The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

CHAPTER 3

THE BOURGEOIS BURGLAR The word and the thing: elves and dwarves

Sigelhearwan, Nodens, Fawler, fancy, glamour: stripped of its layers of scholarly guardedness, the essence of Tolkien’s belief was that ‘the word authenticates the thing’. This was a belief grounded on philology. Tolkien thought, indeed he knew, that he could distinguish many words and word-forms into two classes, one ‘old-traditional-genuine’, the other ‘new-unhistorical-mistaken’. From this he went on to form the opinion, less certain but still highly plausible, that the first group was not only more correct but also more interesting than the second; it had compelled assent over the millennia, it had a definite ‘inner consistency’, whether or not that was the ‘inner consistency of reality’ or merely of Secondary Art.

These beliefs go a long way towards explaining Tolkien’s sudden displays of scrupulosity. In 1954 he was ‘infuriated’ to find that the printers of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings had gone through it, with the best will in the world and in conformity with standard English practice, changing ‘dwarves’ to ‘dwarfs’, ‘dwarvish’ to ‘dwarfish’, ‘elven’ to ‘elfin’, and so on. Considering the hundreds of changes involved (and the cost of proof correction) many authors might have let the matter ride; but Tolkien had all the original forms restored (see Biography, p. 290). In 1961 Puffin Books did much the same thing to a reprint of The Hobbit, and Tolkien complained to his publishers (Letters, p. 313) at greater length. His point was that even in modern English many old words ending in -f can still be told from new ones by their plural forms: old words (or at least old words of one particular class in Old English) behave like ‘hoof’ or ‘loaf’ and become ‘hooves’, ‘loaves’, while new ones (unaffected by sound-changes in the Old English period) simply add -s, as in ‘proofs’, ‘tiffs’, ‘rebuffs’. Writing ‘dwarfs’ was then, to Tolkien’s acute and trained sensibility, the equivalent of denying the word its age and its roots. Much the same reasoning had led Jacob Grimm, many years before, to leave the word Elfen out of his dictionary altogether, as an English import, replacing it with the native form Elben (which no one actually used any more) – his argument is repeated almost verbatim in the advice to German translators in Tolkien’s ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings’, p. 164. Even more than ‘dwarfs’ Tolkien disliked the word ‘elfin’, since this was a personal and pseudo-medieval coinage by Edmund Spenser – the poet hailed by the OED’s citations as the dawn of modern literature, and also the man whose first poem, The Shepheardes Calendar of 1579, was ornamented by the most offensive gloss that Tolkien probably ever encountered. In quick succession this declared that for all its age ‘that rancke opinion of Elfes’ [sic] should be rooted ‘oute of mens hearts’ as being a mistaken form of the Italian faction the ‘Guelfes’, and was in any case a Papistical notion spread by ‘bald Friers and knauish shauelings’.¹ Tolkien would not have known whether to be offended most as philologist, as patriot, or as Roman Catholic! All round, the gloss no doubt confirmed him in the belief that modern and erroneous spellings went with stupid and self-opinionated people.

Belief was reinforced further by the history of the word ‘fairy’. The OED, true to form, said that this was the word that should be used: ‘In mod. literature, elf is a mere synonym of FAIRY, which has to a great extent superseded it even in dialects.’ But whether this particular fact was true or not, Tolkien knew that much else of the OED’s information on such points was wrong. Its first citation for ‘fairy’ in its present sense is from John Gower, 1393, ‘And as he were a fairie’; but as Tolkien remarked in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (Tree p. 8), what Gower really wrote was ‘as he were of faierie’, ‘as if he had come from (the land of) Faërie’. Just above the OED cites the earlier poem of Sir Orfeo as evidence for the belief that ‘the fairy’ could be a collective noun, ‘the fairy-folk’: ‘Awey with the fayré sche was ynome’, i.e. presumably ‘she was taken away by the fairy-people’. Tolkien made no overt remark on the matter, but his translation of Sir Orfeo, published in 1975, has the line correctly translated, ‘By magic was she from them caught’. ‘Fayré’ in that context means ‘glamour’, the deceptio visus of the inhabitants of Fairyland. The gist of these observations for Tolkien must have been that ‘fairy’ in its modern sense was a newer word than the OED realised; that it was furthermore a foreign word derived from French fée; and had been throughout its history a source of delusion and error for English people, ending in the compound words ‘fairy-tale’ and ‘fairy-story’ which as Tolkien observed in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ were badly defined, uninformed, and associated with literary works (like Drayton’s Nymphidia) bereft of the slightest trace of sub-creation or any other respectable literary art.

Good writing began with right words. Tolkien accordingly schooled himself to drop forms like ‘elfin’, ‘dwarfish’, ‘fairy’, ‘gnome’, and eventually ‘goblin’, though he had used all of them in early works up to and including The Hobbit.² More importantly he began to work out their replacements, and to ponder what concepts lay behind the words and uses which he recognised as linguistically authentic. This activity of re-creation – creation from philology – lies at the heart of Tolkien’s ‘invention’ (though maybe not of his ‘inspiration’); it was an activity which he kept up throughout his life, and one which is relatively easy to trace, or to ‘reconstruct’. Thus there can be little doubt what Tolkien thought of the ‘elves’ of English and Germanic tradition. He knew to begin with that Old English ælf was the ancestor of the modern word, was cognate with Old Norse álfr, Old High German alp, and for that matter, had it survived, Gothic *albs. It was used in Beowulf, where the descendants of Cain include eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéas, ‘ettens and elves and demon-corpses’, and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where the seven-foot green giant with his monstrous axe is described nervously by bystanders as an aluisch mon or uncanny creature. The wide distribution of the word in space and time proves that belief in such creatures, whatever they were, was once both normal and immemorially old, going back to the times when the ancestors of Englishmen and Germans and Norwegians still spoke the same tongue. Yet what did the belief involve? Considering concept rather than word, Tolkien must soon have come to the conclusion that all linguistically authentic accounts of the elves, from whichever country they came, agreed on one thing: that the elves were in several ways paradoxical.

For one thing, people did not know where to place them between the polarities of good and evil. They were the descendants of Cain, the primal murderer, said the Beowulf-poet. They weren’t as bad as that, imply the characters in Sir Gawain – actually the green giant plays fair and even lets Sir Gawain off – but they were certainly very frightening. It was wrong to offer sacrifice to them (álfa-blót) concurred all post-Christian Icelanders. On the other hand it might have seemed a good idea to propitiate them; if you didn’t, Anglo-Saxons perhaps reminded each other, you might get wæterælfádl, the ‘water-elf disease’, maybe dropsy, or ælfsogoða, lunacy. There was a widespread belief in ‘elf-shot’, associated on the one hand with the flint arrows of prehistoric man and on the other with the metaphorical arrows of diabolic temptation. The consensus of these references is fear.

Simultaneous with that, though, is allure. Ælfscýne is an approbatory Anglo-Saxon adjective for a woman, ‘elf-beautiful’. Fríð sem álfkona, said the Icelanders, ‘fair as an elf-woman’. The standing and much-repeated story about the elves stresses their mesmeric charm. It may be ‘True Thomas’ on Huntly bank who sees ‘the queen of fair Elfland’, or a young woman who hears the elf-horn blowing, but either way the immediate reaction is of desire. True Thomas disregards all warnings to make off with the elf-queen, does not return to earth for seven years, and (in Walter Scott’s version) leaves immediately again as soon as he is called. The medieval romance of Sir Launfal ends with the same glad desertion. For women to run off with elves was regarded with more suspicion. ‘Lady Isabel’ in the Scottish ballad saves her maidenhood and her life from the treacherous elf-knight she herself has summoned, and at the start of The Wife of Bath’s Tale Chaucer makes a series of jokes about elves and friars, the burden of which is that the latter are sexually more rapacious than the former, though the former had a bad reputation with young women as well. The allure and the danger are mixed. Indeed a common variant of the ‘young man/elf-queen’ story ends with him in despair, not at having been seduced but at being deserted. It is the memory of former happiness, the ‘disillusionment’ of loss of ‘glamour’, which leaves Keats’s character ‘Alone and palely loitering’.

Now one can see very easily how such an apparent discrepancy of fear and attraction might in sober reality arise. Beauty is itself dangerous: this is what Sam Gamgee tries to explain to Faramir in The Two Towers, when interrogated on the nature of Galadriel, the elf-queen herself. ‘I don’t know about perilous’ says Sam (pp. 664–5), replying to Faramir’s highly accurate remark that she must be ‘perilously fair’:

‘It strikes me that folk takes their peril with them into Lórien, and finds it there because they’ve brought it. But perhaps you could call her perilous, because she’s so strong in herself. You, you could dash yourself to pieces on her, like a ship on a rock; or drownd yourself, like a hobbit in a river. But neither rock nor river would be to blame.’

One could say the same of Sir Launfal’s lady, or True Thomas’s. One can also see how the rejected wives and fiancées, or husbands and fathers of people under elvish allure would concoct a very different story! Before long they would have the ylfe in exactly the same category as Cain – or Moloch. But this would be a second-hand opinion, and a prejudiced one (like those of Boromir, or Éomer and the Riders, LOTR p. 329 or p. 422).

It is in fact the strong point of Tolkien’s ‘re-creations’ that they take in all available evidence, trying to explain both good and bad sides of popular story; the sense of inquiry, prejudice, hearsay and conflicting opinion often gives the elves (and other races) depth. In Lothlórien we can see Tolkien exploiting, for instance, variant ideas about the elves and time. Most stories agreed that humans returning from Elf-land were temporally confused. Usually they thought time outside had speeded up: three nights in Elf-land might be three years outside, or a century. But sometimes they thought it had stood still. When the elf-maid sings in the Danish ballad of ‘Elverhøj’, or ‘Elf-hill’, time stops:

Striden strom den stiltes derved,

som førre var van at rinde;

de liden smaafiske, i floden svam,

de legte med deres finne.

