The History of the Hobbit Page 24
23 Added in the top margin and marked for insertion at this point: ‘and pinched [> prodded] him to feel if he was fat and munchable’.
24 This sentence was recast while being written, then changed again to read ‘He had just taken his hand out of his pocket again (which was lucky).’
25 Here ‘fish bones’ is a revision, but I cannot make out the original short word that bones replaced, other than that it was short (perhaps three or four letters) and began with p-; pin(s) is my best guess.
Note that Gollum is not naked, as he is sometimes portrayed by inattentive illustrators, nor reduced to merely a loincloth, but has at least some clothing (however ragged), with pockets.
26 Written in small, neat letters in the bottom margin and marked for insertion at this point to replace everything in this paragraph after ‘Bilbo’s pardon’:
He kept on saying ‘we are sorry, we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give
27 Crowded in above the line and marked for insertion at this point: ‘Gollum must have dropped that ring some time; that he’.
28 Added and marked for insertion at this point: ‘and to find it really did what G. said it would’.
29 This game was originally called ‘blind man’s buff’ but is more often now known as ‘blind man’s bluff’.
This chapter, the most famous in the entire book,1 is paradoxically little-known in its original form. Only some 17,000 copies of the first edition were ever offered for sale,2 and since 1951 those who wished to know how Tolkien originally conceived the crucial Gollum episode have had to consult sources such as Anderson’s textual notes in The Annotated Hobbit or the parallel text presentation of excerpts from the two versions in Bonniejean Christensen’s article ‘Gollum’s Character Transformation in The Hobbit’.3 So far as I know, the first edition text of the chapter has been reprinted in its entirety only once in the last fifty-five years, in the anthology Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, ed. Marvin Kaye & Saralee Kaye [1985].
The following commentary, therefore, while taking into account some features common to all versions of the chapter, from first draft through the third edition – such as the riddles – focuses primarily on the remarkable differences between the story as Tolkien first wrote it and the revised version he eventually, after much hesitation,4 adopted as canonical.
(i)
The Gollum
One of Tolkien’s greatest characters makes his auspicious debut in this chapter, and no point more firmly separates the draft and first edition on the one hand from the second and all subsequent editions on the other than their respective characterizations of Gollum. The most surprising difference, usually overlooked by the commentators, is that Gollum is clearly not a hobbit in the original – ‘I don’t know where he came from or who or what he was’ says the narrator, and there’s no reason not to think he speaks for the author here and take him at his word. It’s not clear from the manuscript text whether Gollum is one of the ‘original owners’ who predate the goblins, ‘still there in odd corners’ or one of the ‘other things’ that ‘sneaked in from outside’.5 But in either case, all the details of his description argue against his being of hobbit-kin. Unlike Bilbo, the hobbit, Gollum is ‘dark as darkness’, with long fingers (p. 155), large webbed feet (p. 158) that flap when he walks (unlike the silent hobbit; cf. p. 161), and ‘long eyes’ (p. 161), huge and pale, that not only protrude ‘like telescopes’ but actually project light.6 Small wonder that early illustrators like Horus Engels7 depict a huge, monstrous creature rather than the small, emaciated figure Tolkien eventually envisioned.8 Not until he came to write the sequel, The Lord of the Rings, and forced himself to confront all the unanswered questions in The Hobbit that might be exploited for further adventures, did Tolkien have the inspiration to make Gollum a hobbit. He subsequently very skillfully inserted the new idea into the earlier book through the addition of small details in the initial description of the creature. Thus the readings in the third edition [1966], with the interpolations highlighted in italics:
‘Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature . . . as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face.’
