguous. Nothing could be more familiar in modern commerce than the ‘& Co.’. But Thorin’s ‘Co.’ is not a limited company but a company in the oldest sense – fellow-travellers, messmates. In this initial clash Bilbo’s deliberately grown-up style loses hands down. It seems pompous, evasive, self-deceiving, readily exposed by the dwarvish concentration on real probabilities.

After that, one might say, the styles see-saw. Thorin’s is still up when they arrive in Laketown and he announces himself with genuine pomp as ‘Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror King under the Mountain’. Fili and Kili get the same treatment, ‘The sons of my father’s daughter…Fili and Kili of the race of Durin’, but Bilbo is left as an anti-climax, ‘and Mr. Baggins who has travelled with us out of the West’. One should note that Laketown is itself a place of clashing styles, in which there are at least three attitudes present: the Master’s wary scepticism, similar to Bilbo’s at the start, but extending in the case of the younger people to refusal to believe in any old tales about dragons at all; a counterbalancing and equally foolish romanticism, based on ‘old songs’ not very well understood, in which the dragon may exist but is no longer to be feared; and the grim and unpopular views of Bard, balanced between the two. Laketown, at the centre of the book, functions as another primarily hostile image of modernity, against which Thorin and the dwarves seem both splendid and realistic.

But then the stylistic see-saw tilts the other way. When Thorin launches into another magniloquent speech at the start of chapter 12, which contains within it the epic ‘now is the time’ formula, the narrator cuts it down with ‘You are familiar with Thorin’s style on important occasions’, and Bilbo cuts it down further with a mix of plain speech and sarcastic exaggeration: ‘If you mean you think it is my job to go into the secret passage first, O Thorin Thrain’s son Oakenshield, may your beard grow ever longer…say so at once and have done!’ Dwarvish rhetoric, and dwarvish splendour, are re-established by the sight of the treasure, which fills even Bilbo ‘with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves’; but this too is kept in check by Bilbo’s reactions. His mithril mail-coat and jewelled helmet ought to transform the hobbit even more than did the naming of Sting, but though he appreciates them, he cannot help putting himself back in a Hobbi-ton context: ‘I feel magnificent…but I expect I look rather absurd. How they would laugh on the Hill at home! Still I wish there was a looking-glass handy!’

The final confrontation of styles comes, however, in chapters 15 and 16. Chapter 15, ‘The gathering of the clouds’, reaches a pitch of archaism higher than anything so far encountered. The raven Roäc son of Care speaks with impressive dignity; Thorin’s challenge repeats his titles, and is backed up by a newly aggressive version of the dwarves’ song from chapter 1; the chapter leads on to the parley between Thorin and Bard, so archaically put, so full of rhetorical questions and grammatical inversions, that it remains quite hard to follow. One thing it does convey impressively is the difficulty of negotiation once issues of honour are involved. Much of the chapter would fit quite easily into situations from the Icelandic ‘Sagas of the Kings’. But in the next chapter Bilbo takes a hand, and he does so with a return to the ‘business manner’ which was so unsuccessful at the start. Handing over the Arkenstone to Bard and the Elvenking, he says, ‘in his best business manner’: ‘Really you know…things are impossible. I wish I was back in the West in my own home, where folk are more reasonable’. And with this he produces – from a pocket in his jacket, which he is still wearing over his mail – his original letter from ‘Thorin & Co.’. His next proposal to them dwells on the exact meaning of ‘profits’, and uses words like ‘claims’ and ‘deduct’, all part of the vocabulary of the modern (Western) world and quite unknown to the ancient (Northern) one. But by this stage Bilbo has reverted all the way to his origins, and is furthermore demonstrating its ethical superiority. He rejects the suggestion of the Elvenking that he should stay with them in honour and safety, one should note, out of a purely private scruple, his word to Bombur, who would get the blame if he did not return. While this has some ancient Classical precedents – one thinks of Regulus returning to the Carthaginian torturers after having advised the Romans not to ransom him or his men – it is essentially kindly, un-aggressive, anti-heroic: though at the same time, like Bilbo deciding to go back into the goblins’ tunnels, or down the tunnel to Smaug, undeniably brave. It is at this moment that Gandalf reappears, to ratify Bilbo’s decision, re-establish him as ‘Mr. Baggins’, and send him off to dream not of treasure but of eggs and bacon.

