The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  —Iwein, tr. J. W. Thomas [1979], p. 69.

  The ring in ‘The Lady of the Fountain’, one of the three ‘French Romances’ that make up the final third of The Mabinogion in most editions and translations – in essence an adaptation of Chrétien’s Ywain into Welsh – has a similar power and activation method: The Lady Luned (as she is called here) tells Owein (Ywain)

  ‘Take this ring and put it on thy finger, and put this stone in thy hand, and close thy fist over the stone; and as long as thou conceal it, it will conceal thee too . . .’

  . . . And Owein did everything the maiden bade him . . . But when they came to look for him they saw nothing . . . And that vexed them. And Owein slipped away from their midst . . .

  —The Mabinogion, tr. Gwyn Jones & Th. Jones

  [1949; rev. ed. 1974], pp. 164–5.

  Of these three closely related rings (or more accurately three versions of a tale about the same ring), Tolkien is most likely to have been familiar with the Welsh iteration, since this fell squarely within his fourteenth-century specialization (e.g., the same era as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and we know from other evidence that he was familiar with The Mabinogion.33

  The third ring to consider also appears in works by multiple authors, but rather than translations here we have an unfinished romance by one author completed by a sequel written by another: M. M. Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato [Roland in Love, 1495] and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso [Roland Gone Mad, 1516] – the latter being the work to which C. S. Lewis compared The Lord of the Rings when it first appeared, rather to Tolkien’s annoyance.34

  A ring . . .

  . . . of price and vertue great:

  This ring can make a man to go unseene,

  This ring can all inchantments quite defeat

  —Orlando Furioso, Sir John Harington translation [1591];

  Book III stanza 57.

  Here the ring in question belongs to a femme fatale – Angelica, princess of Cathay, who uses it to sow chaos among Charlemagne’s knights. Angelica’s ring has the power not just of rendering her invisible, but her mount as well so long as she is touching it. More importantly, it has the additional power of making its wearer immune to any spell cast upon her, and as such is later used by the heroic virago (warrior-woman) Bradamante (the original of Spenser’s Britomart and one of the possible inspirations for Tolkien’s Éowyn) to defeat the evil wizard Atlante. Just as Angelica herself, in true ‘perils of Pauline’ fashion, is captured and rescued time and again, passing from knight to knight, so too does her ring pass from Angelica to Brunello to Bradamante to Rogero (Ruggiero) before it is finally regained by Angelica herself. Perhaps significantly, its separate powers each have a distinct activation method. To gain the invulnerability to spells, the ring must be worn on a finger; any finger will do, there is no mention of any stone or setting, and the ring’s protection can be negated simply by pulling it off an opponent’s hand. By contrast, to turn invisible a character must pop the ring into her mouth, and she remains invisible for as long as she keeps it there.

  ‘Then see you set upon him . . .

  Nor give him any time, lest he convay

  The ring into his mouth, and so thereby

  Out of your sight he vanish quite away.’

  —ibid., Book III stanza 61

  Into her mouth the Ring she doth convay,

  And straight invisible she goeth away.

  Rogero . . .

  Found all too late, that by the Rings strange power,

  She had unseene convai’d her selfe away.

  —ibid., Book XI stanzas 6–7.

  With Angelica’s ring, we see a theme that would become common among enchanted rings: a duplication (sometimes a multiplicity) of arbitrarily selected powers, making them devices able to protect the wearer from any harm and granting him whatever powers the dictates of the plot require. The stories in which characters possess these multi-purpose rings tend to treat those rings in perfunctory fashion, as self-consciously artificial plot-devices inserted to ease all the hero’s challenges. This is certainly the case in our fourth ring, the first of the two rings of invisibility from relatively modern times discovered by Douglas Anderson (The Annotated Hobbit, page 133). Fr. François Fénelon’s ‘The Enchanted Ring’ [late seventeenth century] is best known today through its appearance in Andrew Lang’s collection The Green Fairy Book [1892], a volume Tolkien explicitly refers to in his Andrew Lang lecture that later became ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (OFS.38).