‘The swift stream then stood still, that before had been running; the little fish that swam in it played their fins in time.’³

Did the discrepancy disprove the stories? Tolkien thought it pointed rather to what C. S. Lewis called the ‘unexpectedness’ of reality,⁴ and paused to explain the phenomenon in The Fellowship of the Ring, p. 379. There Sam thinks that their stay in Lothlórien, the ‘elf-hill’ itself, might have been three nights, but ‘never a whole month. Anyone would think that time did not count in there!’ Frodo agrees, but Legolas says that from an elvish viewpoint things are more complicated than that:

‘For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream.’

His remarks harmonise the motifs of ‘The Night that Lasted a Year’ and ‘The Stream that Stood Still’. They are in a way redundant to the mere action, the plot of The Lord of the Rings. Yet they, and many other incidental turns, explanations, allusions,^* help to keep up a sense of mixed strangeness and familiarity, of reason operating round a mysterious centre. This feeling Tolkien himself acquired from long pondering on literary and philological cruxes; it explains why he laid such stress on ‘consistency’ and ‘tone’.

To cut matters short, one can remark that Tolkien went through much the same process with the ‘dwarves’. This is also an old word, cf. Old English dweorh, Old Norse dvergr, Old High German twerg, Gothic *dvairgs etc. It seems to have cohabited with the word for ‘elf’ over long periods, causing a sequence of confusions over ‘light-elves’ ( = elves), ‘black-elves’ ( = ? dwarves), and ‘dark-elves’ ( = ?), which Tolkien never forgot and eventually brought to prominence in the story of Eöl in The Silmarillion. More interesting is some slight sense in various sources that men dealt with dwarves in a way they could not with elves, on an equal basis marred often by hostility. The seven dwarves help Snow-White in the familiar fairy-tale (from the Grimms’ collection), but in ‘Snow-White and Rose-Red’ (also from Grimm) the dwarf combines great wealth with sullen ingratitude. The association with gold and mining is strong, as in the site of ‘Dwarf’s Hill’; so are the stories of broken bargains, as when the Norse god Loki refuses to pay a dwarf the head he has lost, with Portia-like quibbles, or when Loki again strips the dwarf Andvari of all his wealth, even the last little (fatal) ring that Andvari pleads for.⁵ Inter uos nemo loquitur, nisi corde doloso, says the dwarf in the eleventh-century German poem Ruodlieb, with hostile truth: ‘among you (men) no one speaks except with a deceitful heart. That is why you will never come to long life …’ Both the longevity of dwarves and their tendency to get into disputes over payment are remembered on several occasions in The Hobbit. Their ‘under-the-mountain’ setting there is traditional too. The great Old Norse poem on world’s end, the Völuspá, links them with stone: stynia dvergar fyr steindurom, ‘the dwarves groan before their stone-doors’. Snorri Sturluson (a kind of Northern Lazamon) says that they ‘quickened in the earth … like maggots’, while his Icelandic countrymen long called echoes dvergmál, ‘dwarf-talk’. The correspondence between such separated works as Snorri’s Prose Edda (thirteenth-century Icelandic) and the Grimms’ Kindermärchen (nineteenth-century German) is indeed in this matter surprisingly, even provocatively strong, and Tolkien was not the first to see it; the Grimms themselves observed that such things were a proof of some ‘original unity’, des ursprünglichen Zusammenhangs.⁶ Zusammenhang: a ‘hanging together’. That is very much what Tolkien thought of all these tales, and the phenomenon remains no matter what interpretation one puts on it.

However, both with elves and with dwarves there is one further factor to which Tolkien gave great weight; and that is literary art. No matter how many cross-references he could find and use, it looks as if he gave greatest weight and longest consideration to single poems, tales, phrases, images, using these as the centre of his portrayals of whole races or species. Naturally it is a speculative business to identify these, but I would suggest that the ‘master-text’ for Tolkien’s portrayal of the elves is the description of the hunting king in Sir Orfeo; and for the dwarves is the account of the Hjaðnin-gavíg, the ‘Everlasting Battle’, in Snorri’s Edda. These give further the ‘master-qualities’ of, respectively, evasiveness and revenge.

To take the simpler one first, the story of the ‘Everlasting Battle’ is as follows: once upon a time there was a king called Högni, whose daughter was Hildr. She, however, was abducted in his absence (some versions say seduced by a master-harper) by a pirate king called Hethinn. Högni pursued them and caught up at the island of Hoy in the Orkneys. Here Hildr tried to make a reconciliation, warning her father that Hethinn was ready to fight. Högni ‘answered his daughter curtly’. As the two sides draw up to each other, though, Hethinn makes a better and more courteous offer. But Högni refuses, saying: ‘Too late have you made this offer of coming to terms, for now I have drawn Dáinsleif which the dwarves made, which must kill a man every time it is drawn, and never turns in the stroke, and no wound heals where it makes a scratch.’ Unintimidated by words (like most Vikings) Hethinn shouts back that he calls any sword good that serves its master, and the battle is on. Every day the men fight, every night Hildr wakes them by witchcraft, so it will go to Doomsday.⁷

This story is one, evidently, of remorseless pride flaring only in taciturnity; its centre is Högni’s decision to fight rather than look for a moment as if he could be bought; the ‘objective correlative’ of pride and decision is the sword Dáinsleif, the ‘heirloom of Dáin’, which the dwarves made and which knows no mercy. The sword Tyrfing in the Saga of King Heidrek edited by Christopher Tolkien is virtually identical – dwarf-made, cursed, remorseless, leading to murder between close relatives and the final lament, ‘It will never be forgotten; the Norns’ doom is evil’. These qualities, it seems, are those which Tolkien chose and developed for his dwarves. Thorin and Company act out of revenge as well as greed in The Hobbit, the long and painful vengeance of Thráin for Thrór is the centre of what we are told of the dwarves in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, Dáin Ironfoot himself incarnates in Tolkien’s Middle-earth the whole tough, fair, bitter, somehow unlucky character of the dwarvish race.⁸ It is not too much to say that the ‘inspiration’ of their portrayal as opposed to the more laborious element of ‘invention’, springs directly from Snorri and the Hjaðningavíg and ‘Dáinsleif which the dwarves made’. To use Tolkien’s phrase, this was a ‘fusion-point of imagination’, once met never forgotten.

As for the elves, their fusion or kindling-point would seem to be some twenty or thirty lines from the centre of the medieval poem of Sir Orfeo, itself a striking example of the alchemies of art. In origin this is only the classical story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but the fourteenth-century poet (or maybe some forgotten predecessor) has made two radical changes to it: one, the land of the dead has become elf-land, from which the elf-king comes to seize Dame Heurodis; two, Sir Orfeo, unlike his classical model, is successful in his quest and bears his wife away, overcoming the elf-king by the mingled powers of music and honour. The poem’s most famous and original passage is the image of the elves in the wilderness, seen again and again by Orfeo as he wanders mad and naked, looking for his wife, but never certainly identified as hallucinations, phantoms, or real creatures on the other side of some transparent barrier which Orfeo cannot break through. To quote Tolkien’s translation:

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 … (SGPO pp. 129–30)

Many hints from this took root in Tolkien’s mind: the shadow-army with its echoing horns which was to follow Aragorn from the ‘paths of the dead’, the ‘dim blowing of horns’ as a ‘great hunt’ goes past the silent dwarves in Mirkwood in The Hobbit, and in The Hobbit again the image of the fierce, proud, impulsive, honourable elf-king who imprisons Thorin but will take no advantage in the end even of Bilbo. Stronger than anything, though, is the association of the elves with the wilderness – an idea corroborated to Tolkien by the many Anglo-Saxon compounds such as ‘wood-elf’, ‘water-elf’, ‘sea-elf’ and so on – and with the music of the harp, the instrument by which Sir Orfeo wins back his wife. It may even have seemed significant to Tolkien that in Sir Orfeo the elves freed and rewarded their harper-enemy for his skill, while in some versions of the Hjaðningavíg the dwarvish weapon Dáinsleif condemns Hjarrandi (the Northern Orpheus) not just to death but to death everlastingly repeated. A whole conflict of temperament between two species is summed up in the detail, and a conflict of style. However, the further one traces Tolkien’s debt to ancient texts and fragments, in this matter, the more one realises how easy it was for him to feel that a consistency and a sense lay beneath the chaotic ruin of the old poetry of the North – if only someone would dig it out. To quote Shakespeare’s observations on another Enchanted Wood which sensible people can make nothing of (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i):

But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigured so together,

More witnesseth than fancy’s images,

And grows to something of great constancy;

But howsoever, strange and admirable.

