by Adam Roberts
4
The Riddles of the All-Wise
Bilbo and Gollum’s exchange takes place in the chapter called ‘Riddles in the Dark’. It is an appropriate location for a riddling game, since the point of riddles is precisely to leave you ‘in the dark’. In this chapter I intend taking the answers to these nine Bilbo and Gollum riddles as a sort of meta-riddle, a larger, darker puzzle, to which I propose an answer. I do so in the spirit of riddling proposed at the end of the last chapter. I am proceeding, in other words, from the notion that riddles are more than simple puzzles, mapping one answer onto one question; that riddles, on the contrary, are rebuses that open larger and more profound questions about the mysteries of story, art, life and afterlife. I can only ask you to bear with me.
To recap: the answers to the ten riddles Gollum and Bilbo asked one another are: mountain; teeth; wind; daisy; dark; egg; a fish; a fish being eaten; time; a golden ring. We may wish to believe, of course, that Tolkien simply selected riddles at random, either recalling riddles from his wide reading, or perhaps making them up himself, and that this list of items has no further significance.1 Or we might want to go a little further that the riddles, over and above posing interesting questions for the reader to answer, do extra work in the text by characterising Gollum and Bilbo. Tom Shippey makes this case, and persuasively too, pointing out that Gollum’s riddles tend to be more ancient, darker, about hidden or more terrifying things like darkness, all-devouring time and the roots of mountains. The answers to Bilbo’s riddles, on the other hand, tend to be more quotidian, above-ground, cheery (daisies, eating a fish-supper sitting at a table and so on). And perhaps that is as far as it goes: the riddles work as entertainments in their own right, and as ways of obliquely characterising the two speakers, and nothing more.
At the end of the previous chapter I suggested that these answers—mountains, fish, wind, flowers, dark and so on—were important enough symbols to Tolkien’s imagination to figure not only in the riddles themselves, but in the majority of other pieces of verse included in the book—as well (of course) as props and settings in the novel itself: the misty mountain (and Erebor); the fish Gollum catches and so on. I also pointed up the curious, rather beguiling unclarity of Tolkien’s responses to the question whether he invented the riddles himself or adapted them from ancient sources: claiming both the former and the latter. This in itself seems to me a significant thing. In effect, it is Tolkien riddling about the riddles. Taking my cue from this, I hope in this chapter to advance an argument about, as it were, the meta-riddling aspect of Tolkien’s novel.
We might begin by noting that the answers to the nine, or ten, questions Bilbo and Gollum swap—depending on whether we wish to take ‘what have I got in my pocket?’ as a ‘proper’ riddle, or not—take the form of a sort of riddle in their own right. We could write it out this way:
I am a mountain;
I am teeth;
I am the wind;
I am a daisy;
I am the dark;
I am an egg;
I am a fish;
I am a fish;
I am time;
I am a golden ring.
What am I?
There are plenty of ancient riddles that take this form; ‘The Song of Amairgen’ from the eleventh-century old Celtic Book of Leinster is one; supposed spoken by Amairgen Glúngel son of Míl as he first arrived in Ireland.
I am a wind in the sea
I am a sea-wave upon the land
I am the sound of the sea
I am a stag of seven combats
I am a hawk upon a cliff
I am a tear-drop of the sun
I am fair
I am a boar for valour
I am a salmon in a pool
I am a lake in a plain
I am the excellence of arts
I am a spear that wages battle with plunder.
I am a god who forms subjects for a ruler
Who explains the stones of the mountains?
Who invokes the ages of the moon?
Where lies the setting of the sun?
Who bears cattle from the house of Tethra?
Who are the cattle of Tethra who laugh?
What man, what god forms weapons?2
This ancient Celtic riddle enjoyed a vogue during the early years of the twentieth century (Yeats’s Lady Gregory translated it, amongst others) although its answer or answers are the subject of some debate. Robert Graves spends a good portion of his monumental study of poetry and myth The White Goddess (1946) trying to solve it. Here is his ‘reconstruction’ of the poem:
I am a stag: of seven tines,
I am a flood: across a plain,
I am a wind: on a deep lake,
I am a tear: the Sun lets fall,
I am a hawk: above the cliff,
I am a thorn: beneath the nail,
I am a wonder: among flowers,
I am a wizard: who but I
Sets the cool head aflame with smoke?