  Archbishop Fénelon’s story is an example of the highly artificial literary fairy tale that flourished in France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in the hands of writers like Charles Perrault and Madame D’Aulnoy, and its titular Fairy’s ring has a wide range of powers, the selection of which is decidedly eccentric:

  Take this ring, which will make you the happiest and most powerful of men . . . If you turn the diamond inside, you will become invisible. If you turn it outside, you will become visible again. If you place it on your little finger, you will take the shape of the King’s son, followed by a splendid court [i.e., a group of richly dressed courtiers]. If you put it on your fourth finger, you will take your own shape.

  —‘The Enchanted Ring’, in The Green Fairy Book, page 138.

  The turning of the ring clearly derives from the older examples of Plato’s or Chrétien’s rings, although either Fénelon or his translator (or both) are so careless that he or she forgets how the Fairy’s ring works, and later in the story we are told that the hero turns the ring to assume the prince’s form (ibid., p. 141). The reader is also left to wonder why it has specific powers on three of the hero’s fingers, with no mention of the fourth. As with Plato’s and Ariosto’s rings, there is no sign that Fénelon’s ring had any influence on The Hobbit, but it may have influenced the later development of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings, particularly if Tolkien came across Fénelon’s story while working on his Andrew Lang lecture in the period when he was beginning the sequel. Fénelon’s tale in fact can be taken as a refutation of Plato’s thesis (that such a ring would inevitably corrupt anyone who gained it): after the hero wisely decides he’s achieved everything he wants and gives the ring back to the Fairy he got it from, she gives it to his brother. The brother promptly drives home the moral of the story by using it for vicious, selfish purposes, embarking on a mini crime spree strikingly reminiscent of Sméagol’s behavior as retold by Gandalf:

  The only use he made of the ring was to find out family secrets and betray them, to commit murders and every sort of wickedness, and to gain wealth for himself unlawfully. All these crimes, which could be traced to nobody, filled the people with astonishment.

  —Fénelon, ‘The Enchanted Ring’; The Green Fairy Book, pages 142–3.

  Thus, in Fénelon’s fairy tale the good character uses the ring primarily for good and the evil character for evil – not unlike the Gollum/Bilbo dichotomy noted by Gandalf in ‘The Shadow of the Past’.

  The fifth ring, also relatively modern, comes from an Estonian folktale [circa 1866] by Friedrich Kreutzwald, part of a group of nationalist writers who tried to do for Estonian what Elias Lönnrot had done for Finnish a generation earlier when he created the Kalevala [1835], writing down the surviving bits and pieces of old Baltic lore before they were entirely forgotten and constructing folk-tales and a national epic (the Kalevipoeg) from the remnants. Better known from its German translation in Ehstnische Märchen [‘Estonian Fairytales’] as ‘Der Norlands Drache’, it was translated by one of Andrew Lang’s assistants as ‘The Dragon of the North’ in The Yellow Fairy Book [1894]. Here the ring of invisibility is no less than King Solomon’s signet-ring, now the property of a beautiful witch-maiden whom the hero beguiles until he gains the chance to steal it from her. Its full powers are unknown, but even the ‘half-knowledge’ of the witch-maiden unlocks a wide array of useful powers:

  If I put the ring upon the little finger of my left hand, then I can fly like a bird t
hrough the air wherever I wish to go.35 If I put it on the third finger of my left hand I am invisible, and I can see everything that passes around me, though no one can see me. If I put the ring upon the middle finger of my left hand, then neither fire nor water nor any sharp weapon can hurt me. If I put it on the forefinger of my left hand, then I can with its help produce whatever I wish. I can in a single moment build houses or anything I desire. Finally, as long as I wear the ring on the thumb of my left hand, that hand is so strong that it can break down rocks and walls. Besides these, the ring has other secret signs which, as I said, no one can understand. No doubt it contains secrets of great importance. The ring formerly belonged to King Solomon, the wisest of kings . . . it is not known whether this ring was ever made by mortal hands: it is supposed that an angel gave it to the wise King.

  —‘The Dragon of the North’, in The Yellow Fairy Book, page 14.