I do not suppose Tolkien would have liked the down-grading of ‘fancy’, nor the comedy of Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed. Bully Bottom, though, has a Tolkienish bravura; and Hippolyta’s feeling that ‘there must have been something in it’ was his own. Creative anachronisms

It was by similar processes of ‘reconstruction’ that Tolkien arrived at his ‘orcs’ and ‘wargs’, later his ‘ents’ and ‘woses’.^* None of the foregoing, however, offers any help at all with ‘hobbits’. If ‘the word authenticates the thing’, they are not authentic, for ‘hobbit’ is in no sense an ancient word. Nor indeed does their genesis seem to have had any element of ‘invention’ in it; it was pure ‘inspiration’, without any trace of thought at all. The moment of the word’s arrival has in fact been recorded by Tolkien, and subsequently by Humphrey Carpenter:

It was on a summer’s day, and he was sitting by the window in the study at Northmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate exam papers. Years later he recalled: ‘One of the candidates 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. 230)⁹

The incident seems a perfect example of the creative unconsciousness: the boring job, the state of combined surface concentration and deeper lack of interest, the sudden relaxation which allows a message to force its way through from some unknown area of pressure. It is reminiscent of the flashes of insight which solve scientists’ problems in dreams (like von Kékulé the chemist and the snake with its tail in its mouth). But what has philology to do with an event so mysterious and so personal?

Tolkien had no opinion to offer himself. In a letter in the Observer (20 February 1938), he answered speculation by saying ‘I do not remember anything about the name and inception of the hero’, and denied (without total certainty) that the word ‘hobbit’ could have come from prior reading in African exploration or fairy-tale, as had been suggested. He thought that earlier writers’ hobbits, if they existed, were probably ‘accidental homophones’, i.e. the name was the same but the thing was not. Much later, in a letter he seems never to have posted (Letters, pp. 379–87), he observed that though he could often remember acquiring names this process played little part in the construction of stories. It is somehow typical that the OED should have claimed (Times, 31 May 1977) to have identified Tolkien’s ‘source’ and ‘inspiration’ in J. Hardy’s edition of The Denham Tracts, Vol. II (1895), which declares that ‘The whole earth was overrun with ghosts, boggles … hobbits, hobgoblins’. The word ‘hobbit’ is there, but in a run of distinctly insubstantial creatures which hardly correspond to Tolkien’s almost pig-headedly solid and earthbound race. Words are not things: the name ‘hobbit’ may seem to be for the researcher, a dead-end.

Even dead-ends have their uses, though (see below). This particular one prompts several thoughts. One is that although Tolkien accepted the word as coming from outside, not being rooted in antiquity at all, he nevertheless did not rest until he had worked out an acceptable etymology for it. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ is of course the first sentence of The Hobbit. Not quite the last sentence, but on the last page of the last appendix of The Lord of the Rings, is the note on the word ‘hobbit’ which gives its derivation, viz. from Old English *hol-bytla, ‘hole-dweller’ or ‘hole-builder’. Holbytla is an ‘asterisk word’. It was never recorded, but nevertheless could, is even on the whole likely to have existed, like *dvairgs. Furthermore it makes the magic sentence of inspiration into a tautology: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hole-liver…’ What else would you expect? The implication is that the inspiration was a memory of something that could in reality have existed, and that anyway conformed to the inflexible rules of linguistic history: as a word ‘hobbit’ was more like ‘dwarves’ than ‘elfin’.

The next point is that Tolkien did admit one possible source in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922), the story of the near-disgrace and abortive self-discovery of a complacent American businessman; to this theme the journey and the nature of Bilbo Baggins show some correspondence. But the source that Tolkien emphatically rejected is the word ‘rabbit’, of which so many critics have been reminded. ‘Calling Bilbo a “nassty little rabbit” was a piece of vulgar trollery’, he wrote, ‘just as “descendant of rats” was a piece of dwarfish [sic] malice’ (Observer, 20 February 1938). ‘Certainly not rabbit’ he affirmed later. Internal evidence runs against him here, however, for it is not only the trolls who think simultaneously of Bilbo and rabbits. Bilbo makes the comparison himself in chapter 6 of The Hobbit, when he sees the eagle sharpening its beak and begins ‘to think of being torn up for supper like a rabbit’. Three pages later the same thought occurs to the eagle, ‘You need not be frightened like a rabbit, even if you look rather like one.’ Thorin shakes Bilbo ‘like a rabbit’ in chapter 16, and much earlier Beorn – admittedly a rude and insensitive character – pokes Mr Baggins in the waistcoat and observes ‘little bunny is getting nice and fat again’ (p. 123). He is in a sense repaying the insult Bilbo offered earlier (p. 109), when he thought Beorn’s ‘skin-changing’ meant he was ‘a furrier, a man that calls rabbits conies, when he doesn’t turn their skins into squirrels’. But the multiplicity of names gives a further clue to Tolkien’s real thoughts, incubating since 1915 and the neologism ‘coney-rabbits’ in ‘Goblin Feet’.

The fact is that ‘rabbit’ is a peculiar word. The OED can find no ultimate etymology for it, nor trace it back in English before 1398. ‘Coney’ or ‘cunny’ is little better, going back to 1302, while ‘bunny’ is a pet-name used originally for squirrels, as it happens, and not recorded till the seventeenth century. The words for ‘rabbit’ differ in several European languages (French lapin, German kaninchen), and there is no Old English or Old Norse word for it at all. These facts are unusual: ‘hare’ for instance is paralleled by Old English hara, German hase, Old Norse heri, and so on, while the same could be said for ‘weasel’ or ‘otter’ or ‘mouse’ or ‘brock’ or most other familiar mammals of Northern Europe. The reason, of course, is that rabbits are immigrants. They appeared in England only round the thirteenth century, as imported creatures bred for fur, but escaped to the wild like mink or coypu. Yet they have been assimilated. The point is this: not one person in a thousand realises that rabbits (no Old English source) are in any historical way distinct from mice (O.E. mýs) or weasels (O.E. weselas), while the word is accepted by all as familiar, native, English. The creature has further established itself irreversibly in the folk-imagination, along with wise owls (O.E. úlan) and sly foxes (O.E. fuhsas). But if an Anglo-Saxon or Norseman had seen one he would have thought it alien if not bizarre. Rabbits prove that novelties can be introduced into a language and then made to fit – of course as long as one exhibits due regard to deep structures of language and thought. ‘If a foreign word falls by chance into the stream of a language’, wrote Jacob Grimm, ‘it is rolled around till it takes on that language’s colour, and in spite of its foreign nature comes to look like a native one.’¹⁰

Now this situation of anachronism-cum-familiarity certainly has something to do with hobbits. The first time that Bilbo Baggins appears in close focus he is ‘standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe’. Smoking later appears as not just a characteristic of hobbits, but virtually the characteristic, ‘the one art that we can certainly claim to be our own invention’, declares Meriadoc Brandybuck (LOTR p. 8). But what are they smoking besides pipes? ‘Pipeweed, or leaf’, declares the Lord of the Rings Prologue firmly. Why not say ‘tobacco’, since the plant is ‘a variety probably of Nicotiana’? Because the word would sound wrong. It is an import from some unknown Caribbean language via Spanish, reaching English only after the discovery of America, sometime in the sixteenth century. The words it resembles most are ‘potato’ and ‘tomato’, also referring to new objects from America, eagerly adopted in England and naturalised with great speed, but marked off as foreign by their very phonetic structure. ‘Pipeweed’ shows Tolkien’s wish to accept a common feature of English modernity, which he knew could not exist in the ancient world of elves or trolls, and whose anachronism would instantly be betrayed by a word with the foreign feel of ‘tobacco’. Actually Bilbo does use ‘tobacco’ on page 6 of The Hobbit, and Gandalf mentions ‘tomatoes’ not much later. In the first edition. The third changes ‘cold chicken and tomatoes’ to ‘cold chicken and pickles’,¹¹ and after that the foreign fruit is excluded. ‘Potatoes’ stay in, being indeed the speciality of Gaffer Gamgee, but his son Sam has a habit of assimilating the word to the more native-sounding ‘taters’ – Tolkien notes elsewhere that the word was borrowed into colloquial Welsh from colloquial English as tatws, in which form it sounds much less distinctive (‘EW’, p. 34). But in fact the scene in which Sam discusses ‘taters’ with Gollum (LOTR p. 640) is a little cluster of anachronisms: hobbits, eating rabbits (Sam calls them ‘coneys’), wishing for potatoes (‘taters’) but out of tobacco (‘pipeweed’). One day, offers Sam to Gollum, he might cook him something better – ‘fried fish and chips’. Nothing could now be more distinctively English! Not much would be less distinctively Old English. The hobbits, though, are on our side of many cultural boundaries.

That, then, is their association with rabbits. One can see why Tolkien denied the obvious connection between the two: he did not want hobbits classified as small, furry creatures, vaguely ‘cute’ just as fairies were vaguely ‘pretty’. On the other hand both insinuated themselves, rabbits into the homely company of fox and goose and hen, hobbits into the fantastic but equally verbally authenticated set of elves and dwarves and orcs and ettens. One might go so far as to say that the absence of rabbits from ancient legend made them not an ‘asterisk word’ but an ‘asterisk thing’ – maybe they were there but nobody noticed. That is exactly the ecological niche Tolkien selected for hobbits, ‘an unobtrusive but very ancient people’ (LOTR p. 1, my italics). It is not likely that this role was devised for them before the arrival of the inspired ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’, any more than the etymology from holbytla. Still, the amazing thing about that sentence, looking back, is the readiness with which it responded to development. The first half of it helped to anchor hobbits in history, via holbytlan, the second to characterise them in fiction, via the anachronisms associated with the rabbit-analogy. Such complexity could be the result of prior unconscious cogitation or later artistic effort. Either way, ‘hobbit’ as word and concept threw out its anchors into Old and modern English at once: ‘grammarye’ at work once more. Breaking Contact

This preamble makes it easier to say what Tolkien was doing in The Hobbit. Like Walter Scott or William Morris before him, he felt the perilous charm of the archaic world of the North, recovered from bits and scraps by generations of inquiry. He wanted to tell a story about it simply, one feels, because there were hardly any complete ones left; Beowulf or The Saga of King Heidrek stimulated the imagination but did not satisfy it. Accordingly he created a sort of ‘asterisk-world’ for the Norse Elder Edda. The dwarf-names of ‘Thorin and Company’, as well as Gandalf’s, come from a section of the Eddic poem Völuspá, often known as the Dvergatal or ‘Dwarves’ Roster’. This is not much regarded now, and has been called a ‘rigmarole’, a meaningless list; The Hobbit implies, though, that that meaningless list is the last faded memento of something once great and important, an Odyssey of the dwarves. As for the landscape through which Gandalf, Thorin and the rest move, that too is an Eddic one; ‘the pathless Mirkwood’ is mentioned in several poems, while ‘the Misty Mountains’ come from the poem Skirnismál, where Freyr’s page, sent to abduct the giant’s daughter, says grimly to his horse:

‘Myrct er úti, mál qveð ec ocr fara

úrig fiöll yfir

þyrsa þióð yfir;

báðir við komomc, eða ocr báða tecr

sá inn ámátki iötunn.’