Thorin then drops to his lowest point of the see-saw with his cursing of Bilbo, when Bilbo punctures dwarvish greeting formulas in much the same way that Gandalf punctured his own at the beginning: ‘Is this all the service of you and your family that I was promised, Thorin?’ It takes the Battle of the Five Armies and his own heroic death to re-establish Thorin, and in these events Bilbo plays almost no part at all, except to say deflatingly, ‘I have always understood that defeat may be glorious. It seems very uncomfortable, not to say distressing’. (This may be a private joke. The King Edward’s School Song, which Tolkien must have had to sing repeatedly in his youth, is aggressive even by Victorian standards, and contains the lines: ‘Oftentimes defeat is splendid, / Victory may still be shame, / Luck is good, the prize is pleasant, / But the glory’s in the game’.)

Thorin’s two final speeches, however, show a balance of ancient epic dignity and a modern wider awareness: on the one hand, ‘I go now to the halls of waiting, to sit beside my fathers’, on the other, recognition of ‘the kindly West’ and ‘a merrier world’. But a final and absolutely precise balance is reached only when Bilbo and the surviving dwarves part, with completely antithetical speeches:

‘If ever you visit us again [said Balin], when our halls are made fair once more, then the feast shall indeed be splendid!’

‘If ever you are passing my way,’ said Bilbo, ‘don’t wait to knock! Tea is at four; but any of you are welcome at any time!’

Visit / pass my way, splendid / welcome, feast / tea: the contrasts of words and behaviour are obvious and deliberate. Yet it is also perfectly obvious that beneath these contrasts, both speakers are saying exactly the same thing. As with Gollum and Bilbo, Bard the bowman and Bard the officer, the heroes of antiquity and the Lancashire Fusiliers, there is a continuity between ancient and modern which is at least as strong as the difference. Bridging the gap

The thought above may take us back to rabbits, and to hobbits. Tolkien’s hobbits are like rabbits in a way which few people suspect, but which he himself was almost uniquely qualified to observe, that is, in their etymological history (real or imagined). The word ‘rabbit’ is a strange one. Almost all of the names for the wild mammals of England have remained more or less the same for more than a thousand years. Words like fox, weasel, otter, mouse, hare, were virtually the same in Old English, respectively fuhs, wesel, otor, mús, hasa. ‘Badger’ is a relatively new word, from French, but the old word, brocc, is still used: in later life Tolkien was short with translators who did not realize that the Shire place-name Brockhouses meant a badger sett. Such words tend to be the same in other Germanic languages too, so that the German for ‘hare’ is Hase, the Danish hare, and so on. The reason, obviously, is that these are old words for creatures which have long been familiar. But ‘rabbit’ is not like that. The words for the animal in neighbouring languages are different, so German Kaninchen, French lapin, and so on. There is no Old English word for ‘rabbit’. Again, the obvious reason is that rabbits are a relatively recent import into England, like mink, brought in first by the Normans as fur-bearing animals, eventually released into the wild. However, not one English person in ten thousand realizes that, nor do they care. Rabbits have been naturalized, have made their way into folk-tale and popular belief and children’s story, from Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit to Beatrix Potter’s Benjamin Bunny. Now it seems as if they have always been there.

This is the fate which I think Tolkien would like for hobbits. His dwarves and elves are similar, in the age of their names and their wide distribution, to hares and foxes. Hobbits are (if one discounts the slender evidence of The Denham Tracts) imports, like rabbits. But perhaps in the end, or even, by art, in the beginning, they can be made to seem harmonious, to settle in, to look as if they had been there all along – the niche which Tolkien eventually claimed for hobbits, ‘an unobtrusive but very ancient people’ (my emphasis). Tolkien even found an etymology for hobbits, as the OED has failed to do for rabbits. His first words about them were, as has been said, ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’. Many years and many hundreds of pages later, in almost the last words of the last Appendix of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien suggested that ‘hobbit’ might be a modern worn-down form of an unrecorded but perfectly plausible Old English word, holbytla. Hol of course means hole. A ‘bottle’ even now in some English place-names means a dwelling, and Old English bytlian means to dwell, to live in. Holbytla, then, = ‘hole-dweller, hole-liver’. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hole-liver.’ What could be more obvious than that? It is not impossible that Tolkien, one of the great philologists, who knew more about Old English in the 1930s than almost anyone alive, might have had this etymology in his head, perhaps subconsciously, when he wrote the seminal sentence on the School Certificate paper, but I think it is unlikely. What is more likely is that Tolkien, faced with a verbal puzzle, did not rest till he had worked out a totally convincing argument for it; while even in creating words he did so with a very strong sense of what fitted English patterns and what did not.