I am a spear: that roars for blood,
I am a salmon: in a pool,
I am a lure: from paradise,
I am a hill: where poets walk,
I am a boar: ruthless and red,
I am a breaker: threatening doom,
I am a tide: that drags to death,
I am an infant: who but I
Peeps from the unhewn dolmen, arch?
I am the womb: of every holt,
I am the blaze: on every hill,
I am the queen: of every hive,
I am the shield: for every head,
I am the tomb: of every hope.3
This is powerfully written stuff, certainly better poetry than James Carey’s duller rendering; but it brings us no closer to an answer. It is true that Graves thought he had got to the bottom of it, although the mournful truth Gravesphiles (and I would describe myself as one) have to confront is that few professional scholars of Celtic literature think that his speculations have any scholarly or intellectual merit whatsoever. This does not dismay me, however, since one of the things this book is trying to do is precisely to engage imaginative ingenuity as the proper idiom of riddles—and The White Goddess is certainly an ornately ingenious book. Graves takes his cue from a number of other old Celtic riddles that encode alphabet solutions, and over many pages teases out his theory that ‘The Song of Amairgen’ is a poetic expression of an ancient ‘alphabet of the trees’, spelling out a particular message. The details of Graves ‘solution’ need not concern us here. What is relevant is that he takes it as an acrostic at all. This brings us to the large topic of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic ‘acrostic’ riddles.
There are many examples of both acrostic and mesostic riddles in Anglo-Saxon literature. An acrostic is a text in which the initial letters of each line spell out a hidden message, usually (in the case of Anglo-Saxon riddles), the solution. A mesostic is a form of acrostic in which the embedded letters that spell out the solution is included in the middle of the poem, usually after the caesura. I shall give you some examples of what I mean. The late seventh-century priest and author Aldheim wrote a book called the Enigmata comprising one hundred riddles in Latin verse. This book was included in the letter Aldheim wrote to the reigning King of Northumbria, the Epistola ad Acircium, which begins with a Latin verse preface that is itself an acrostic: cleverly, the first letters spell out the sentence, ‘Aldhelmus cecinit millenis versibus odas’, from both the initial and the final letters of the lines. Aldheim’s Enigmata was modelled on a similar collection by an earlier writer called Symphosius, called the Symposii Aenigmata, which also includes acrostic riddles.
Old English riddlers had a similar predilection for acrostics. Riddle 19 from the Exeter Book contains not one but several acrostics, rune acrostics in this case, embedded into the Roman letters of the Anglo-Saxon poem. Here it is, and for ease of modern reading I have transliterated the original runes into their modern alphabetical equivalents, and put them in as capital letters:
Ic on siþe seah SRO
H hygewloncne, heafodbeorhtne,
swiftne ofer saelwong swiþe þrægan.
Hæfde him on hrycge hildeþryþe
NOM naegledne rad
AGEW Widlast ferede
rynestrong on rade rofne CO
FOAH For wæs þy beorhtre,
swylcra siþfæt. Saga hwæt ic hatte.
Do not to be fooled by the line breaks. Here is a modern-English version:
I saw one (S R O H) high-spirited, his head bright with ornaments, swiftly running over the pleasant plain; upon his back he had warlike strength; this (N O M) rode armourless; travelling far upon (A G E W), swiftly going on, he carried (C O F O A H). The journey was all the brighter, the expedition of these three. Say what I am called.
To solve the riddle you need to clock that its acrostics are included backwards, presumably because straightforwardly spelled out rune words would be too easy. Run the letter order in reverse and you have:
HORS (the OE for ‘horse’)
MON (= ‘man’)
WEGA (= ‘ways’)
HAOFOC (= ‘hawk’)
And the riddle is solved. There are a great many modern-English descendants of this particular form of riddle:
My first is in blood and also in battle,
My second in oak and acorn and apple
My third and fourth are both the same
And can be found twice in refrain,
My second to last begins ending
And my ending begins last. What am I?4
A related tribe of riddles presents the reader or listener with a series of descriptions, inviting us to visualise them as things in the world, only to reveal that the key is alphabetical. Here is an example from Alan Garner’s 2004 novel Thursbitch. John Turner is trying to get his horses home through a snowstorm.
