Читать книгу J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century - Tom Shippey - Страница 17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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