Just as Tolkien changed his mind – or, rather, delved more deeply into the subject in the course of writing the sequel before finally committing himself – as to Gollum’s origin, so too he changed the character’s personality in the post-publication revisions. For Gollum is far more honorable in the draft and first edition than he later appears. He is perfectly willing, even eager, to eat Bilbo, should the hobbit lose the riddle-game, but abides by the results (cf. p. 160: ‘[Bilbo] need not have been frightened. For one thing the Gollum had learned long long ago was never to cheat at the riddle-game’). Without discounting his cowardice, or prudence, in the matter of the sword, we should nonetheless give him his due: having lost the contest, he is pathetically eager to make good on his debt of honour (‘I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon’), offering a substitute reward (‘fish caught fresh to eat’) in place of the missing ring. Remember too that Gollum had not yet specified what the ‘present’ was; a less scrupulous monster might have been tempted, upon discovering the ring’s absence, to substitute some other prize, such as the fish, for the unnamed reward – but not Gollum. We are thus faced with the amusing depiction of a monster who is considerably more honorable than our hero. For Bilbo soon realizes that he already has Gollum’s treasure but goes ahead and demands a second prize (being shown the way out) in addition to the one he has quietly pocketed – a neat parallel to Gollum’s earlier trick of ‘working in two answers at once’ on that final attempt to answer the last question. The narrator, moreover, applauds his duplicity (‘“Finding’s keeping” he said to himself; and being in a very tight place I think he was right, and anyway the ring belonged to him now.’) with spurious logic that sounds so much like special pleading that Tolkien eventually decided it was just that: Bilbo’s own attempt, in writing this scene for his memoirs, to justify his claim to the ring (see the Fourth Phase of this book, beginning on p. 729, for Tolkien’s eventual solution to this problem).
We should also note that Gollum’s distinctive speech pattern – his hissing, overuse of sibilants, and peculiarity of referring to himself in the plural – was present from the very first, although greatly emphasised by revisions prior to publication.9 As we might expect, though, it is somewhat more erratic in the draft, particularly in the matter of pronouns – thus he at first refers to Bilbo several times as ‘he’ before sliding into the depersonalized ‘it’, and once as ‘you’. Similarly, he refers to himself as ‘ye’ at one point rather than his usual ‘we/us’. Interestingly enough, it is quite clear that ‘my precious’ originally applied only to Gollum himself and not the ring: Gollum ‘always spoke to himself not to you’, usually in first person plural, yet he refers to the ring as ‘it’ (‘bless us and splash us, we haven’t the present we promised, and we haven’t got it for ourselves’). Some of these aberrant elements remained in the published text,10 even through Tolkien’s careful revisions of 1947 and his recording of the Gollum-episode in 1952.11
One final point that we should perhaps consider before moving on is whether or not Gollum in some form predated The Hobbit. Carpenter notes that one of the poems Tolkien wrote as part of the series ‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’, titled ‘Glip’, described ‘a strange slimy creature who lives beneath the floor of a cave and has pale luminous eyes’ (Carpenter, page 106). Carpenter mistakenly dates this poem to the Leeds period (1920–1925/6), while Anderson, who prints the entire poem for the first time (DAA.119), assigns it to ‘around 1928’.12 Glip seems to be yet another example of something escaping out of family folklore into one of Tolkien’s books, like the Gaffer (cf. Mr. Bliss), the Dutch doll who became Tom Bombadil, the toy dog
whose loss inspired Roverandom, or the teddy bears who helped inspire such figures as the three bears of Mr. Bliss, the North Polar Bear of the Father Christmas series, and of course Medwed/Beorn. The reverse is, of course, also equally possible: that Tolkien adapted a purely literary creation into the children’s bedtime stories. In either case, the character did become a private bogeyman for the Tolkien children: Michael Tolkien recalled in a 1975 radio interview how John Tolkien, the oldest brother, terrified his younger siblings by ‘playing Gollum’, creeping into their room at night, with twin torches (flashlights) for the monster’s shining eyes.13
(ii)
Riddles
And what about the Riddles? There is work to be done here on the sources and analogues. I should not be at all surprised to learn that both the hobbit and Gollum will find their claim to have invented any of them disallowed.
—JRRT to The Observer, 20th February 1938; see Appendix II.