‘The mirk is outside, I call it our business to fare over the misty mountains, over the tribes of orcs (þyrs = orc, see note above); we will both come back, or else he will take us both, he the mighty giant.’

All that Tolkien has done, in a way, is to make place-names out of adjectives, to turn words into things. But there is one very evident obstacle to recreating the ancient world of heroic legend for modern readers, and that lies in the nature of heroes. These are not acceptable any more, and tend very strongly to be treated with irony: the modern view of Beowulf is John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971). Tolkien did not want to be ironic about heroes, and yet he could not eliminate modern reactions. His response to the difficulty is Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, the anachronism, a character whose initial role at least is very strongly that of mediator. He represents and often voices modern opinions, modern incapacities: he has no impulses towards revenge or self-conscious heroism, cannot ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl’ as the dwarves suggest, knows almost nothing about Wilderland and cannot even skin a rabbit, being used to having his meat ‘delivered by the butcher all ready to cook’. Yet he has a place in the ancient world too, and there is a hint that (just like us) all his efforts cannot keep him entirely separate from the past.

His name, thus, is Baggins, and he lives in Bag End. This latter name had personal and homely associations for Tolkien (see Biography, p. 234). But it is also a literal translation of the phrase one sees often yet stuck up at the end of little English roads: cul-de-sac. Cul-de-sacs are at once funny and infuriating. They belong to no language, since the French call such a thing an impasse and the English a ‘dead-end’. The word has its origins in snobbery, the faint residual feeling that English words, ever since the Norman Conquest, have been ‘low’ and that French ones, or even Frenchified ones, would be better. Cul-de-sac is accordingly a peculiarly ridiculous piece of English class-feeling – and Bag End a defiantly English reaction to it. As for Mr Baggins, one thing he is more partial to than another is his tea, which he has at four o’clock. But over much of the country ‘tea’, indeed anything eaten between meals but especially afternoon tea ‘in a substantial form’ as the OED says, is called ‘baggins’. The OED prefers the ‘politer’ form ‘bagging’, but Tolkien knew that people who used words like that were almost certain to drop the terminal -g (another post-Conquest confusion anyway). He would have found the term glossed under bæggin, bægginz in W. E. Haigh’s Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District (London: Oxford University Press), for which he had written an appreciative prologue in 1928. Mr Baggins, then, is at the start of The Hobbit full of nonsense, like modern English society as perceived by Tolkien: he takes pride in being ‘prosy’, pooh-poohs anything out of the ordinary, and is almost aggressively middle middle-class in being more respectable than the Tooks though rather ‘well-to-do’ than ‘rich’. If he went much further in this direction he would end up like his cousins the ‘Sackville-Bagginses’ – they, of course, have severed their connection with Bag End by calling it cul-de-sac(k) and tagging on the French suffix -ville! Yet Bilbo’s heart is in the right place (also like modern English society as perceived by Tolkien). He likes flowers; he is proud of his ancestor the Bullroarer; if not quite ‘as fierce as a dragon in a pinch’ he is at any rate no coward; and like his name he is ample, generous, substantial, if undeniably plain and old-fashioned. He has therefore not entirely lost his passport into the ancient world, and can function in it as our representative, without heroic pretensions but also without cynical ironies. He is admittedly a bourgeois. That is why Gandalf turns him into a Burglar. Both words come from the same root (burh = ‘town’ or ‘stockaded house’), and while they are eternal opposites they are opposites on the same level. By the end of The Hobbit, though, Bilbo as burglar has progressed so far as to rub shoulders with heroes, even to be (just) considerable as one himself.^*

The early moves of The Hobbit depend very much on this tension between ancient and modern reactions. It begins almost as satire on modern institutions, with Mr Baggins’s language particularly taking some shrewd knocks: the more familiar it seems the more fossilised it is. Thus Bilbo’s ‘Good Morning’ is no longer a wish offered to another person, but either that, or an objective statement, or a subjective statement, or all of them together, or even a gesture of hostility. ‘“What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!” said Gandalf. “Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good till I move off.”’ His ‘not at all’ means ‘yes’, his ‘my dear sir’ means nothing, and when he says ‘I beg your pardon’ he no longer has any sense that he is asking for anything or that ‘pardon’ might be a valuable thing to receive. Against this the dwarves’ ceremonious style of salutation – ‘At your service!’ ‘At yours and your family’s!’ ‘May his beard grow ever longer!’ ‘May the hair on his toes never fall out!’ – may seem pompous and indeed be insincere, but at any rate it is about something, not just semantically empty. Similarly Bilbo, trying to be business-like, flees to abstractions, only to have the narrator expose them: ‘“Also I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration, and so forth” – by which he meant: “What am I going to get out of it? And am I going to come back alive?”’ Thorin, though long-winded enough, does not talk about calculations, but about things:^* the dwarf-song which opens their conclave centres on the misty mountains cold and grim, on harps, necklaces, twisted wire, pale enchanted long-forgotten gold. No wonder the hobbit feels ‘the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves’. In the first clash between ancient and modern ‘ancient’ wins easily; in an entirely proper sense (res = ‘thing’) it seems much realer.

In any case the narrator has his thumb firmly on the balance. His voice is very prominent throughout The Hobbit (as it is not in The Lord of the Rings), and as has been said it provides ‘a very firm moral framework by which to judge’¹² – elves are good, goblins bad, dwarves, eagles, dragons, men and Beorn all in different ways in between. Besides building up morality, though, it more interestingly tears down expectation. The narrator’s favourite phrase is ‘of course’, but this usually introduces something unexplained or unpredictable: ‘That, of course, is the way to talk to dragons’, or ‘He knew, of course, that the riddle game was sacred’, or ‘It was often said … that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd’. Sometimes these and similar remarks introduce information. More often they create a sense that more information exists round the edges of the story, and that events are going according to rules only just hinted at, but rules just the same. Adjectives like ‘the famous Belladonna Took’ or ‘the great Thorin Oakenshield himself’ imply a depth of history, statements like ‘no spider has ever liked being called Attercop’ one of experience. The frequent remarks about legendary creatures of the ‘Trolls’ purses are the mischief’ kind furthermore blur ordinary experience into the magical, while the question ‘what would you do, if an uninvited dwarf came and hung his things up in your hall?’ is very much in the style of ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ The child reader senses, perhaps, the sportiveness of all this, and delights in it; the adult, as he goes along, finds himself succumbing to the ancient principle that ‘redundancy is truth’ – the more unnecessary details are put in the more lifelike we take fiction to be. The underlying point, though, is that the narrator is there cumulatively to express a whole attitude to the archaic-heroic setting: casual, matter-of-fact, even unimpressed, but accordingly lulling. He gets the landscape, the characters and the ‘rules’ through the modern barriers of disbelief and even, potentially, of contempt.

The way The Hobbit works in fact shows up well in any comparison of Chapter 2, ‘Roast Mutton’, with its analogue in the Grimms’ folk-tale of ‘The Brave Little Tailor’. In this latter a tailor (the trade was synonymous with feebleness, as in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part II III ii) kills seven flies at a blow, and is so emboldened that he starts a career of violence and monster-killing. He bluffs his way through a contest of strength with one giant, and frightens off a whole gang of them: ‘each of them had a roast sheep in his hand and was eating it’. Sent by the king to catch two more, he hides up a tree and throws stones at them till they quarrel and kill each other: ‘they tore up trees in their agony and defended themselves’, he says airily when he shows the bodies, ‘but all that does no good when a chap like me comes along who can kill seven with one blow!’ Bilbo starts off very much as a ‘little grocer’, but he never shows anything like the ‘little tailor’s’ resource or effrontery; an omni-competent character would destroy any modern story’s action. Instead he is presented very much as a reader-surrogate, driven on by shame to try to be ‘The Master Thief’ (like the character in Asbjörnsen and Moe’s Norse folktale) but hampered by utter ignorance of the rules of the game. He is caught by one ‘fact’ which neither he nor the reader could have predicted – trolls’ purses talk – and saved by two more: wizards can ventriloquise, and ‘trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of, and never move again’. ‘As you probably know’ is here the final blow in Tolkien’s strategy of ‘counter-realism’. Nobody knows that; indeed it isn’t true; in a traditional tale no narrator could get away with so shamelessly exploiting the gap between his world and his listener’s, because of course there wouldn’t be one! However in The Hobbit the combined assurance of Gandalf, the narrator, the trolls and the dwarves outweighs the ignorance of Bilbo, and the reader. As it happens the belief about being underground before dawn is as traditional as belief in trolls and dwarves at all, going back to the Elder Edda and the end of the Alvíssmál, where Alvíss the dwarf is kept talking till daylight by Thórr, and so turned to stone.^* Inventive resource is very strong in The Hobbit, over words and races and characters and events. The book’s distinguishing characteristic, though, is its sense that all these things come from somewhere outside and beyond the author, forming a Zusammenhang as solid as everyday’s and on occasion no more irrational. The Ring as ‘Equalizer’

