Thorin then drops to his lowest point of the see-saw with his cursing of Bilbo, when Bilbo punctures dwarvish greeting formulas in much the same way that Gandalf punctured his own at the beginning: ‘Is this all the service of you and your family that I was promised, Thorin?’ It takes the Battle of the Five Armies and his own heroic death to re-establish Thorin, and in these events Bilbo plays almost no part at all, except to say deflatingly, ‘I have always understood that defeat may be glorious. It seems very uncomfortable, not to say distressing’. (This may be a private joke. The King Edward’s School Song, which Tolkien must have had to sing repeatedly in his youth, is aggressive even by Victorian standards, and contains the lines: ‘Oftentimes defeat is splendid, / Victory may still be shame, / Luck is good, the prize is pleasant, / But the glory’s in the game’.)
Thorin’s two final speeches, however, show a balance of ancient epic dignity and a modern wider awareness: on the one hand, ‘I go now to the halls of waiting, to sit beside my fathers’, on the other, recognition of ‘the kindly West’ and ‘a merrier world’. But a final and absolutely precise balance is reached only when Bilbo and the surviving dwarves part, with completely antithetical speeches:
‘If ever you visit us again [said Balin], when our halls are made fair once more, then the feast shall indeed be splendid!’
‘If ever you are passing my way,’ said Bilbo, ‘don’t wait to knock! Tea is at four; but any of you are welcome at any time!’
Visit / pass my way, splendid / welcome, feast / tea: the contrasts of words and behaviour are obvious and deliberate. Yet it is also perfectly obvious that beneath these contrasts, both speakers are saying exactly the same thing. As with Gollum and Bilbo, Bard the bowman and Bard the officer, the heroes of antiquity and the Lancashire Fusiliers, there is a continuity between ancient and modern which is at least as strong as the difference.
Bridging the gap
The thought above may take us back to rabbits, and to hobbits. Tolkien’s hobbits are like rabbits in a way which few people suspect, but which he himself was almost uniquely qualified to observe, that is, in their etymological history (real or imagined). The word ‘rabbit’ is a strange one. Almost all of the names for the wild mammals of England have remained more or less the same for more than a thousand years. Words like fox, weasel, otter, mouse, hare, were virtually the same in Old English, respectively fuhs, wesel, otor, mús, hasa. ‘Badger’ is a relatively new word, from French, but the old word, brocc, is still used: in later life Tolkien was short with translators who did not realize that the Shire place-name Brockhouses meant a badger sett. Such words tend to be the same in other Germanic languages too, so that the German for ‘hare’ is Hase, the Danish hare, and so on. The reason, obviously, is that these are old words for creatures which have long been familiar. But ‘rabbit’ is not like that. The words for the animal in neighbouring languages are different, so German Kaninchen, French lapin, and so on. There is no Old English word for ‘rabbit’. Again, the obvious reason is that rabbits are a relatively recent import into England, like mink, brought in first by the Normans as fur-bearing animals, eventually released into the wild. However, not one English person in ten thousand realizes that, nor do they care. Rabbits have been naturalized, have made their way into folk-tale and popular belief and children’s story, from Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit to Beatrix Potter’s Benjamin Bunny. Now it seems as if they have always been there.
This is the fate which I think Tolkien would like for hobbits. His dwarves and elves are similar, in the age of their names and their wide distribution, to hares and foxes. Hobbits are (if one discounts the slender evidence of The Denham Tracts) imports, like rabbits. But perhaps in the end, or even, by art, in the beginning, they can be made to seem harmonious, to settle in, to look as if they had been there all along – the niche which Tolkien eventually claimed for hobbits, ‘an unobtrusive but very ancient people’ (my emphasis). Tolkien even found an etymology for hobbits, as the OED has failed to do for rabbits. His first words about them were, as has been said, ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’. Many years and many hundreds of pages later, in almost the last words of the last Appendix of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien suggested that ‘hobbit’ might be a modern worn-down form of an unrecorded but perfectly plausible Old English word, holbytla. Hol of course means hole. A ‘bottle’ even now in some English place-names means a dwelling, and Old English bytlian means to dwell, to live in. Holbytla, then, = ‘hole-dweller, hole-liver’. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hole-liver.’ What could be more obvious than that? It is not impossible that Tolkien, one of the great philologists, who knew more about Old English in the 1930s than almost anyone alive, might have had this etymology in his head, perhaps subconsciously, when he wrote the seminal sentence on the School Certificate paper, but I think it is unlikely. What is more likely is that Tolkien, faced with a verbal puzzle, did not rest till he had worked out a totally convincing argument for it; while even in creating words he did so with a very strong sense of what fitted English patterns and what did not.
These comments on the word ‘hobbit’ furthermore fit the concept of hobbits. They are above all anachronisms, novelties in an imagined ancient world, the world of fairy-tale and nursery-rhyme and what once lay behind them. They retain that anachronistic quality stubbornly to the end, smoking tobacco (an import from America unknown to the ancient North), and eating potatoes (another import from America, on which old Gaffer Gamgee is an authority). The scene in the Two Towers chapter, ‘Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit’, in which the hobbit Sam cooks rabbit, wishes for potatoes, and promises in better days to cook Gollum that English favourite, ‘fish and chips’, is a cluster of anachronisms. And Tolkien was certainly aware of them, for in The Lord of the Rings he changed the alien word ‘tobacco’ into ‘pipeweed’, often referred to the equally alien ‘potatoes’ as the more native-sounding ‘taters’ or ‘spuds’ – and in the 1966 edition of The Hobbit cut the equally alien word ‘tomatoes’ out altogether, replacing it in Bilbo’s larder with ‘pickles’ (see Bibliography, p. 30).
However, Tolkien kept the hobbits as anachronisms, because that was their essential function. The ways of creativity are difficult if not impossible to follow, and neat schemas are likely to be wrong in their neatness, if not their general direction. But one could say, with no doubt over-simple neatness, that Tolkien, like so many of the philologists of previous generations, was aware of the great gaps between ancient literature (like Beowulf) and its downgraded modern successors (like the tale of ‘The Bear and the Water-carl’), as of the inadequacies of both groups in both quantity and quality; that he felt the urge to fill the gaps – not for nothing was his first unpublished attempt at an elvish mythology called ‘The Book of Lost Tales’; that he wished also, when doing so, to give some hint of the charm and the fascination of the poems and stories to which he dedicated his professional life; and that he wanted finally to bridge the gap between the ancient world and the modern one. The hobbits are the bridge. The world they lead us into, Middle-earth, is the world of fairy-tale