The wind was full in their faces and the horses were trying to tuck into a bank for shelter, but Bryn kept them from shoving their panniers against the rocks. Now it was dark and the snow was swarming into his lanthorn and he could not see for the whiteness; but he knew the road. ‘Eh. Jinney. Can you tell me this poser? “Luke had it in front. Paul had it behind. Phoebe Mellor had it twice in the middle afore she was wed. Lads have it. Wenches don’t. Yon’s in life, but not in death”.’5
We are tempted to think that Turner is referring to the male member and its sexual potential. In fact the solution to the riddle (you have guessed it already, I am sure) is the letter ‘L’.
In Chapter 2, above, I mentioned the idea that the Exeter Book riddles were all composed by one figure, the poet Cynewulf, two of whose lines (‘Hail! Earendel brightest of angels / Over Middle-earth sent down to men’) had such an important effect upon Tolkien’s own imagination. The idea that Cynewulf composed the riddles was widespread in the nineteenth century, although scholarship today considers it unlikely. But Cynwulf wrote a great many other poems—indeed Cynewulf and Cædmon are the only two Anglo-Saxon poets whose names are known to us (which is to say: there are plenty of other OE poems, but all the authors’ names have been lost).6 And one thing for which Cynewulf is particularly famous is inserting runic acrostics, usually of his own name, into his verse.
Runes are interesting things in their own right, and are also of course a feature of Tolkien’s particular creative strategy.7 He inserts runes in The Hobbit (for instance, in the map of the Lonely Mountain), and the Return of the King includes amongst its appendices a key to these strange letters. More, Tolkien sometimes wrote letters in runic script: simple greetings, for instance at Christmas, made strange and riddling by the alphabet in which they are couched. Part of the appeal of runes is surely this—that they add glamour to otherwise straightforward communication precisely by riddling it. What cannot be denied is that Cynewulf used runes in exactly this way:
Anglo-Saxon scribes made use of [runes] for purposes of shorthand, as happened also in Scandinavia, writing the rune where the meaning denoted by the name was required … Cynewulf uses the same device to conceal, or rather reveal his name in three of his four signed poems, and the same principle is also employed for acrostic purposes in some of the Riddles of the Exeter Book.8
Sometimes Cynewulf would add runes in a straightforward or consecutive manner, spelling out his name. Sometimes the elements would be rearranged, presumably to make the riddle more challenging.
Cynewulf’s method of inserting his runic acrostic is quite straightforward in Christ II and Elene. In both poems the runes occur in their right order, heralded as it were by the unmistakeable rune-name cen, and woven singly into the structure of the verse so as to further the narrative rather than in any way impede it…. [On the other hand] Juliana preserves the right order, but inserts the runes in three groups. CYN, EWU and LF, with points separating each run from the next and from the surrounding text in the MA. Fates, which like Christ II omits E as far as can be judged from the damaged MS, disturbs the position in the poet’s name by the words F þær on ende standeþ, followed, as far as can be surmised, by the runes W, U, L, C, Y, N, again woven singly into the text.9
It is in this broader context of acrostic and letter-puzzles that I want to try and read the nine riddles of chapter 8. I am, in other words, taking these various riddles as kind of ‘meta-riddle’. Indeed, in keeping with the theoretical approach of this study as a whole, I want to suggest two ‘solutions’ to this meta-riddle, both, I think, equally valid. One will bring us back to The Hobbit as a novel, via the slightly indirect route of trolls. The other will lead us out, into the larger world of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth storytelling. In each case the approach to the business of solving the riddle will be different.
Let us put on one side (for a moment) the ‘what have I got in my pocket?’ riddle, and start from the premise that each item in the poem stands for a different letter, a conceit for which there is precedence in Anglo-Saxon and Celtic riddle-culture.