This ‘illusion of historical truth and perspective’ is, of course, as Tolkien himself said of Beowulf, ‘largely a product of art’ (‘Monsters’, p. 247). And sometimes the art ran out. Tolkien himself admitted (Observer, 20 February 1938) that twice he got stuck. He did not say where, leaving that for later researchers to make fools of themselves over, but it may be argued that the first few chapters of The Hobbit consist mostly of disengagement and playing down the readers’ collective sense of doubt. As late as the start of chapter 4 the company is halted again (for the third time), and there is a sense of the author groping for intellectual justification. In the mountain-storm Bilbo looks out and sees that ‘across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below’. Giants never enter the Tolkien universe again – Gandalf accepts their existence for a second in chapter 7 – and the passage is a failure of tone; it reads like an old interpretation of giants as ‘nature-myth’, i.e. as personifications of the avalanche like Thórr and his hammer personifying thunder and lightning. This is too allegorical for Middle-earth. But the story takes off very shortly afterwards, with the capture by the goblins (incidentally still too close to munitions workers as the trolls were to labourers), the escape, the goblin runners pursuing ‘swift as weasels in the dark’, and Bilbo’s forcible detachment from the dwarves. Crawling along the tunnel hours later ‘his hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel. It was a turning point in his career’, comments Tolkien, ‘but he did not know it.’ A turning-point in Tolkien’s career too, for from this came most of his subsequent inspiration – Gollum, Sauron,¹³ eventually The Lord of the Rings itself.

But no more than Bilbo did Tolkien realise this at the time. As he testified later (LOTR p. xv), glimpses in The Hobbit ‘had arisen unbidden of things higher or deeper or darker than its surface: Durin, Moria, Gandalf, the Necromancer, the Ring’. The ring changed its significance even between editions of The Hobbit.¹⁴ In the first matters were relatively straightforward: Bilbo found the ring, met Gollum, they agreed to hold a riddle-contest, the stakes being Bilbo’s life against Gollum’s ‘precious’. Bilbo won, but since by accident he’d acquired Gollum’s ‘precious’ already he asked to be shown the way out instead. The sequence works, it excuses Bilbo of any charge of theft (he’d won the ring fair and square) but as anyone familiar with the Ring in its later manifestations will see, the amazing thing is Gollum’s readiness to bet his ‘precious’, bear the loss of it, and then offer to show the way out as a douceur. ‘I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: “We are ssorry; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only pressent, if it won the competition”’ (Hobbit first edition, p. 92). In the second and subsequent editions his last words are ‘Thief! Thief! Thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it for ever!’ Furthermore Gollum’s charge is arguably true, since in this version the deal was Bilbo’s life against any nominated service, such as showing the way out. In both versions Bilbo gets the ring and the exit, but in the latter one it is his claim to the ring which is shaky.

Now, Tolkien integrated this second thought into his story marvellously well, even keeping the first version as an excuse Bilbo had told with uncharacteristic dishonesty to put his claim to the ‘precious’ beyond doubt. However, it is the first thought one should keep in mind while considering the genesis of The Hobbit. And here the obvious point, surely, is that the ring is just a prop: a stage-prop, like the marvellous devices common in fairy-tales or legends (there is a wish-fulfilling ring in the Grimms’ ‘The King of the Golden Mountain’, and a cloak of invisibility), but also a prop for Bilbo’s status with the dwarves. It is a kind of ‘Equalizer’. After acquiring it Bilbo remains in most ways as out of touch with Wilderland as before: he cannot dress meat or dodge wargs, and when in chapter 15 Balin asks if he can make out the bird’s speech he has to reply ‘Not very well’ – the narrator, still maximising the distance between him and everyday Middle-earth normality, adds ‘(as a matter of fact, he could make nothing of it at all)’. He cannot even tell when crows are being insulting. But the ring makes up for this. Before he had it he was essentially a package to be carried, his name as a ‘burglar’ nothing but an embarrassment even to himself. With the ring he can take an active part. He uses it straight away to get past the dwarves’ look-out and raise his prestige – they ‘looked at him with quite a new respect’ – and then to save his companions first from the spiders and second from the elvish dungeons. The problem after that is in a way to maintain his status without simply reducing it to the accident of owning a magic ring. Tolkien takes some trouble over this, observing in the wood-elves’ dungeon that ‘One invisible ring was a fine thing, but it was not much good among fourteen’ – so that credit for that escape is Bilbo’s – and after the fight with the spiders that ‘knowing the truth about the vanishing did not lessen [the dwarves’] opinion of Bilbo at all; for they saw that he had some wits, as well as luck and a magic ring – and all three were useful possessions.’ There is something provocative in this last statement, for it seems to deny that owning a magic ring could be an accident. Still, the very arguability of Bilbo’s status shows how the ring changed The Hobbit: it brought a new possibility of action which would be simultaneously ‘heroic’ and credible, it developed the opposition of ancient and modern motifs into something like a dialogue.

The main subject of that dialogue is courage. Few modern readers of Beowulf, or the Elder Edda, or the Icelandic ‘family sagas’, can escape a certain feeling of inadequacy as they contemplate whole sequences of characters who appear, in a casual and quite lifelike way, not to know what fear is. How would we manage in such a society? With our culture’s characteristic ‘softness, worldliness, and timidity’¹⁵ would we be fit for anything but slavery? To this self-doubt Bilbo Baggins makes a sober but relatively optimistic response. His style of courage shows up when he is in the dark and alone. He faces fear first in the escape from Gollum, when he takes a ‘leap in the dark’ rather than kill a defenceless enemy (this comes only in the second edition). A more significant scene is when he faces the giant spider and kills it ‘all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else’. A third is as he creeps down the tunnel to his first sight of Smaug, but stops as he hears dragon-snoring ahead. Tolkien lays great stress on this:

Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. At any rate after a short halt go on he did … (p. 200)

Such scenes remind us that even Samuel Colt’s ‘Equalizer’ did not make all men heroes: it only made them all the same size. They also provide a behaviour-model which is not quite beyond emulation (no one can fight a dragon, but everyone can fight fear). Mainly they place in a kindly light that style of courage – cold courage, ‘moral courage’, two o’clock in the morning courage – which our age is most prepared to venerate.

They further expose the dwarves to something like the satire turned on Mr Baggins’s modernisms at the start of the story. Thorin Oakenshield, for all his heroic name, sends Bilbo down the tunnel, and the rest do little but look embarrassed. The narrator insists (p. 199) that ‘they would all have done their best to get him out of trouble … as they did in the case of the trolls’, but he may not carry entire conviction. When he escaped from the goblins Bilbo had just decided he had to go back into the tunnels and look for his friends when he found his friends deciding just the opposite about him! ‘If we have got to go back into those abominable tunnels to look for him, then drat him’, is their last word. Maybe Gandalf would have talked them round. But before this begins to sound like treason against the images of the ancient North (the ‘great contribution’ of whose early literature, Tolkien had said, was ‘the theory of courage’, ‘Monsters’, p. 262), it needs to be said that The Hobbit’s dialogue contains many voices. There is something splendid in the narrator’s reversion to laconicism at the end, when he says (as a matter of course) that since Thorin is dead Fili and Kili are too; they ‘had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother’, a motif immemorially old. Much can be said too for Thorin Oakenshield, while for some considerable stretch of the story, say chapters 6 to 8, one can see Tolkien exploring with delight that surly, illiberal independence often the distinguishing mark of Old Norse heroes. Gandalf’s own reaction to being treed is just to kill as many enemies as possible; the rescuing eagles are, the narrator says euphemistically, ‘not kindly birds’; there is a fine scene of sullen insolence between Thorin and the elf-king; but the centre of the whole sequence is Beorn.

He is in a way the least invented character in the book. His name is an Old English heroic word for ‘man’, which meant originally ‘bear’, so that naturally enough he is a were-bear, who changes shape, or ‘skin’ as Gandalf calls it, every night. He has a very close analogue in Bothvarr Bjarki (= ‘little bear’), a hero from the Norse Saga of Hrólfr Kraki, and another in Beowulf himself, whose name is commonly explained as Beowulf = ‘bees’ wolf’ = honey-eater bear, and who breaks swords, rips off arms and cracks ribs with ursine power and clumsiness. Beorn keeps bees too; is surly in disposition; not to be trusted after dark; and ‘appalling when he is angry’, a description not altogether different from being ‘kind enough if humoured’. The dwarves and Bilbo see both sides of him, but perceive them as one. On their second morning they find him in a good mood, telling ‘funny stories’ and apologising for having doubted their word – it has been confirmed by two prisoners:

‘What did you do with the goblin and the Warg?’ asked Bilbo suddenly.

‘Come and see!’ said Beorn, and they followed round the house. A goblin’s head was stuck outside the gate and a warg-skin was nailed to a tree just beyond. Beorn was a fierce enemy. But now he was their friend … (p. 124)

‘The heart is hard, though the body be soft’, said Tolkien of fairy-tale readers. But actually in context Beorn’s ferocity is attractive. It goes with his rudeness and his jollity, all projections of that inner self-confidence which as Tolkien knew lay at the core of the ‘theory of courage’. ‘What do you believe in?’ ask whole sequences of kings to Icelandic wanderers in sagas. ‘Ek trúi á sjálfan mik’, runs the traditional response, ‘I believe in myself’. Killer-Glúmr, an axeman like Beorn, widens this to believing in his axe and his moneybag and his storehouse as well. Both characters have the air of men who have ‘been into’ a crisis of existentialism – and straight out the other side, leaving the crisis sadly tattered.

