Читать книгу J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century - Tom Shippey - Страница 14

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

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

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

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

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

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays king, ruins town,

And beats high mountain down.

Gollum’s ‘fish’ riddle:

Alive without breath,

As cold as death;

Never thirsty, ever drinking,

All in mail, never clinking

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

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

Meolchwitum sind marmanstane

wagas mine wundrum frætwede…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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