The first thing that leaps out is the duplication of fishes (‘I am a fish / I am a fish’) in the middle of the sequence. The relevant letter in this case is ‘S’, or ‘Z’; embodying in its shape the sinuous curve of a fish swimming; and capturing sonically the splash and hiss of the motion it imparts to the water.10 The initial word is suggestive, too: we can see the visual pun between the letter ‘A’ and a mountainous peak—in Tolkien’s own invented script, the Tehtar vowel sign for ‘A’ is the shape, ‘Λ’.11 Although a number of Old English and Celtic words for ‘mountain’ (munt, beorg, héahbeorg) do not begin with A, others do. There is, for instance, the word aran (seen in the name of the Welsh mountain Aran Fawddwy, for instance), a word related to the Old English aræran, ‘to raise, to stand-up, to be erect’. We might also think of the modern words such as the French ‘aiguille’ or the mountain range known as the Alps. Indeed, the name ‘alps’ derives from an Old Gaelic word ‘alb’, meaning ‘mountain’.12 The consonant ‘ł’, represented in modern Welsh by ‘ll’, is formed by pressing the tongue against the teeth in a particular way; and writing it out in Roman script creates a little schematic of a tooth, LL. This provides us with a kind of visual rebus: as ‘A’ or ‘Λ’ resembles a mountain, so LL or Ц resembles a tooth. Now the OE for ‘teeth’ is tēþ, but there are a number of related words, to do with the sound teeth make, that begin with ‘hl’ (which approximates to ‘ł’ or an aspirated ‘l’, and which words are sometimes spelled without the ‘h’). For instance there is hlýdan, which means amongst other things ‘to chatter’ or ‘clatter’ ones teeth; and hleahtor, which is the action of laughter—or showing one’s teeth. There is also læswian, which means to feed, graze or chew. Then we have ‘V’, the first letter of ‘wind’ in many languages (the Latin ventus, the French ‘vent’; and of course the German ‘wind’ is pronounced ‘vind’). The Old Norse Vindr influenced the OE and the modern English word descends from it. ‘I’ takes the form of a plant (and the modern lower-case ‘i’, with its dot-like calyx sitting atop its stem, is even closer in this regard). But more relevantly, perhaps, is th
at this English letter, ‘i’, puns on ‘eye’, which is precisely the heart of the original riddle. The OE for ‘eyes’ is ‘eáge’; although the OED records a number of variant spellings in early usage, amongst them ‘iȝe’ and ‘yȝe’. Also relevant may be the OE íwan, which means ‘to show, to bring before the eyes’. The OE for ‘dark’ is mirk, something Tolkien encodes into the name of the spider-infested forest through which Bilbo and the dwarves must travel. O is (obviously) a letter shaped like an egg; but we might also wish to consider the two-letter ligature known as ‘ash’, the Æ—because in Old English the word for ‘egg’ was ‘æg’ or ‘æ´g’. Then we have our two swimmers—the relevant OE here being swimman: S, S. Finally there is ‘time’, a concept for which there are several Old English words that begin ‘l’: læne, which means ‘a short time’ or ‘temporary, transitory’; and lange, which means ‘a long time’.
To summarise, I am proposing a reading of Tolkien’s string of riddle answers as a single acrostic. I suggest a simple re-ordering of one element in the resulting word (following the OE habit of reversing elements in their own acrostic riddles), such that the two swimmers migrate, as it were, upstream before the æg and mirk. This brings us to the following, tentative solution:
I am a mountain; A
I am teeth; Ł or L
I am the wind; V
I am a daisy; I
I am a fish; S
I am a fish; S
I am the dark; M
I am an egg; Æ
I am time; L
What am I?
In other words, the meta-riddle reveals itself, when read acronymically, as spelling out a word: Ałvissmæl or Alvissmæl. Now, the Alvíssmál (as the name is conventionally modernised) is the name of a poem with which Tolkien was very familiar, and one with an undeniable relationship with The Hobbit. It is part of the compendium of Norse mythological texts of which mention has already been made, the Elder Edda, The all-viss portion of the title is the same as the English ‘all-wise’; it is the name of the dwarf who appears in the poem. The ‘mal’ part means ‘sayings’, or ‘riddles’. So this poem is called the ‘All-wise’s Sayings’.
