The contest for authority
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: