Читать книгу J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century - Tom Shippey - Страница 15

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

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

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

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

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

‘Myrct er úti, mál qveð ec ocr fara

úrig fiöll yfir,

pyr[s]a þióð yfir;

báðir við komomc, eða ocr báða tecr

sá inn ámátki iötunn.’

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

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

over the rainy mountains,

over the tribes of thyrses;

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

he the mighty giant.’

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

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

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

There often by him would he see,

when noon was hot on leaf and tree,

the king of Faerie with his rout

came hunting in the woods about

with blowing far and crying dim,

and barking hounds that were with him;

yet never a beast they took nor slew,

and where they went he never knew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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