J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Tom Shippey

What, for instance, is ‘Gandálfr’ doing in the list, when the second element is quite clearly álfr, ‘elf, a creature in all tradition quite distinct from a dwarf? And why is ‘Eikinskjaldi’ there, when unlike the others it does not seem to be a possible name, but looks like a nickname, ‘Oakenshield’? In Tolkien of course it is a nickname, the origin of which is eventually given in Appendix A (III) of The Lord of the Rings. As for Gandálfr, or Gandalf, Tolkien seems to have worked out a more complex explanation. In early drafts of The Hobbit Gandalf was the name given to the chief dwarf, while in the first edition what Bilbo sees that first morning is just ‘a little old man’. Even in the first edition, however, the little old man’s staff soon comes into the story, while by the third edition – Tolkien made significant changes in both the second and third editions, 1951 and 1966, some of them discussed later on – Gandalf has become ‘an old man with a staff’ (my emphasis). This seems highly suitable. Even now the ‘magic wand’ is the common property of the stage-magician, while in all popular and learned literary tradition, from Shakespeare’s Prospero to Milton’s Comus or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the staff is the distinguishing mark of the wizard. It looks as if Tolkien sooner or later interpreted the first element of ‘Gandálfr’, quite plausibly, as ‘wand’ or ‘staff, while the second element, as said above, obviously means ‘elf. Now Gandalf in Tolkien is definitely not an elf, but then it turns out that he is not just an ‘old man’ either; one can see that to those who knew no better (people like Éomer in The Lord of the Rings much later on) he might well seem distinctly ‘elvish’. Tolkien seems to have concluded at some point that ‘Gandálfr’ meant ‘staff-elf, and that this must be a name for a wizard. And yet the name is there in the Dvergatal, so that the wizard must in some way have been mixed up with dwarves. Could it be that the reason the Dvergatal had been preserved was that it was the last fading record of something that once had happened, some great event in a non-human mythology, an Odyssey of the dwarves? This is, anyway, what Tolkien makes of it. The Hobbit, one might say, is the story that lies behind and makes sense of the Dvergatal, and much more indirectly gives a kind of context even to ‘Snow White’ and the half-ruined fairy-tales of the brothers Grimm.

       The author’s voice

      The two sides of The Hobbit are, then, fairly clear: on the one side there is modern middle-class English Bilbo, on the other the archaic world which lies behind both vulgar folk-tale and its aristocratic, indeed heroic ancestors. The former is represented by clocks and fussiness – Bilbo gasping out, ‘I didn’t get your note till after 10.45 to be precise’, and feeling he cannot leave home without a pocket-handkerchief. The latter is created by poetry and the Misty Mountains and Bilbo feeling how grand it would be to ‘wear a sword instead of a walking-stick’. Naturally the two sides are going to clash, and much of The Hobbit is about the clash of styles, attitudes, behaviour patterns – though in the end one might conclude that they are not as far apart as they first seemed, and that Bilbo has just as much right to the archaic world and its treasures as Thorin or Bard. However the pressing problem for Tolkien was perhaps not to introduce the archaic world – much of which, as has been said above, has long been familiar at least in its personnel even to child readers – as to give it intellectual coherence, to make the reader feel that it had a sort of existence outside the immediate narrative. Tolkien solved this problem, in The Hobbit, if quite differently in The Lord of the Rings, by flexible and intrusive use of the authorial voice.

      The general strategy is shown several times in the first few pages. At the start of paragraph four Tolkien imagines a question from a reader, ‘what is a hobbit?’, and replies as if hobbits are not unknown but may have escaped some readers’ attention: ‘I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays’ (my emphasis both times). As soon as that parenthesis is over, we are told that Bilbo’s mother was ‘the famous Belladonna Took’ (my emphasis again), the implication again being that the author is only selecting from a body of pre-existing information. Her distinction is partly explained by the theory that ‘one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife’, immediately corrected – in the 1966 edition, previous editions being slightly different – by ‘That was, of course, absurd’. This time the word ‘absurd’ implies that there are well-known ways of judging such statements, so well-known that the author has no need to give them, while the ‘of course’ assumes that the reader must know these too. In every case the suggestion is that there is story outside the story, so to speak, a whole wider world of which one is seeing only some small fraction. The point is made totally explicit on page 3, when the narrator interjects ‘Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale’.

      All these devices are furthermore repeated, sometimes again and again – in his essay on ‘Some of Tolkien’s Narrators’ in the very recent collection Tolkien’s ‘Legendarium’ (for which see the final ‘List of References’), Paul Edmund Thomas lists some 45 cases of direct address by the narrator of The Hobbit, and this does not include some of the types of interjection discussed here. ‘The famous Belladonna Took’ is echoed by ‘the great Thorin Oakenshield himself (the reasons for his fame and nickname given only in a footnote in Appendix A (III) of The Lord of the Rings, seventeen years and a thousand pages later). Even in the first edition Tolkien used the ‘of course’ trick at least three more times in exactly the same way as with the ‘fairy wife’ theory: ‘They were elves of course’, in chapter 3, ‘The feasting people were Wood-elves of course’ (chapter 8), and ‘That of course is the way to talk to dragons’ (chapter 12). Very similar is the trick of suddenly producing a piece of totally unexpected and unpredictable information from the heart of the fairy-tale world, and pretending it is common knowledge. The most dramatic example is the climax of the troll episode, when the light comes over the hill and the birds twitter, and the trolls turn to stone: ‘for trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of’. The idea is indeed an ancient one, with Odin playing the same trick as Gandalf (though on a dwarf) in the Old Norse poem Alvíssmál. But in context it is totally unexpected, though Tolkien had prepared for it with earlier direct addresses to the reader, once again invoking prior knowledge: ‘Yes, I am afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each…it is nearly always worth while, if you can manage it…Trolls’ purses are the mischief, and this was no exception’. There is a kind of unfairness in it, for the author naturally knows everything and the reader nothing about the world being introduced, but the voice assumes a kind of complicity; and every time another piece of the picture is being filled in, another part of the mental map disclosed. By the end of The Hobbit – and this was one of the reasons for the immediate demand for a sequel – a detailed and consistent picture of the fairy-tale world, and of many of its inhabitants, had been generated. Tolkien had to set the scene, indeed to guarantee that there was a scene to set, before the story could be allowed to unroll.

      The story itself is highly episodic, and so not easy to summarize. Briefly, one may say that the book’s nineteen chapters divide approximately half and half into the adventures which Bilbo and the dwarves have before they reach the Lonely Mountain and the lair of Smaug the dragon; and the complexities surrounding the gaining, guarding and sharing of the dragon’s treasure once the Lonely Mountain has been reached. Chapters tend to come in threes, with numbers 1 to 3 getting the company as far as the Misty Mountains, where they are captured by the goblins; 4 to 6 dealing with the crossing of the mountains, including Bilbo winning the magic ring of invisibility; and 7 to 9 set in Mirkwood, where Bilbo uses his ring twice to rescue the dwarves first from the giant spiders, and second from the Wood-elves’ prison. Chapters 12 to 14 deal with Bilbo’s first two attempts to ‘burgle’ Smaug, the dragon’s attempted revenge and final death at the hands of Bard the Bowman; and chapters 15 to 17 with the quarrels over the treasure, between dwarves, elves, men and eventually goblins. The last two chapters are an evident coda, returning Bilbo to his home; while the two central chapters 10 and 11 mark a kind of transition, as Bilbo emerges for a short while from an entirely archaic and romantic world to a world once more dominated by human beings, humdrum ideas of ‘business’ and the Master of Laketown,