The solitary conquest of fear: the fierce denial of it. These two conceptions, one modern, one archaic, circle round each other most of the way through The Hobbit. It would be wrong to say they are ever resolved, but they do at least reach climaxes of anachronism and clash of style near the end; first in the death of Smaug, then around the Battle of the Five Armies.

To take these in order, it may be said that killing Smaug is the basic problem of The Hobbit, and not just for the dwarves. Tolkien had few models to work from: Beowulf kills his dragon in plain fight, but without surviving, as is also to happen at Ragnarök with Thórr and the Midgard Serpent. Sigurthr kills Fáfnir in the Edda by stratagem and via the notorious draconic ‘soft underbelly’, Vítharr at Ragnarök again is to slay the monstrous Fenriswolf by putting foot on lower jaw and hand on upper and tearing the beast apart. This last is implausible for men or hobbits, Beowulf’s case and Thórr’s are depressing, and Sigurthr’s frankly too obvious to be interesting: Tolkien thought of something like it to begin with, but if the dwarves are well up on ‘stabs and jabs and undercuts’ then probably Smaug would be too. In the end he had to use a variant on ‘soft underbellies’, but to it he adds a notion as anachronistic to old-style ‘heroism’ as are Bilbo’s decisions in the dark. This new element is ‘discipline’.

Like ‘glamour’, ‘discipline’ is a much-altered word. Its earliest English meaning, in the Ancrene Wisse, is ‘flogging’; the lady anchorites, says its author, must well tame their flesh mid herde disciplines. Later on the word comes to mean teaching or training, especially military training or drill; by the eighteenth century it covered the whole complex business of priming, loading, cocking, presenting and firing the ‘Brown Bess’ infantry musket to the beat of drum, a ritual which if carried out perfectly left British redcoats invulnerable to direct assault (as at Culloden), but when bungled left them, as an OED citation says, ‘fit only for the contempt and slaughter of their enemies’ (as at Falkirk the year before). In Tolkien’s day the word had come to signify the most prized of all British imperial qualities, a specialised cold-bloodedness and readiness to take punishment which the OED finds itself unable to define. Its classic case was perhaps the wreck of the Birkenhead troopship on 25th February 1852, when 500 soldiers found themselves on a sinking ship with inadequate lifeboats in a shark-infested sea. They were drawn up on deck, maintaining, says the Annual Register for 1852, ‘perfect discipline’, and told eventually to jump overboard and make for the few boats which had been launched. But the ship’s captain begged them not to, as the boats with the women in would inevitably be swamped. ‘“Not more than three”’, he reported, ‘“made the attempt.” Under this heroic obedience to discipline the whole mass were engulphed in the waves by the sinking of the ship.’¹⁶ The event became a part of British mystique, as did the quality. Lord Kitchener asked Tolkien’s army of 1916 to show ‘discipline and steadiness under fire’, with typical attention to passivity. Nothing like this can be seen in early Northern literature; the analogue to the Birkenhead disaster in The Saga of Eirik the Red has indeed a Norseman giving up his place in a lifeboat, but he does it with characteristic personal bravura (and rudeness).¹⁷ Nevertheless Tolkien had been taught to value discipline, and it solved his problem over Smaug.

It is Bard the Bowman who kills Smaug, heroically enough with a lost arrow saved as a family heirloom for generations. Before that, though, Bard has figured as a nameless participant in a crowd scene about the giving and taking of orders. He has the trumpets blown, the warriors armed, the pots filled with water and the bridge to the land thrown down; it is this last precaution which daunts Smaug for a moment as he sweeps in over the cold fire-quenching lake. Then the dragon is faced with ‘a hail of dark arrows’ from platoons of bowmen, urged on by ‘the grim-voiced man (Bard was his name), who ran to and fro cheering on the archers and urging the Master to order them to fight to the last arrow’. Fighting to the last round is of course the traditional phrase; being a ‘discipline’ concept it post-dates musketry. But Tolkien has here transferred the ethic of Waterloo or Albuera back to ancient days. He does it again as the dragon shatters the town and the townspeople break for their lifeboats: ‘But there was still a company of archers that held their ground among the burning houses. Their captain was Bard …’ The phrase ‘hold one’s ground’ is not even recorded by the OED till 1856, though there is a parallel in the Old English poem Maldon, where the English are exhorted to ‘hold their stead’ (which they don’t). Not that holding their ground does these particular archers any good, or Smaug any harm; he is killed by the last arrow, the one particular arrow shot heroically by Bard. Still, the whole pressure of the scene is towards modern coolness and preparation, not ancient ‘berserk’ fury (a ‘berserk’ being a ‘bear-shirt’, a man like Beorn). It is discipline that does for Smaug: discipline and that element of ‘complacency’ (OED 1650) which lets Smaug neglect his armour and so betray himself successively to hobbit, thrush and man.

The death of Smaug, like Bilbo in the dark, lets us see courage in a modern way. Their obverse is the Battle of the Five Armies (where Bilbo disappears from sight and heroic displays come from Thorin, Fili, Kili, Dain and especially Beorn), and the unusually complex scene of debate before it in chapter 15. Here Bard and Thorin oppose each other, and do so in highly unchildlike and ratiocinative style. To summarise Bard’s proposition to Thorin, he says in essence: (1) I have killed the dragon, so I deserve a reward, (2) I am also the heir of Girion lord of Dale, and much of Smaug’s treasure was his, so I should have it back, (3) Smaug’s destruction of Laketown has left destitute the people who helped the dwarves, and they deserve repayment, especially as (4) the dragon-attack was the dwarves’ fault (or actually Bilbo’s). To these points – split up in the original by heavy rhetorical questions – Thorin replies in the same mode, though not the same order. He ignores (1), perhaps out of pride, rejects (2), on the ground that Girion is dead and so can have no claim, and half-accepts (3) and (4); in dwarvish style he agrees to pay a fair price for earlier assistance, but refuses compensation for the dragon-attack since that was Smaug’s business not his own. Finally he refuses to parley under threat and asks a rhetorical question himself: ‘It is in my mind to ask what share of their inheritance you would have paid to our kindred, had you found the hoard unguarded and us slain’.

The laborious legalism of this is straight out of Icelandic saga: one thinks of the hero of The Saga of Hrafnkell ticking off the appropriate compensations for the murders he has committed, the hamstringing he has suffered, loss of goods during feud and even the natural increase of animals during periods of confiscation – all coexisting, of course, with an ethic of ruthless violence. It is clear that Tolkien was all but enchanted by that ethical and literary style. The whole scene is presented very much for our admiration, and when later on Dain and the dwarves of the Iron Hills appear, their stilted ceremoniousness – ‘But who are you that sit in the plain as foes before defended walls?’ – rings much more powerfully than the narrator’s modernistic translation: ‘You have no business here. We are going on, so make way or we shall fight you!’ Nevertheless between these two moments another scene has intervened, marked by the greatest cluster of anachronisms since chapter 1: Bilbo’s delivery of the Arkenstone to Bard, the Elvenking and Gandalf.

Bilbo has all along been (nearly) immune to the paraphernalia of heroism. He would like to see himself in a ‘looking-glass’ when Thorin outfits him with mithril armour, but fears he looks ‘rather absurd’, especially when he thinks of his neighbours on The Hill back home. He also listens with dismay and disapproval to the proud speeches of Bard and Thorin, and takes his own steps to break heroic deadlock.

‘Really you know,’ Bilbo was saying in his best business manner, ‘things are impossible. Personally I am tired of the whole affair. I wish I was back in the West in my own home, where folk are more reasonable. But I have an interest in this matter – one fourteenth share, to be precise, according to a letter, which fortunately I believe I have kept.’ He drew from a pocket in his old jacket (which he still wore over his mail), crumpled and much folded, Thorin’s letter that had been put under the clock on his mantelpiece in May!

‘A share in the profits, mind you,’ he went on. ‘I am aware of that. Personally I am only too ready to consider all your claims carefully, and deduct what is right from the total before putting in my own claim.’ (p. 250)

This speech and speaker could hardly be less like the ones that surround it. Bilbo’s behaviour is solidly anachronistic, for he is wearing a jacket, relying on a written contract, drawing a careful distinction between gain and profit, and proposing a compromise which would see Bard’s claim as running expenses (almost tax-deductible). Where Bard and Thorin used archaic words (‘Hail!’, ‘foes’, ‘hoard’, ‘kindred’, ‘slain’), he uses modern ones: ‘profit’, never used in English till 1604, and then only in Aberdeen, ‘deduct’, recorded in 1524 but then indistinguishable from ‘subtract’ and not given its commercial sense till much later, ‘total’, not used as here till 1557, ‘claim’, ‘interest’, ‘affair’, ‘matter’, all French or Latin imports not adopted fully into English till well after the Norman Conquest. It is fair to say that no character from epic or saga could even begin to think or talk like Bilbo. But what is the effect here of this final sharp juxtaposition between Bard and Bilbo, ‘hero’ and ‘businessman’?

