The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology

This story is one, evidently, of remorseless pride flaring only in taciturnity; its centre is Högni’s decision to fight rather than look for a moment as if he could be bought; the ‘objective correlative’ of pride and decision is the sword Dáinsleif, the ‘heirloom of Dáin’, which the dwarves made and which knows no mercy. The sword Tyrfing in the Saga of King Heidrek edited by Christopher Tolkien is virtually identical – dwarf-made, cursed, remorseless, leading to murder between close relatives and the final lament, ‘It will never be forgotten; the Norns’ doom is evil’. These qualities, it seems, are those which Tolkien chose and developed for his dwarves. Thorin and Company act out of revenge as well as greed in The Hobbit, the long and painful vengeance of Thráin for Thrór is the centre of what we are told of the dwarves in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, Dáin Ironfoot himself incarnates in Tolkien’s Middle-earth the whole tough, fair, bitter, somehow unlucky character of the dwarvish race.8 It is not too much to say that the ‘inspiration’ of their portrayal as opposed to the more laborious element of ‘invention’, springs directly from Snorri and the Hjaðningavíg and ‘Dáinsleif which the dwarves made’. To use Tolkien’s phrase, this was a ‘fusion-point of imagination’, once met never forgotten.

As for the elves, their fusion or kindling-point would seem to be some twenty or thirty lines from the centre of the medieval poem of Sir Orfeo, itself a striking example of the alchemies of art. In origin this is only the classical story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but the fourteenth-century poet (or maybe some forgotten predecessor) has made two radical changes to it: one, the land of the dead has become elf-land, from which the elf-king comes to seize Dame Heurodis; two, Sir Orfeo, unlike his classical model, is successful in his quest and bears his wife away, overcoming the elf-king by the mingled powers of music and honour. The poem’s most famous and original passage is the image of the elves in the wilderness, seen again and again by Orfeo as he wanders mad and naked, looking for his wife, but never certainly identified as hallucinations, phantoms, or real creatures on the other side of some transparent barrier which Orfeo cannot break through. To quote Tolkien’s translation:

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 … (SGPO pp. 129–30)

Many hints from this took root in Tolkien’s mind: the shadow-army with its echoing horns which was to follow Aragorn from the ‘paths of the dead’, the ‘dim blowing of horns’ as a ‘great hunt’ goes past the silent dwarves in Mirkwood in The Hobbit, and in The Hobbit again the image of the fierce, proud, impulsive, honourable elf-king who imprisons Thorin but will take no advantage in the end even of Bilbo. Stronger than anything, though, is the association of the elves with the wilderness – an idea corroborated to Tolkien by the many Anglo-Saxon compounds such as ‘wood-elf’, ‘water-elf’, ‘sea-elf’ and so on – and with the music of the harp, the instrument by which Sir Orfeo wins back his wife. It may even have seemed significant to Tolkien that in Sir Orfeo the elves freed and rewarded their harper-enemy for his skill, while in some versions of the Hjaðningavíg the dwarvish weapon Dáinsleif condemns Hjarrandi (the Northern Orpheus) not just to death but to death everlastingly repeated. A whole conflict of temperament between two species is summed up in the detail, and a conflict of style. However, the further one traces Tolkien’s debt to ancient texts and fragments, in this matter, the more one realises how easy it was for him to feel that a consistency and a sense lay beneath the chaotic ruin of the old poetry of the North – if only someone would dig it out. To quote Shakespeare’s observations on another Enchanted Wood which sensible people can make nothing of (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i):

But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigured so together,

More witnesseth than fancy’s images,

And grows to something of great constancy;

But howsoever, strange and admirable.

I do not suppose Tolkien would have liked the down-grading of ‘fancy’, nor the comedy of Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed. Bully Bottom, though, has a Tolkienish bravura; and Hippolyta’s feeling that ‘there must have been something in it’ was his own.

