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,