There often by him would he see,
when noon was hot on leaf and tree, the king of Faerie with his rout came hunting in the woods about with blowing far and crying dim, and barking hounds that were with him; yet never a beast they took nor slew, and where they went he never knew.
The first sign of the elves in chapter 8 of The Hobbit is the flying deer which charges into the dwarves as they try to cross the water of oblivion in Mirkwood. After it has leapt the stream and fallen from Thorin’s arrow:
they became aware of the dim blowing of horns in the wood and the sound of dogs baying far off. Then they all fell silent; and as they sat it seemed they could hear the noise of a great hunt going by to the north of the path, though they saw no sign of it.
Orfeo’s hunt is ‘dim’ because it is not clear he is in the same world as the fairies, who chase beasts but never catch them. The dwarves’ hunt is ‘dim’, more practically, because they are after all in Mirk-wood and cannot see or even hear clearly. But the idea is the same in both places, of a mighty king pursuing his kingly activities in a world forever out of reach of strangers and trespassers in his domain. Tolkien expanded this very much, with ideas both from his own mythology (the underground fortress) and from traditional fairy-tale (the fairies who disappear whenever strangers try to intrude on them), but he continued to use the same technique as with riddles and Beorn and dwarf-names and place-names: he took fragments of ancient literature, expanded on their intensely suggestive hints of further meaning, and made them into coherent and consistent narrative (all the things which the old poems had failed, or never bothered, to do).
There is one final obvious use of old heroic poetry in The Hobbit, this time one which shows Tolkien especially clearly playing with anachronism, with the contrast of old and new: Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug. For Tolkien’s taste there were too few dragons in ancient literature, indeed by his count only three – the Miðgarðsorm or ‘Worm of Middle-earth’ which was to destroy the god Thor at Ragnarök, the Norse Doomsday; the dragon which Beowulf fights and kills at the cost of his own life; and Fafnir, who is killed by the Norse hero Sigurd. The first was too enormous and mythological to appear in a story on anything like a human scale, the second had some good touches but remained speechless and without marked character (though Tolkien did take from Beowulf the idea of the thief stealing a cup, and then returning, eventually in a company of thirteen). For the most part, though, Tolkien was left with the third dragon, Fafnir. In the Eddic poem Fdfnismdl Sigurd stabs it from underneath, having dug a trench in the path down which it crawls – this is perhaps one of the ‘stabs and jabs and undercuts’ which the dwarves mention while they are discussing ‘dragon-slayings historical, dubious, and mythical’ in chapter 12 – but Fafnir does not die at once. Instead, for some twenty-two stanzas the hero and the dragon engage in a conversation, from which Tolkien took several hints.
The first is that in the Eddic poem Sigurd, to begin with, will not give his name, but replies riddlingly, calling himself both motherless and fatherless. Tolkien entirely remotivates this, explaining ‘This of course is the way to talk to dragons…No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk’. Sigurd’s motive was that Fafnir was dying, and ‘it was the belief in old times that the word of a dying man had great power, if he cursed his enemy by name’. But then the Eddie poem is, as often, a disappointment to a logical mind, for Sigurd does give his name very shortly after this, and Fafnir indeed seems to know all about him. Tolkien used the start of the conversation, then, and ignored its later development. He took a second hint from Fafnir’s wily and successful attempt to sow discord between his killers, for Fafnir gives Sigurd unsought advice: ‘I advise you, Sigurd, if you will take the advice, and ride home from here…Regin betrayed me, he will betray you, he will be the death of both of us’. In the same way Smaug tells Bilbo to beware of the dwarves, and Bilbo (with less reason than Sigurd) is for a moment taken in. There is a third hint after the dragon is dead, for Sigurd, tasting the dragon’s blood, becomes able to understand bird-speech, and hears what the nut-hatches are saying: that Regin does indeed mean to betray him. In The Hobbit, of course, it is the thrush who proves able to understand human speech, not the other way round, and his intervention is fatal to the dragon, not to the dwarves. One can say only that Tolkien was well aware of the one famous human-dragon conversation in ancient literature, and admired the sense it creates of a cold, wily, superhuman intelligence, an ‘overwhelming personality’, to use Tolkien’s entirely modern terminology. However, as often, Tolkien took the hints, but felt he could improve on them.
Much of the improvement comes from a kind of anachronism, which as so often in The Hobbit creates two entirely different verbal styles. Smaug does not, initially, talk like Beorn, or Thorin, or Thranduil the elf-king, or other characters from the heart of the heroic world. He talks like a twentieth-century Englishman, but one very definitely from the upper class, not the bourgeoisie at all. His main verbal characteristic is a kind of elaborate politeness, even circumlocution, of course totally insincere (as is often the case with upper-class English), but insidious and hard to counter. ‘You seem familiar with my name’, says Smaug, with a hint of asperity – being ‘familiar’ is low-class behaviour, like calling people by their first names on first meeting – ‘but I don’t seem to remember smelling you before’. Smaug could be a colonel in a railway carriage, spoken to by someone to whom he has not been properly introduced, and freezing him off with hauteur. He goes on with a characteristic mix of bluntness and the pretended deference which indicates offence: ‘Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?’ (my emphasis). Bilbo then launches into his riddling introduction, but when Smaug talks at length again he has become in his turn familiar, even colloquial: ‘Don’t talk to me!’ (this means, ‘Don’t try to fool me!’). ‘You’ll come to a bad end, if you go with such friends’ (‘friends’ is entirely sarcastic). ‘I don’t mind if you go back and tell them so from me’ (my emphasis again: Smaug is still talking casually, but the understatement is clearly contemptuous). As he oozes confidentially on, his speech fills up with interjections, ‘Ha! Ha!…Bless me!…eh?’, and with further roundabout mock-courtesy, ‘you may, perhaps, not altogether waste your time…I don’t know if it has occurred to you that…’ This is nothing like Fafnir, or Sigurð, or indeed any character from epic or saga, but it is convincingly dragonish: threatening, but cold, and horribly plausible. It is no wonder Bilbo is ‘taken aback’.
However, this is not the only speech-mode Smaug has available. When Bilbo finally mentions to him the heroic motive of ‘Revenge’ – and Bilbo throughout the conversation talks in a much more elevated style than is usual for him – Smaug replies more archaically and more heroically than anyone has done in The Hobbit so far. ‘I have eaten his people like a wolf among sheep, and where are his sons’ sons that dare approach me…My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt’. His language here approaches that of the Old Testament, and it is matched by the narrator’s in describing him. After Bilbo’s first theft, when Smaug wakes and finds he has been robbed, ‘The dwarves heard the awful rumour of his flight’ – ‘rumour’ here has the distinctly old-fashioned sense of ‘far-off noise’, not the weak modern one of ‘gossip’. A couple of times Tolkien uses the device of substituting adjectives for adverbs, ‘Slow and silent he crept back to his lair…floated heavy and slow in the dark like a monstrous crow’, again creating an antique effect. Smaug’s last boast to himself, at the end of chapter 12, ‘They shall see me and remember who is the real King under the Mountain’, uses the archaic third-person ‘shall’ of warriors’ boasts in Old Norse and Old English, now condemned or marked as abnormal by modern school-grammarians. Smaug in fact seems to have a foot, or a claw, in two worlds at once. And in this at least he is like Bilbo the hobbit.