Creative anachronisms

It was by similar processes of ‘reconstruction’ that Tolkien arrived at his ‘orcs’ and ‘wargs’, later his ‘ents’ and ‘woses’.* None of the foregoing, however, offers any help at all with ‘hobbits’. If ‘the word authenticates the thing’, they are not authentic, for ‘hobbit’ is in no sense an ancient word. Nor indeed does their genesis seem to have had any element of ‘invention’ in it; it was pure ‘inspiration’, without any trace of thought at all. The moment of the word’s arrival has in fact been recorded by Tolkien, and subsequently by Humphrey Carpenter:

It was on a summer’s day, and he was sitting by the window in the study at Northmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate exam papers. Years later he recalled: ‘One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. But that’s only the beginning.’ (Biography, p. 230)9

The incident seems a perfect example of the creative unconsciousness: the boring job, the state of combined surface concentration and deeper lack of interest, the sudden relaxation which allows a message to force its way through from some unknown area of pressure. It is reminiscent of the flashes of insight which solve scientists’ problems in dreams (like von Kékulé the chemist and the snake with its tail in its mouth). But what has philology to do with an event so mysterious and so personal?

Tolkien had no opinion to offer himself. In a letter in the Observer (20 February 1938), he answered speculation by saying ‘I do not remember anything about the name and inception of the hero’, and denied (without total certainty) that the word ‘hobbit’ could have come from prior reading in African exploration or fairy-tale, as had been suggested. He thought that earlier writers’ hobbits, if they existed, were probably ‘accidental homophones’, i.e. the name was the same but the thing was not. Much later, in a letter he seems never to have posted (Letters, pp. 379–87), he observed that though he could often remember acquiring names this process played little part in the construction of stories. It is somehow typical that the OED should have claimed (Times, 31 May 1977) to have identified Tolkien’s ‘source’ and ‘inspiration’ in J. Hardy’s edition of The Denham Tracts, Vol. II (1895), which declares that ‘The whole earth was overrun with ghosts, boggles … hobbits, hobgoblins’. The word ‘hobbit’ is there, but in a run of distinctly insubstantial creatures which hardly correspond to Tolkien’s almost pig-headedly solid and earthbound race. Words are not things: the name ‘hobbit’ may seem to be for the researcher, a dead-end.

Even dead-ends have their uses, though (see below). This particular one prompts several thoughts. One is that although Tolkien accepted the word as coming from outside, not being rooted in antiquity at all, he nevertheless did not rest until he had worked out an acceptable etymology for it. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ is of course the first sentence of The Hobbit. Not quite the last sentence, but on the last page of the last appendix of The Lord of the Rings, is the note on the word ‘hobbit’ which gives its derivation, viz. from Old English *hol-bytla, ‘hole-dweller’ or ‘hole-builder’. Holbytla is an ‘asterisk word’. It was never recorded, but nevertheless could, is even on the whole likely to have existed, like *dvairgs. Furthermore it makes the magic sentence of inspiration into a tautology: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hole-liver…’ What else would you expect? The implication is that the inspiration was a memory of something that could in reality have existed, and that anyway conformed to the inflexible rules of linguistic history: as a word ‘hobbit’ was more like ‘dwarves’ than ‘elfin’.

The next point is that Tolkien did admit one possible source in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922), the story of the near-disgrace and abortive self-discovery of a complacent American businessman; to this theme the journey and the nature of Bilbo Baggins show some correspondence. But the source that Tolkien emphatically rejected is the word ‘rabbit’, of which so many critics have been reminded. ‘Calling Bilbo a “nassty little rabbit” was a piece of vulgar trollery’, he wrote, ‘just as “descendant of rats” was a piece of dwarfish [sic] malice’ (Observer, 20 February 1938). ‘Certainly not rabbit’ he affirmed later. Internal evidence runs against him here, however, for it is not only the trolls who think simultaneously of Bilbo and rabbits. Bilbo makes the comparison himself in chapter 6 of The Hobbit, when he sees the eagle sharpening its beak and begins ‘to think of being torn up for supper like a rabbit’. Three pages later the same thought occurs to the eagle, ‘You need not be frightened like a rabbit, even if you look rather like one.’ Thorin shakes Bilbo ‘like a rabbit’ in chapter 16, and much earlier Beorn – admittedly a rude and insensitive character – pokes Mr Baggins in the waistcoat and observes ‘little bunny is getting nice and fat again’ (p. 123). He is in a sense repaying the insult Bilbo offered earlier (p. 109), when he thought Beorn’s ‘skin-changing’ meant he was ‘a furrier, a man that calls rabbits conies, when he doesn’t turn their skins into squirrels’. But the multiplicity of names gives a further clue to Tolkien’s real thoughts, incubating since 1915 and the neologism ‘coney-rabbits’ in ‘Goblin Feet’.