  Again, although the hero does use the ring to slay a dragon, there is little here that resembles Bilbo’s ring, although there is a hint elsewhere in the tale that could be argued to anticipate The Lord of the Rings, when the witch-maiden offers the ring and herself to the hero:

  Here is my greatest treasure, whose like is not to be found in the whole world. It is a precious gold ring. When you marry me, I will give you this ring as a marriage gift, and it will make you the happiest of mortal men . . .

  —ibid., page 14 (italics mine).

  Of all this array of five distinct rings of invisibility in eight separate works36 – one classical (Plato), one medieval (Chrétien/Hartmann/Mabinogion), one renaissance (Boiardo/Ariosto), one from a literary fairy tale of the Enlightenment (Fénelon), and one from a reconstructed folk-tale of the Romantic era (Kreutzwald) – the one likeliest to have influenced Tolkien in The Hobbit is Owein’s ring in ‘The Lady of the Fountain’, the Welsh version of Chrétien’s tale. It seems very likely, however, that both Plato’s account and perhaps Fénelon’s as well contributed something to the One Ring as Tolkien developed it in The Lord of the Rings – never forgetting, however, that the primary influence on Frodo’s ring is in fact The Hobbit itself: here, as so often, Tolkien is his own main source. Doubtless other rings of invisibility exist which have eluded my researches, but no ring exactly like Bilbo’s has surfaced and it seems likely that this is because it was Tolkien’s own invention, giving his hero an edge to offset his small size and lack of martial experience and given limitations because that improved the challenges the hobbit would face, creating a better story.

  (iv)

  The Invisible Monster

  The idea of an invisible monster stalking its unwary prey and suddenly seizing upon it with dire results, such as Tolkien describes Gollum as having done for ‘ages and ages’, is of course not original with The Hobbit, but comparison with earlier examples casts some interesting light on Tolkien’s treatment of the theme. It is a very old theme, going back at least to Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur [written by 1469, published 1485], which features as a recurrent villain in Book I (The Tale of King Arthur) Part ii (‘Balin or the Knight with the Two Swords’) Sir Garlon, the invisible knight, infamous for ambushing foes, striking them down, and then escaping under the cover of his invisibility. He is finally killed when struck down in turn by Sir Balin, who cares as little for the rules of chivalry as Garlon himself and seizes the chance of killing the apparently unarmed and visible Garlon while a guest of Garlon’s brother. There is never any explanation of how Sir Garlon, the evil brother of King Pellam (the Fisher-King and guardian of the Graal), is able to become invisible; it seems to simply be one of the inexplicable wonders associated with the Graal’s keepers. Tolkien was of course familiar with Malory and deeply interested in the rediscovery in 1934 of a manuscript version of Le Morte D’Arthur (cf. Verlyn Flieger’s essay ‘Tolkien and the Idea of the Book’ in The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder [2006], especially pages 290–3), and the coincidence of an invisible villain and a character named Balin37 in the same work is striking, but in the absence of any significant detailed parallels between Sir Garlon and Gollum it seems unlikely that Malory’s work influenced The Hobbit.

  In more modern treatments closer to Tolkien’s own time, sometimes such a creature is human, as in Wells’ The Invisible Man [1897], or very near it, as in de Maupassant’s ‘The Horla’ [1887]. Other times it is starkly inhuman, as in Bierce’s ‘The Damned Thing’ [1893] and Lovecraft’s tale inspired by Bierce’s story, ‘The Dunwich Horror’ [1928]. Wells’ story is really a fable demonstrating the same moral as Plato – that the power to become invisible would inevitably be exploited for evil ends – with the Ring of Gyges replaced by modern chemicals and mathematical formulas, while de Maupassant’s tale is more a variant on Edgar Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ [1839], the story of an unseen doppelgänger who probably does not exist outside the narrator’s deranged imagination. Gollum, while certainly unpleasant, is (as Gandalf later observes in ‘The Shadow of the Past’) not a monster per se but a creature more like Bilbo than unlike him, invisible only through the use of a magic ring. By contrast, Bierce’s ‘Damned Thing’ is utterly alien, a creature whose size, shape, appearance, and nature can only be guessed from the viciousness with which it attacks and the horrible wounds it leaves on its victim (inspiring the subtitle of one part of the tale, ‘A Man Though Naked May Be In Rags’). Bierce’s Thing cannot be seen because it lies outside our frame of reference: one of his narrators suggests that, just as there are sounds audible to animals that we humans cannot hear, so too there are colours of the spectrum we cannot see. Since ‘the Damned Thing is of such a colour!’ it cannot be detected by human eyes.