It does continue The Hobbit’s strong vein of comedy. It also leads to a sort of ‘eucatastrophe’, to use Tolkien’s own term, as Mr Baggins and the sympathetic reader with him find themselves and the modern code of humility and compromise regarded with gratifying wonder by the Elvenking and Gandalf himself. Still, the comedy is not all one way, for Bilbo remains faintly ridiculous; no one should see The Hobbit as a straight progression from satire against the modern world to satire against the ancient one. What chapter 16 and the scenes around it do most powerfully, perhaps, is to enforce a plea for tolerance across an enormous gap of times and attitudes and ethical styles. On the one hand there is Bilbo Baggins, with his virtue of ‘moral courage’ or readiness ‘to encounter odium, disapproval, or contempt rather than depart from what he deems the right course’ (first recorded 1822); his corresponding vice is ‘self-distrust’ (1789). On the other we have Beorn, Thorin, Dain, whose virtue can only be described by such a non-English noun as the Old Norse drengskapr – magnanimity, the awareness of being a warrior and so on one’s dignity, the quality Dain shows in ratifying Thorin’s agreement even though Thorin is dead – and whose vice is a kind of selfish materialism. Neither side is better than the other, or has any right to criticise. The contrast is one of styles, not of good and bad. Accordingly, though throughout The Hobbit there have been scenes where the pretensions of one have been exposed by the other (Bilbo sneering at Thorin’s elevated language, p. 198, Gloin cutting Bilbo very short at p. 19), by the end even the two linguistic styles have become invulnerable to each other’s ironies:

‘Good-bye and good luck, wherever you fare!’ said Balin at last. ‘If ever you visit us again, 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!’ (p. 269)

There is not much in common between the language of these two speakers; nevertheless it is perfectly clear that they are saying the same thing. Going on from his beliefs in ‘the reality of language’ and ‘the reality of history’, Tolkien was perhaps beginning to arrive at a third: ‘the reality of human nature’. The bewilderment of Smaug

This is a slippery and a dangerous concept. If there is one thing which twentieth-century anthropology has proved, it is that people are different, and that even matters which appear entirely natural or instinctive are so enmeshed in nets of custom as to make it impossible to detect ‘human universals’. There is no sign that Tolkien took any notice of modern anthropology, but then he hardly needed to. Ancient texts would provide him with any number of examples of how what is now considered natural might be in another age unthinkable, or vice versa. People’s behaviour all too evidently changes. But isn’t there something underneath the nets of custom that remains the same? Something that would link modern Englishmen with their Anglo-Saxon ancestors just as philology sees, beneath a thousand years of change, essential continuity between the language of Beowulf and that of today?

Tolkien must have been brooding on this question for many years. In 1923 he published in The Gryphon (the magazine of Leeds’s Yorkshire College) a poem called ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’, the first version of what was to become in 1970 ‘The Hoard’. The first title is better, though, for it means ‘the gold of ancient men, wound round with magic’, it is line 3052 of Beowulf’, and it points to a notorious difficulty in that poem over the hero’s motives. When he went to fight his dragon he appeared to do so for the best of reasons, i.e. to protect his people. On the other hand he also showed a keen interest in the treasure, which the dragon was only trying to guard, having been provoked by the theft of a cup by a passing runaway (or ‘burglar’). At one point indeed, in a violently-disputed passage, the poet seems to say that there was a curse on the gold, so that the man who plundered it ‘should be guilty of sin, be shut up in devil’s haunts, bound in hell-bands and tormented grievously. Yet by no means too eagerly had Beowulf before gazed upon its owner’s treasure of gold with the curse on it.’¹⁸ Was Beowulf guilty or not? Did the curse punish him or not? Certainly the hoard he wins brings death to him and disaster to his people. Maybe this is also a punishment for the spark of avarice the poet is hinting at. But then maybe the dragon-curse is itself avarice. So Tolkien suggested in the 1923 poem, tracing in successive stanzas the transmission of a treasure from elf to dwarf to dragon to hero and ending with the picture of an old and miserly king overthrown by his rivals and leaving his gold to oblivion. All the characters in it are the same: they begin with vitality, mirth and courage, they end in age, wealth and squalor. Their decline is caused by gold. Could their progress also be a kind of analogue of human history, beginning in heroic endeavour and ending in ‘commercialism’, ‘materialism’, ‘industrialism’, that whole series of distinctively modern concepts which nevertheless centre if not on gold, on that ‘idolatry of artefacts’ which C. S. Lewis called, in evident agreement with Tolkien, the ‘great corporate sin of our own civilisation’?¹⁹ If one does think that for a moment, there is a further corollary: just as old miser grew out of young hero eager for treasure, so the ‘great corporate sin’ of modernity must have had some ancient origin. This sinful continuity between ancient and modern must have been on Tolkien’s mind as he finished The Hobbit.

There is in the final chapters a continuum of greed. Least reprehensible is the Elvenking’s: he likes artefacts, but for their beauty, and is satisfied in the end with the emeralds of Girion. Bard is more modern in tone, but is let off as well since his motives are so clearly constructive. Bilbo too, with his ethic of being ‘well-to-do’ rather than vulgarly ‘rich’, is relatively immune. The dwarves, though, have very strong feelings about treasure, especially their ‘pale enchanted gold’ or gold galdre bewunden;²⁰ they even put ‘a great many spells’ over the trolls’ hoard, just in case. As soon as they come within range of Smaug’s treasure its spell starts to work on them. They send Bilbo down the tunnel; they rejoice prematurely; on first sight of the treasure they have to be dragged away from it by Bilbo, ‘not without many a backward glance of longing’. Finally Thorin himself is obsessively determined to give nothing to Bard or elves or Lakemen, and when forced to disgorge by Bilbo’s theft of the Arkenstone, thinks against normal dwarvish behaviour-patterns of breaking his word. ‘So strong was the bewilderment of the treasure upon him, he was pondering whether by the help of Dain he might not recapture the Arkenstone and withhold the share of the reward.’

‘Bewilderment’ is a good word there. In modern parlance it means ‘mental confusion’, which is fair enough as a description of Thorin’s state; he has no idea how he will reach his ends, or what these ends are, only that parting with treasure is not among them. The modern sense however arises from the physical one of being ‘lost in the wild’, and Thorin is that too, being stuck in the centre of the Desolation of Smaug with plenty of gold but little to eat; he could end up as literally ‘bewildered’ as the Master of Laketown who, fleeing with his city’s share of the treasure, ‘died of starvation in the waste’. There is even a third sense of the word to remind us of the visible, tactile source of the treasure’s power, the quality that makes the dwarves run their fingers through it: it means ‘a tangled or labyrinthine condition of objects’, says the OED, quoting (1884) ‘What a bewilderment of light and color met her eyes’. When one thinks of the dim images of gold and jewels and ‘silver red-stained in the ruddy light’ which is Bilbo’s first glimpse of the hoard, one sees that this sense for ‘the bewilderment of the treasure’ is appropriate too.

Thorin’s ‘bewilderment’ is physical and mental and moral as well. The ‘dragon-sickness’ which he and the Master of Laketown catch is also simultaneously magical and moral. At the bottom of it there lies an old superstition which says that dragons are actually misers who have in greed and despair walled themselves up alive, ‘lain down on their gold’ as sagas say. Naturally the gold on which they have brooded (see Hobbit, p. 243) exudes a miasma of avarice. Yet one has the sense of an external force meeting an internal weakness, especially strong in the artefact-worshipping dwarves, and in the Master whose mind was given ‘to trades and tolls, to cargoes and gold’, who despises old songs and speaks on occasion (p. 233) with a distinctive post-Industrial Revolution modernity. This is in fact a complex and successful presentation of the motives behind a real historical change; one might usefully compare the scene at the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), where the revolutionaries against the Automated State turn obsessively, with their first success, to tinkering with machines. Both books are making the same sort of (not very liberal) point: things, metal things, are genuinely fun to play with, but it’s very hard to stop the fun from getting out of hand, though only in the twentieth century have we become really aware of that. Hence the ‘continuum of greed’ from Elvenking to Master. Hence, too, the brooding from 1923 on the word galdor. Besides ‘spell’ and ‘bewilderment’ it also means ‘poetry’; you could say that the ‘enchantment’ of the treasure is a kind of wicked equivalent of ‘glamour’.

There is however another character in this continuum, indeed at one end of it, and that is Smaug. His name is another ‘asterisk word’, being the past tense *smaug of a Germanic verb *smugan, ‘to squeeze through a hole’, as Tolkien said in his 1938 Observer letter; also the Old Norse equivalent of an Old English magic word found in a spell wið sméogan wyrme, ‘against the penetrating worm’. But he has a mental sense as well as a physical one, since O.E. sméagan also means ‘to inquire into’ and in adjectival form ‘subtle, crafty’.²¹ All round it is appropriate that Smaug should have the most sophisticated intelligence in The Hobbit.

Bilbo’s conversation with him is indeed a brilliant stroke. Like so much in the book it has a model in an Eddic poem, Fáfnismál, in which Sigurthr and Fáfnir talk while the dragon dies of the wound the hero has given him. Like Bilbo, Sigurthr refuses to tell the dragon his name but replies riddlingly (for fear of being cursed); like Smaug, Fáfnir sows dissension between partners by remarking on the greed that gold excites; the dissension actually breaks out when eating the dragon’s heart helps Sigurthr to understand bird-talk (another prominent Hobbit motif). Nevertheless Fáfnismál once again did not offer Tolkien enough. It drifted off into mere exchange of information, it contained as Tolkien said of Beowulf too much ‘draconitas’ and not enough ‘draco’, not enough of the ‘real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own’ (‘Monsters’, pp. 258–9). Tolkien therefore set himself to repair this gap, and did so once more by introducing a strong dose of anachronistic modernity.