Despite Tolkien’s challenge nearly sixty years ago, relatively little has been done to date tracing the ‘sources and analogues’ of Bilbo’s and Gollum’s riddles, although many critics have offered suggestions of sources for specific riddles (the most thorough such treatment being Anderson’s in The Annotated Hobbit) or drawn parallels between this riddle-contest and other wisdom-exchanges and question-challenges in medieval literature (including Vafthrúthnismál14 and Alvíssmál from the Elder Edda, ‘The Deluding of Gylfi’ from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, Joukahainen’s challenge to Vainamoinen in Runo III of the Kalevala, the Old English ‘Second Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn’,15 and most importantly the riddle-contest in The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise).16 Most of these contests involve one character questioning the other about obscure or mythological events, such as the origin of the earth, sun, and moon or the nature of the gods, or asking for prophecies of events still to come like the end of the world. Several have similarly high stakes as in Bilbo and Gollum’s contest: the dwarf Alvis in Alvíssmál is kept answering questions until day breaks and the sunlight kills him (an obvious source for Bladorthin’s earlier trick with the trolls; cf. p. 103), while the wise old giant Vafþrúðnir warns his challenger (the disguised god Odin, operating under the nom de guerre of Gagnrad) that he never leaves alive those who cannot answer his questions, only to forfeit his own life in the end when Odin asks him an unanswerable question: ‘What words did Odin whisper to his son/when Balder was placed on the pyre?’ Only Odin himself knows the answer, just as only Bilbo knows what lies hidden in his pocket. The riddle-contest in The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, Tolkien’s direct model, ends with exactly the same question – Odin, disguised as Gestumblindi (‘The Blind Stranger’), puts riddles to King Heidrek, who answers each with ease until the final question (not a riddle) is sprung on him. Again the stakes are high: Heidrek has promised to pardon any criminal who ‘should propound riddles which the king could not solve’, and when he realizes he has been tricked he goes into a rage and attacks Odin, who eludes him but curses the king to a shameful death at the hands of slaves, a curse quickly fulfilled (cf. the death of Tinwelint in ‘The Nauglafring’ and of Thingol in The Silmarillion). In his own story, Tolkien has combined features of both Vafthrúthnismál and the scene in The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise; like the former, both participants get a chance to ask and then answer; like the latter (where one character does all the asking and the other all the answering), the questions are in riddle-form. Indeed, one of Gollum’s riddles derives directly from one answered by Heidrek (see below).
It should be stressed however that, whatever Tolkien’s sources and inspiration, this striking scene and the riddles it is built around are almost entirely of Tolkien’s own creation. Both frame (the back and forth interaction of the two contestants) and content (the riddles themselves) differ greatly from their precursors. This point was made strongly by Tolkien himself when, a decade after publication, Allen & Unwin suggested that Houghton Mifflin need not secure Tolkien’s permission before reprinting several of the riddles in an anthology of poetry,17 as ‘the riddles were taken from common folk lore and were not invented by you’. Tolkien responded
As for the Riddles: they are ‘all my own work’ except for ‘Thirty White Horses’ which is traditional, and ‘No-legs’. The remainder, though their style and method is that of old literary (but not ‘folk-lore’) riddles, have no models as far as I am aware, save only the egg-riddle which is a reduction to a couplet (my own) of a longer literary riddle which appears in some ‘Nursery Rhyme’ books, notably American ones. So I feel that to try and use them without fee would be about as just as walking off with somebody’s chair because it was a Chippendale copy, or drinking his wine because it was labelled ‘port-type’. I feel also constrained to remark that ‘Sun on the Daisies’ is not in verse (any more than ‘No-legs’) being but the etymology of the word ‘Daisy’, expressed in riddle-form.
—JRRT to Allen & Unwin, 20th September 1947; Letters p. 123.