The fact is that ‘rabbit’ is a peculiar word. The OED can find no ultimate etymology for it, nor trace it back in English before 1398. ‘Coney’ or ‘cunny’ is little better, going back to 1302, while ‘bunny’ is a pet-name used originally for squirrels, as it happens, and not recorded till the seventeenth century. The words for ‘rabbit’ differ in several European languages (French lapin, German kaninchen), and there is no Old English or Old Norse word for it at all. These facts are unusual: ‘hare’ for instance is paralleled by Old English hara, German hase, Old Norse heri, and so on, while the same could be said for ‘weasel’ or ‘otter’ or ‘mouse’ or ‘brock’ or most other familiar mammals of Northern Europe. The reason, of course, is that rabbits are immigrants. They appeared in England only round the thirteenth century, as imported creatures bred for fur, but escaped to the wild like mink or coypu. Yet they have been assimilated. The point is this: not one person in a thousand realises that rabbits (no Old English source) are in any historical way distinct from mice (O.E. mýs) or weasels (O.E. weselas), while the word is accepted by all as familiar, native, English. The creature has further established itself irreversibly in the folk-imagination, along with wise owls (O.E. úlan) and sly foxes (O.E. fuhsas). But if an Anglo-Saxon or Norseman had seen one he would have thought it alien if not bizarre. Rabbits prove that novelties can be introduced into a language and then made to fit – of course as long as one exhibits due regard to deep structures of language and thought. ‘If a foreign word falls by chance into the stream of a language’, wrote Jacob Grimm, ‘it is rolled around till it takes on that language’s colour, and in spite of its foreign nature comes to look like a native one.’10

Now this situation of anachronism-cum-familiarity certainly has something to do with hobbits. The first time that Bilbo Baggins appears in close focus he is ‘standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe’. Smoking later appears as not just a characteristic of hobbits, but virtually the characteristic, ‘the one art that we can certainly claim to be our own invention’, declares Meriadoc Brandybuck (LOTR p. 8). But what are they smoking besides pipes? ‘Pipeweed, or leaf’, declares the Lord of the Rings Prologue firmly. Why not say ‘tobacco’, since the plant is ‘a variety probably of Nicotiana’? Because the word would sound wrong. It is an import from some unknown Caribbean language via Spanish, reaching English only after the discovery of America, sometime in the sixteenth century. The words it resembles most are ‘potato’ and ‘tomato’, also referring to new objects from America, eagerly adopted in England and naturalised with great speed, but marked off as foreign by their very phonetic structure. ‘Pipeweed’ shows Tolkien’s wish to accept a common feature of English modernity, which he knew could not exist in the ancient world of elves or trolls, and whose anachronism would instantly be betrayed by a word with the foreign feel of ‘tobacco’. Actually Bilbo does use ‘tobacco’ on page 6 of The Hobbit, and Gandalf mentions ‘tomatoes’ not much later. In the first edition. The third changes ‘cold chicken and tomatoes’ to ‘cold chicken and pickles’,11 and after that the foreign fruit is excluded. ‘Potatoes’ stay in, being indeed the speciality of Gaffer Gamgee, but his son Sam has a habit of assimilating the word to the more native-sounding ‘taters’ – Tolkien notes elsewhere that the word was borrowed into colloquial Welsh from colloquial English as tatws, in which form it sounds much less distinctive (‘EW’, p. 34). But in fact the scene in which Sam discusses ‘taters’ with Gollum (LOTR p. 640) is a little cluster of anachronisms: hobbits, eating rabbits (Sam calls them ‘coneys’), wishing for potatoes (‘taters’) but out of tobacco (‘pipeweed’). One day, offers Sam to Gollum, he might cook him something better – ‘fried fish and chips’. Nothing could now be more distinctively English! Not much would be less distinctively Old English. The hobbits, though, are on our side of many cultural boundaries.

That, then, is their association with rabbits. One can see why Tolkien denied the obvious connection between the two: he did not want hobbits classified as small, furry creatures, vaguely ‘cute’ just as fairies were vaguely ‘pretty’. On the other hand both insinuated themselves, rabbits into the homely company of fox and goose and hen, hobbits into the fantastic but equally verbally authenticated set of elves and dwarves and orcs and ettens. One might go so far as to say that the absence of rabbits from ancient legend made them not an ‘asterisk word’ but an ‘asterisk thing’ – maybe they were there but nobody noticed. That is exactly the ecological niche Tolkien selected for hobbits, ‘an unobtrusive but very ancient people’ (LOTR p. 1, my italics). It is not likely that this role was devised for them before the arrival of the inspired ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’, any more than the etymology from holbytla. Still, the amazing thing about that sentence, looking back, is the readiness with which it responded to development. The first half of it helped to anchor hobbits in history, via holbytlan, the second to characterise them in fiction, via the anachronisms associated with the rabbit-analogy. Such complexity could be the result of prior unconscious cogitation or later artistic effort. Either way, ‘hobbit’ as word and concept threw out its anchors into Old and modern English at once: ‘grammarye’ at work once more.