Thus the most remarkable thing about Smaug is his oddly circumlocutory mode of speech. He speaks in fact with the characteristic aggressive politeness of the British upper class, in which irritation and authority are in direct proportion to apparent deference or uncertainty. ‘You have nice manners for a thief and a liar’ are his opening words to Bilbo (their degree of irony unclear). ‘You seem familiar with my name, but I don’t seem to remember smelling you before. Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?’ He might be a testy colonel approached by a stranger in a railway carriage; why has Bilbo not been introduced? At the same time the ‘bestial life’ of the worm keeps intruding, as he remarks on Bilbo’s smell and boasts parenthetically ‘I know the smell (and taste) of dwarf – none better’, or when he rolls over, ‘absurdly pleased’ like a clumsy spaniel, to show the hobbit his armoured belly. One result is a frequent and vivid sense of paradox, which the ancient world, innocent of scientific rationalism, could hardly have developed: Smaug has both wings and weight, as we are reminded when he leaves his lair and ‘float[s] heavy and slow in the dark like a monstrous crow’ (my italics); and in the cold reptilian belly he keeps hot fire, which peeps out from under his eyelids when he pretends to sleep and flashes ‘like scarlet lightning’ when he is amused. The paradoxes, the oscillations between animal and intelligent behaviour, the contrast between creaky politeness of speech and plain gloating over murder, all help to give Smaug his dominant characteristic of ‘wiliness’, and what the narrator calls with utter modernity (the noun dates in this sense from 1847) his ‘overwhelming personality’.

All this gives great plausibility to another unexpected datum which the narrator springs on us, i.e. ‘the effect that dragon-talk has on the inexperienced’, the ‘dragon-spell’ which keeps prompting Bilbo to run out and confess. No ancient text contains any such motif, but as Smaug oozes confidentially on – ‘I will give you one piece of advice … I suppose you got a fair price. Come now, did you? … Well, that’s just like them … I don’t know if it has occurred to you … Bless me! Had you never thought of the catch?’ – he assumes the ‘Old experienced’ end of the polarity so strongly that it is no surprise for Bilbo to find himself pressed towards the ‘young innocent’ one. Yet the combined magico-moral effect (is it ‘spell’ or is it ‘personality’?) reminds one also of the ‘dragon-sickness’ that Smaug and his treasure between them seem practically and magically to generate. The character of Smaug is part of a Zusammenhang: nothing could be more archaic or fantastic than a dragon brooding on its gold, and yet the strong sense of familiarity in this one’s speech puts it back into the ‘continuum of greed’, makes it just dimly possible that dragon-motivations could on their different scale have some affinity with human ones – even real historical human ones.

If one followed this line of reasoning too far The Hobbit could appear suddenly as a roman à thèse, or even an allegory, in which Bilbo Baggins as Modern Man embarks on his Pilgrim’s Progress (or Regress) into Fantasy, only to find that at the very heart of his monsterworld there is none other than an embodiment of his own worst nature, Greed or even Capitalism itself, skulking on its gold like a fiercer Miss Havisham. The moral would be that all bourgeois must turn Burglar, or something of the sort. Of course such a reading would only be a joke. Still, if by no stretch of the imagination an allegory, The Hobbit does begin to show by its conclusion some flickers of the ‘large symbolism’ Tolkien saw in Beowulf and tried more positively to reproduce in The Lord of the Rings. In its last scene, the conversation between Gandalf, Bilbo and Balin, the wizard is allowed to make the point that metaphors can ‘after a fashion’ be true, that romance and reality are differences of presentation not of fact. The logic of what he says is that if the matter behind old songs can contain someone as prosaic as Bilbo then maybe even the prosaic events of today will sometime be the matter of old songs. There is accordingly a reality, and a continuity, in human nature, even dwarf-hobbit-human nature.

Yet the reason why this hint should not be taken further is obvious enough. Most of The Hobbit suggests strongly that Tolkien did not work from ideas, but from words, names, consistencies and contradictions in folk-tales, things as localised as the dissatisfaction with Fáfnismál which produced Smaug, the brooding over the riddle-contests of Vafðrúðnismál or The Saga of King Heidrek which led (somehow) to Gollum. The two most powerful fragments of all ancient poetry for Tolkien at this time, I cannot help thinking, were the two similar bits from Beowulf and Sir Gawain which imply there are whole worlds the narrator simply cannot get round to. The Old English poet hints at the ‘wide journeys’ which Sigemund the dragon-slayer made, ‘the wicked deeds and battles which the children of men’ (but maybe not of monsters) ‘never knew clearly’. His medieval successor says of Sir Gawain six centuries later that he would never even have reached his main adventure ‘Had he not been stalwart and staunch and steadfast in God’, so many were his clashes with worms and wolves, with wood-trolls ‘and with ogres that hounded him from the heights of the fells’. In exactly the same spirit we are told that even going home Bilbo ‘had many hardships and adventures before he got back’, since ‘The Wild was still the Wild, and there were many other things in it in those days beside goblins’. Some of them have been half-glimpsed already: eyes in the darkness, ‘old castles with an evil look’, ‘startled ears’ responding to the news of the death of Smaug. But in essence the plot of The Hobbit is a tour through darknesses, with no more connection between Gollum and the eagles and Beorn and the spiders than that of one-after-another. The true end of The Hobbit, as opposed to the last scene of chaos and tidying-up,^* is the regretful farewell to the Wild just before, as archaic Took cedes to Edwardian Baggins:

They came to that high point at morning, and looking backward they saw a white sun shining over the outstretched lands. There behind lay Mirkwood, blue in the distance, and darkly green at the nearer edge even in the spring. There far away was the Lonely Mountain on the edge of eyesight. On its highest peak snow yet unmelted was gleaming pale.

‘So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!’ said Bilbo, and he turned his back on his adventure. (p. 271)

Adventure in Middle-earth embodies a modern meaning, but does not exist to propagate it. Insofar as the two worlds are related it is because the ‘inner consistency’ of Secondary Art must necessarily (in order to be consistent) be the same as that of Primary Art or truth.

^* There are too many of these to fit into an argument: one might note, though, that the skill of Tolkien’s elves in archery goes back to ‘elf-shot’; that their association with the sea and their taking of Frodo is very like the passing of Arthur in (and only in) the account of Lazamon, a twelfth-century Worcestershire poet whom Tolkien regarded as the last preserver of Old English tradition; that the gifts of Galadriel correspond to stories preserved in English and Scandinavian family traditions such as that of ‘the Luck of Edenhall’ or the one recorded in Sigrid Undset’s novel Kristin Lavransdatter, part 2, ch. 6; that ‘elvishness’ is a quality recognised in men several times in The Lord of the Rings, but also ascribed to himself by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Tolkien makes no use, however, of the very common ‘changeling’ belief.

^* ‘Orcs’ go back to the orcnéas, the ‘demon-corpses’ of the Beowulf-poet, and to another Old English word orcþyrs, ‘orc-giant’. ‘Wargs’ are a linguistic cross between Old Norse vargr and Old English wearh, two words showing a shift of meaning from ‘wolf’ to ‘human outlaw’. For the ‘ents’ see below and note Tolkien’s own comment in Letters, p. 208, that ‘As usually with me, they grew rather out of their name, than the other way about’. The ‘woses’ are perhaps primarily an apology for Sir Gawain line 721, where wodwos is offered as a plural, though historically a singular derived from Old English wudu-wása. It would not have escaped Tolkien, though, that his office at Leeds University (like mine) stood just off ‘Woodhouse Lane’, which crosses ‘Woodhouse Moor’ and ‘Woodhouse Ridge’. These names may preserve, in mistaken modern spelling, old belief in ‘the wild men of the woods’ lurking in the hills above the Aire. See further Tolkien’s notes on ‘Orc’ and ‘Woses’ in ‘Guide’.

^* I do not know the origin of the personal name ‘Bilbo’, but can record that on one occasion I found myself using Ordnance Survey map no. 161, of S. Herefordshire, to locate churches of similar date to Ancrene Wisse and preserving fragments of the early Anglo-Norse style of stonework. As I did this my eye moved west from Kilpeck to Wormbridge to Abbey Dore to a hill called ‘Great Bilbo’. The Place-Name Survey has not done Herefordshire yet, and I have no explanation for the name; maybe Tolkien had one of his own.

^* The contract he finally does deliver on p. 22 is typically more practical than Bilbo at his most business-like had thought. It covers profits, delivery, travelling expenses, but also defrayal of funeral expenses, ‘by us or our represenatives, if occasion arises and the matter is not otherwise arranged for’. This means, ‘you or all of us may die, and also be eaten’.

^* There is a further weak analogue in the Grimms’ tale no. 195, ‘The Grave-Mound’, and a much stronger one in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (London: Bodley Head, 1945), end of chapter 16. There, though, the tale is given a moral significance, a little like Tolkien explaining ‘elf-time’ in Lothlórien.

^* Even this, I suspect, has a philological root. In the 1928 introduction he wrote to W. E. Haigh’s Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, mentioned above in connection with ‘Baggins’, Tolkien had said that it was important to observe ‘the changes in sense that take place when words of more “learned” origin are adopted and put to everyday use in dialect (see keȩnsil, okshȩn, inséns)’. But okshȩn in Huddersfield dialect meant not ‘auction’ but ‘mess’. ‘Shu’z nout but ȩ slut; ȩr eȩs ȩz ȩ feȩr okshȩn’, quoted Mr Haigh, or for non-natives, ‘She’s nothing but a slut; her house is a fair auction’. When he gets home Mr Baggins finds his house a ‘fair auction’ in both senses. Not only are they selling his goods, they are failing to wipe their feet on the mat! The word has become a ‘fusion-point’ of outraged respectability.