  The closest of all these invisible creatures to Tolkien’s presentation of Gollum comes in Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘What Was It?’ [1859], a horror story by a little-known Irish writer who died fighting for the Union side in the Civil War. There is no record of Tolkien’s reading O’Brien, but some of the parallels are striking, whether due to influence or parallel inspiration or an untraced common source. For example, the description of the creature’s first attack in pitch-blackness sounds remarkably like what being attacked by Gollum must have been like. The narrator is lying down and trying to sleep when

  . . . an awful incident occurred. A Something dropped, as it seemed, from the ceiling, plumb upon my chest, and the next instant I felt two bony hands encircling my throat, endeavouring to choke me.

  —The Fantastic Tales of Fitz-James O’Brien,

  ed. Michael Hayes [1977], page 60.

  Later, after the unseen creature has been captured and bound by the two main characters after it attacked, they are able to gain a general idea of its still-unseen appearance by touch:

  its outlines and lineaments were human. There was a mouth; a round, smooth head without hair; a nose, which, however, was little elevated above the cheeks; and its hands and feet felt like those of a boy.

  — ibid., page 65.

  For Gollum’s similarly smooth, round, hairless head, and relatively small size in the original conception, see Plate VI detail. Eventually O’Brien’s protagonists are able to find out what the creature is like only by making a plaster cast of its form:

  It was shaped like a man, – distorted, uncouth, and horrible, but still like a man. It was small, not over four feet and some inches in height, and its limbs revealed a muscular development that was unparalleled. Its face surpassed in hideousness anything I have ever seen. Gustave Doré . . . never conceived anything so horrible . . . It was the physiognomy of what I should fancy a ghoul might be. It looked as if it was capable of feeding on human flesh.

  —ibid., page 66.

  In the end, the creature starves to death because the narrator and his friend cannot find any food that it will eat (an echo of Gollum’s rejection of lembas in The Two Towers?) and they dare not release it, given its initial murderous assault. O’Brien’s creature sounds very like Gollum as Tolkien originally conceived him: small, wiry, and vicious; humano
id but not human; an invisible strangler lurking in total darkness who ambushes his prey, throttles them, and devours the corpses.38

  Chapter VI

  Wargs and Eagles

  As before, the text continues on the same page (Ms. p. 61; Marq. 1/1/5:11), with no more than a skipped line in the middle of the page to mark where the later chapter break would be inserted.

  He had escaped the goblins, but he didn’t know where he was. He had lost hood, cloak, pony, food, and his friends. He wandered on and on, and the sun began to go down towards the west – sinking towards the mountains. Bilbo looked round and noticed it. He looked forward and could see no mountains in front of him, only ridge and slopes falling towards low lands and plains. ‘I can’t have got right to the other side of the Misty Mountains can I – right to the edge of the Land Beyond’ he said. ‘O where o where can Bladorthin and the dwarves be? I only hope they are not still back in there in the power of the goblins’. So he wandered on; he was wondering very much whether he oughtn’t, now he had a magic ring, to go back into those horrible horrible tunnels and try and find his friends. He had almost made up his mind that he ought to, and was feeling very uncomfortable about it, when he heard voices.

  He stopped and he listened. It didn’t sound like goblins. So he crept forward carefully. He was following a downward path with a rocky wall on one side. On the other side the ground sloped away, and there were dells below the level of the path, fringed or filled with bushes and low trees. In one of these dells under the bushes people were talking, several people. Bilbo crept still nearer, and suddenly peering between two big boulders he saw a head with a yellow hood on – it was Balin doing look-out.TN1 He could have clapped and shouted for surprise and joy, but he didn’t. He had still got the ring out [>