Breaking Contact

This preamble makes it easier to say what Tolkien was doing in The Hobbit. Like Walter Scott or William Morris before him, he felt the perilous charm of the archaic world of the North, recovered from bits and scraps by generations of inquiry. He wanted to tell a story about it simply, one feels, because there were hardly any complete ones left; Beowulf or The Saga of King Heidrek stimulated the imagination but did not satisfy it. Accordingly he created a sort of ‘asterisk-world’ for the Norse Elder Edda. The dwarf-names of ‘Thorin and Company’, as well as Gandalf’s, come from a section of the Eddic poem Völuspá, often known as the Dvergatal or ‘Dwarves’ Roster’. This is not much regarded now, and has been called a ‘rigmarole’, a meaningless list; The Hobbit implies, though, that that meaningless list is the last faded memento of something once great and important, an Odyssey of the dwarves. As for the landscape through which Gandalf, Thorin and the rest move, that too is an Eddic one; ‘the pathless Mirkwood’ is mentioned in several poems, while ‘the Misty Mountains’ come from the poem Skirnismál, where Freyr’s page, sent to abduct the giant’s daughter, says grimly to his horse:

‘Myrct er úti, mál qveð ec ocr fara

úrig fiöll yfir

þyrsa þióð yfir;

báðir við komomc, eða ocr báða tecr

sá inn ámátki iötunn.’

‘The mirk is outside, I call it our business to fare over the misty mountains, over the tribes of orcs (þyrs = orc, see note above); we will both come back, or else he will take us both, he the mighty giant.’

All that Tolkien has done, in a way, is to make place-names out of adjectives, to turn words into things. But there is one very evident obstacle to recreating the ancient world of heroic legend for modern readers, and that lies in the nature of heroes. These are not acceptable any more, and tend very strongly to be treated with irony: the modern view of Beowulf is John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971). Tolkien did not want to be ironic about heroes, and yet he could not eliminate modern reactions. His response to the difficulty is Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, the anachronism, a character whose initial role at least is very strongly that of mediator. He represents and often voices modern opinions, modern incapacities: he has no impulses towards revenge or self-conscious heroism, cannot ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl’ as the dwarves suggest, knows almost nothing about Wilderland and cannot even skin a rabbit, being used to having his meat ‘delivered by the butcher all ready to cook’. Yet he has a place in the ancient world too, and there is a hint that (just like us) all his efforts cannot keep him entirely separate from the past.

His name, thus, is Baggins, and he lives in Bag End. This latter name had personal and homely associations for Tolkien (see Biography, p. 234). But it is also a literal translation of the phrase one sees often yet stuck up at the end of little English roads: cul-de-sac. Cul-de-sacs are at once funny and infuriating. They belong to no language, since the French call such a thing an impasse and the English a ‘dead-end’. The word has its origins in snobbery, the faint residual feeling that English words, ever since the Norman Conquest, have been ‘low’ and that French ones, or even Frenchified ones, would be better. Cul-de-sac is accordingly a peculiarly ridiculous piece of English class-feeling – and Bag End a defiantly English reaction to it. As for Mr Baggins, one thing he is more partial to than another is his tea, which he has at four o’clock. But over much of the country ‘tea’, indeed anything eaten between meals but especially afternoon tea ‘in a substantial form’ as the OED says, is called ‘baggins’. The OED prefers the ‘politer’ form ‘bagging’, but Tolkien knew that people who used words like that were almost certain to drop the terminal -g (another post-Conquest confusion anyway). He would have found the term glossed under bæggin, bægginz in W. E. Haigh’s Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District (London: Oxford University Press), for which he had written an appreciative prologue in 1928. Mr Baggins, then, is at the start of The Hobbit full of nonsense, like modern English society as perceived by Tolkien: he takes pride in being ‘prosy’, pooh-poohs anything out of the ordinary, and is almost aggressively middle middle-class in being more respectable than the Tooks though rather ‘well-to-do’ than ‘rich’. If he went much further in this direction he would end up like his cousins the ‘Sackville-Bagginses’ – they, of course, have severed their connection with Bag End by calling it cul-de-sac(k) and tagging on the French suffix -ville! Yet Bilbo’s heart is in the right place (also like modern English society as perceived by Tolkien). He likes flowers; he is proud of his ancestor the Bullroarer; if not quite ‘as fierce as a dragon in a pinch’ he is at any rate no coward; and like his name he is ample, generous, substantial, if undeniably plain and old-fashioned. He has therefore not entirely lost his passport into the ancient world, and can function in it as our representative, without heroic pretensions but also without cynical ironies. He is admittedly a bourgeois. That is why Gandalf turns him into a Burglar. Both words come from the same root (burh = ‘town’ or ‘stockaded house’), and while they are eternal opposites they are opposites on the same level. By the end of The Hobbit, though, Bilbo as burglar has progressed so far as to rub shoulders with heroes, even to be (just) considerable as one himself.*