Tolkien’s delvings into riddle-lore parallel not just the great philologist Jacob Grimm’s work on fairy-tales but that of James O. Halliwell, the great Shakespearean scholar, who became deeply interested in nursery rhymes for the nuggets of ancient belief embedded in them, producing what was essentially the first critical edition of The Nursery Rhymes of England in 1842.18 What of Tolkien’s sources can be identified with some plausibility testify to his eclecticism, deriving as they do from Old English and Old Norse scholarship as well as Mother Goose. Of the ten ‘riddles’ in the exchange (counting the final, unanswered one, despite Gollum’s quite reasonable objection that it’s ‘not a riddle, precious, no’ – DAA.129),19 only three can be shown to derive from nursery rhyme sources. The second riddle, ‘thirty white horses’, is a familiar nursery rhyme riddle still in common usage, and the eighth (‘no-legs’) is Tolkien’s own variant of a once-familiar class of riddles that some have traced all the way back to The Riddle of the Sphinx;20 the more common version reads
Two legs sat upon three legs
With one leg in his lap;
In comes four legs
And runs away with one leg;
Up jumps two legs,
Catches up three legs,
Throws it after four legs,
And makes him bring one leg back.
—Wm. S. & Cecil Baring-Gould, The Annotated
Mother Goose [1962]; #709, page 276.21
As for the egg-riddle, we would be able to identify this with some certainty even without the letter already cited, for Tolkien had, years earlier, translated the aforementioned ‘longer literary riddle’ into Old English verse:
Meolchwitum sind marmanstane
wagas mine wundrum frœtwede;
is hrœgl ahongen hnesce on-innan,
seolce gelicost; siththan on-middan
is wylla geworht, waeter glaes-hluttor;
Thær glisnath gold-hladen on gytestreamum
æppla scienost. Infær n(æ)nig
nah min burg-fæsten; berstath hw(æ)thre
thriste theofas on thryth(æ)rn min,
ond thæt sinc reafiath – saga hwæt ic hatte!22
The traditional form of this nursery-rhyme riddle appears in both Baring-Gould (p. 270) and the Opies (The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes by Peter & Iona Opie, p. 152):
In marble walls as white as milk,
Lined with a skin as soft as silk,
Within a fountain crystal-clear,
A golden apple doth appear.
No doors are there to this stronghold,
Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.
I have found no specific parallel or antecedent for the first riddle (‘mountain’), nor the third (‘wind’), though Anderson notes that ‘flying without wings’ and ‘speaking without a mouth’ are common elements in wind-riddles (DAA.122). Nevertheless it is interesting to note that the very first riddle in that famous Anglo-Saxon collection of verse riddles known as the Exeter Book is a wind-riddle,23 though it bears little resemblance to Tolkien’s; care
ful examination of Old English sources, and the contemporary critical literature of the first third of the twentieth century debating their correct interpretation, would probably shed a good deal of light on Tolkien’s exact sources and his treatment of them.
The fourth riddle (‘daisy’) is a straightforward example of the philologist at play, drawing on his knowledge of the history of our language (we should not forget that Tolkien’s first professional job was researching word-origins for the OED). Just as he would later quote directly from the OED to define ‘blunderbuss’ in Farmer Giles of Ham, here he turns etymology into poetry, creating a riddle whose answer is self-evident to anyone who knows his or her own language well enough to see through the changes wrought by the years, that have slowly compressed daeges eage (‘day’s eye’) through day’s e’e to daisy.24
Several of the riddles seem to owe more to Scandinavian rather than Old English sources. Thus Taum Santoski pointed out that the fifth riddle (‘dark’) may owe something to a less sinister riddle found in Jón Árnason’s Ízlenzkar Gátur (‘Icelandic Riddles’), a nineteenth-century collection of contemporary riddles published in Copenhagen in 1887:
It will soon cover the roof of a high house.
It flies higher than the mountains
and causes the fall of many a man.
Everyone can see it, but no one can fetter it.
It can stand both blows and the wind, and it is not harmful.
—Árnason, riddle #352: Darkness.
Similarly, the ninth riddle (‘time’) has many parallels. Shippey (The Road to Middle-earth, page 112; revised edition, page 133) traces it back to ‘The Second Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn’:
Saturn said:
‘But what is that strange thing that travels through this world, goes on inexorably, beats at foundations, causes tears of sorrow, and often comes here? Neither star nor stone nor eye-catching jewel, neither water nor wild beast can deceive it at all, but into its hand go hard and soft, small and great. Every year there must go to feed it three times thirteen thousand of all that live on ground or fly in the air or swim in the sea.’