‘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