The early moves of The Hobbit depend very much on this tension between ancient and modern reactions. It begins almost as satire on modern institutions, with Mr Baggins’s language particularly taking some shrewd knocks: the more familiar it seems the more fossilised it is. Thus Bilbo’s ‘Good Morning’ is no longer a wish offered to another person, but either that, or an objective statement, or a subjective statement, or all of them together, or even a gesture of hostility. ‘“What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!” said Gandalf. “Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good till I move off.”’ His ‘not at all’ means ‘yes’, his ‘my dear sir’ means nothing, and when he says ‘I beg your pardon’ he no longer has any sense that he is asking for anything or that ‘pardon’ might be a valuable thing to receive. Against this the dwarves’ ceremonious style of salutation – ‘At your service!’ ‘At yours and your family’s!’ ‘May his beard grow ever longer!’ ‘May the hair on his toes never fall out!’ – may seem pompous and indeed be insincere, but at any rate it is about something, not just semantically empty. Similarly Bilbo, trying to be business-like, flees to abstractions, only to have the narrator expose them: ‘“Also I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration, and so forth” – by which he meant: “What am I going to get out of it? And am I going to come back alive?”’ Thorin, though long-winded enough, does not talk about calculations, but about things:* the dwarf-song which opens their conclave centres on the misty mountains cold and grim, on harps, necklaces, twisted wire, pale enchanted long-forgotten gold. No wonder the hobbit feels ‘the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves’. In the first clash between ancient and modern ‘ancient’ wins easily; in an entirely proper sense (res = ‘thing’) it seems much realer.

In any case the narrator has his thumb firmly on the balance. His voice is very prominent throughout The Hobbit (as it is not in The Lord of the Rings), and as has been said it provides ‘a very firm moral framework by which to judge’12 – elves are good, goblins bad, dwarves, eagles, dragons, men and Beorn all in different ways in between. Besides building up morality, though, it more interestingly tears down expectation. The narrator’s favourite phrase is ‘of course’, but this usually introduces something unexplained or unpredictable: ‘That, of course, is the way to talk to dragons’, or ‘He knew, of course, that the riddle game was sacred’, or ‘It was often said … that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd’. Sometimes these and similar remarks introduce information. More often they create a sense that more information exists round the edges of the story, and that events are going according to rules only just hinted at, but rules just the same. Adjectives like ‘the famous Belladonna Took’ or ‘the great Thorin Oakenshield himself’ imply a depth of history, statements like ‘no spider has ever liked being called Attercop’ one of experience. The frequent remarks about legendary creatures of the ‘Trolls’ purses are the mischief’ kind furthermore blur ordinary experience into the magical, while the question ‘what would you do, if an uninvited dwarf came and hung his things up in your hall?’ is very much in the style of ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ The child reader senses, perhaps, the sportiveness of all this, and delights in it; the adult, as he goes along, finds himself succumbing to the ancient principle that ‘redundancy is truth’ – the more unnecessary details are put in the more lifelike we take fiction to be. The underlying point, though, is that the narrator is there cumulatively to express a whole attitude to the archaic-heroic setting: casual, matter-of-fact, even unimpressed, but accordingly lulling. He gets the landscape, the characters and the ‘rules’ through the modern barriers of disbelief and even, potentially, of contempt.