These comments on the word ‘hobbit’ furthermore fit the concept of hobbits. They are above all anachronisms, novelties in an imagined ancient world, the world of fairy-tale and nursery-rhyme and what once lay behind them. They retain that anachronistic quality stubbornly to the end, smoking tobacco (an import from America unknown to the ancient North), and eating potatoes (another import from America, on which old Gaffer Gamgee is an authority). The scene in the Two Towers chapter, ‘Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit’, in which the hobbit Sam cooks rabbit, wishes for potatoes, and promises in better days to cook Gollum that English favourite, ‘fish and chips’, is a cluster of anachronisms. And Tolkien was certainly aware of them, for in The Lord of the Rings he changed the alien word ‘tobacco’ into ‘pipeweed’, often referred to the equally alien ‘potatoes’ as the more native-sounding ‘taters’ or ‘spuds’ – and in the 1966 edition of The Hobbit cut the equally alien word ‘tomatoes’ out altogether, replacing it in Bilbo’s larder with ‘pickles’ (see Bibliography, p. 30).

However, Tolkien kept the hobbits as anachronisms, because that was their essential function. The ways of creativity are difficult if not impossible to follow, and neat schemas are likely to be wrong in their neatness, if not their general direction. But one could say, with no doubt over-simple neatness, that Tolkien, like so many of the philologists of previous generations, was aware of the great gaps between ancient literature (like Beowulf) and its downgraded modern successors (like the tale of ‘The Bear and the Water-carl’), as of the inadequacies of both groups in both quantity and quality; that he felt the urge to fill the gaps – not for nothing was his first unpublished attempt at an elvish mythology called ‘The Book of Lost Tales’; that he wished also, when doing so, to give some hint of the charm and the fascination of the poems and stories to which he dedicated his professional life; and that he wanted finally to bridge the gap between the ancient world and the modern one. The hobbits are the bridge. The world they lead us into, Middle-earth, is the world of fairy-tale and of the ancient Northern imagination which lay behind fairy-tale, rendered accessible to the contemporary reader.

The qualities of Middle-earth, finally, are evident. Its inhabitants frequently present a challenge to modern values through their superior dignity, loyalty (Fili and Kili dying for Thorin, their lord and mother’s brother), scrupulosity (Dáin honouring Thorin’s agreement, though Thorin is dead), or all-round competence. On the other hand modern values, as represented by Bilbo, as frequently respond to the challenge by decisions taken internally, without witnesses, prompted by duty or conscience rather than concern for wealth or glory. Bilbo, and through him Tolkien’s readers, can come to realize that they too have a birth-right in Middle-earth, need not be totally cut off from it (even if orthodox literary history has tried to assert that they are).

Meanwhile, if there are two further qualities that may finally be asserted for Tolkien’s version of Middle-earth, they are these: emotional depth, and richness of invention. The former is unusual, though not quite unparalleled, in a children’s book. Few writers for children nowadays would dare to include the scene of Thorin’s death, or have a quest end with such a partial victory: ‘no longer any question of dividing the hoard’, many dead including immortals ‘that should have lived long ages yet merrily in the wood’, the hero weeping ‘until his eyes were red’. Nor would they venture on such themes as the ‘dragon-sickness’ which strikes both Thorin and the Master of Laketown, so that the one is ‘bewildered’ morally, by ‘the bewilderment of the treasure’, the other physically, fleeing with his people’s gold to die of starvation ‘in the Waste, deserted by his companions’. As for the unforgiving ferocity of Beorn, the unyielding both-sides-in-the-right confrontation of Thorin and the Elvenking, the grim punctilio of Bard, even Gandalf’s habitual short temper, all these are far removed from standard presentations of virtue as thought suitable for child readers – no doubt one reason why the book has remained so popular.

Turning to richness of invention, perhaps all one need say here is that in The Hobbit Middle-earth retains a strong sense that there is far more to be said about it than has been. As Bilbo goes home, he has ‘many hardships and adventures…the Wild was still the Wild, and there were many other things in it those days beside goblins’: one would like to know what they were. When Smaug is killed the news spreads far across Mirkwood: ‘Above the borders of the Forest there was whistling, crying and piping…Leaves rustled and startled ears were lifted.’ We never learn whose ears they were, but the sense is there that Middle-earth has many lives and many stories besides the ones that have come momentarily into focus. The trick is an old one, and Tolkien learned it like so much else from his ancient sources, Beowulf and the poem of Sir Gawain, but it continues to work. It may have been a surprise to its publishers that a work as sui generis as The Hobbit should have been a popular success, but once it was a success there can have been no surprise in the clamour for a sequel. Tolkien had opened up a new imaginative continent, and the cry now was to see more of it.