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

The way The Hobbit works in fact shows up well in any comparison of Chapter 2, ‘Roast Mutton’, with its analogue in the Grimms’ folk-tale of ‘The Brave Little Tailor’. In this latter a tailor (the trade was synonymous with feebleness, as in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part II III ii) kills seven flies at a blow, and is so emboldened that he starts a career of violence and monster-killing. He bluffs his way through a contest of strength with one giant, and frightens off a whole gang of them: ‘each of them had a roast sheep in his hand and was eating it’. Sent by the king to catch two more, he hides up a tree and throws stones at them till they quarrel and kill each other: ‘they tore up trees in their agony and defended themselves’, he says airily when he shows the bodies, ‘but all that does no good when a chap like me comes along who can kill seven with one blow!’ Bilbo starts off very much as a ‘little grocer’, but he never shows anything like the ‘little tailor’s’ resource or effrontery; an omni-competent character would destroy any modern story’s action. Instead he is presented very much as a reader-surrogate, driven on by shame to try to be ‘The Master Thief’ (like the character in Asbjörnsen and Moe’s Norse folktale) but hampered by utter ignorance of the rules of the game. He is caught by one ‘fact’ which neither he nor the reader could have predicted – trolls’ purses talk – and saved by two more: wizards can ventriloquise, and ‘trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of, and never move again’. ‘As you probably know’ is here the final blow in Tolkien’s strategy of ‘counter-realism’. Nobody knows that; indeed it isn’t true; in a traditional tale no narrator could get away with so shamelessly exploiting the gap between his world and his listener’s, because of course there wouldn’t be one! However in The Hobbit the combined assurance of Gandalf, the narrator, the trolls and the dwarves outweighs the ignorance of Bilbo, and the reader. As it happens the belief about being underground before dawn is as traditional as belief in trolls and dwarves at all, going back to the Elder Edda and the end of the Alvíssmál, where Alvíss the dwarf is kept talking till daylight by Thórr, and so turned to stone.* Inventive resource is very strong in The Hobbit, over words and races and characters and events. The book’s distinguishing characteristic, though, is its sense that all these things come from somewhere outside and beyond the author, forming a Zusammenhang as solid as everyday’s and on occasion no more irrational.

The Ring as ‘Equalizer’

This ‘illusion of historical truth and perspective’ is, of course, as Tolkien himself said of Beowulf, ‘largely a product of art’ (‘Monsters’, p. 247). And sometimes the art ran out. Tolkien himself admitted (Observer, 20 February 1938) that twice he got stuck. He did not say where, leaving that for later researchers to make fools of themselves over, but it may be argued that the first few chapters of The Hobbit consist mostly of disengagement and playing down the readers’ collective sense of doubt. As late as the start of chapter 4 the company is halted again (for the third time), and there is a sense of the author groping for intellectual justification. In the mountain-storm Bilbo looks out and sees that ‘across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below’. Giants never enter the Tolkien universe again – Gandalf accepts their existence for a second in chapter 7 – and the passage is a failure of tone; it reads like an old interpretation of giants as ‘nature-myth’, i.e. as personifications of the avalanche like Thórr and his hammer personifying thunder and lightning. This is too allegorical for Middle-earth. But the story takes off very shortly afterwards, with the capture by the goblins (incidentally still too close to munitions workers as the trolls were to labourers), the escape, the goblin runners pursuing ‘swift as weasels in the dark’, and Bilbo’s forcible detachment from the dwarves. Crawling along the tunnel hours later ‘his hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel. It was a turning point in his career’, comments Tolkien, ‘but he did not know it.’ A turning-point in Tolkien’s career too, for from this came most of his subsequent inspiration – Gollum, Sauron,13 eventually The Lord of the Rings itself.

But no more than Bilbo did Tolkien realise this at the time. As he testified later (LOTR p. xv), glimpses in The Hobbit ‘had arisen unbidden of things higher or deeper or darker than its surface: Durin, Moria, Gandalf, the Necromancer, the Ring’. The ring changed its significance even between editions of The Hobbit.14 In the first matters were relatively straightforward: Bilbo found the ring, met Gollum, they agreed to hold a riddle-contest, the stakes being Bilbo’s life against Gollum’s ‘precious’. Bilbo won, but since by accident he’d acquired Gollum’s ‘precious’ already he asked to be shown the way out instead. The sequence works, it excuses Bilbo of any charge of theft (he’d won the ring fair and square) but as anyone familiar with the Ring in its later manifestations will see, the amazing thing is Gollum’s readiness to bet his ‘precious’, bear the loss of it, and then offer to show the way out as a douceur. ‘I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: “We are ssorry; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only pressent, if it won the competition”’ (Hobbit first edition, p. 92). In the second and subsequent editions his last words are ‘Thief! Thief! Thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it for ever!’ Furthermore Gollum’s charge is arguably true, since in this version the deal was Bilbo’s life against any nominated service, such as showing the way out. In both versions Bilbo gets the ring and the exit, but in the latter one it is his claim to the ring which is shaky.

Now, Tolkien integrated this second thought into his story marvellously well, even keeping the first version as an excuse Bilbo had told with uncharacteristic dishonesty to put his claim to the ‘precious’ beyond doubt. However, it is the first thought one should keep in mind while considering the genesis of The Hobbit. And here the obvious point, surely, is that the ring is just a prop: a stage-prop, like the marvellous devices common in fairy-tales or legends (there is a wish-fulfilling ring in the Grimms’ ‘The King of the Golden Mountain’, and a cloak of invisibility), but also a prop for Bilbo’s status with the dwarves. It is a kind of ‘Equalizer’. After acquiring it Bilbo remains in most ways as out of touch with Wilderland as before: he cannot dress meat or dodge wargs, and when in chapter 15 Balin asks if he can make out the bird’s speech he has to reply ‘Not very well’ – the narrator, still maximising the distance between him and everyday Middle-earth normality, adds ‘(as a matter of fact, he could make nothing of it at all)’. He cannot even tell when crows are being insulting. But the ring makes up for this. Before he had it he was essentially a package to be carried, his name as a ‘burglar’ nothing but an embarrassment even to himself. With the ring he can take an active part. He uses it straight away to get past the dwarves’ look-out and raise his prestige – they ‘looked at him with quite a new respect’ – and then to save his companions first from the spiders and second from the elvish dungeons. The problem after that is in a way to maintain his status without simply reducing it to the accident of owning a magic ring. Tolkien takes some trouble over this, observing in the wood-elves’ dungeon that ‘One invisible ring was a fine thing, but it was not much good among fourteen’ – so that credit for that escape is Bilbo’s – and after the fight with the spiders that ‘knowing the truth about the vanishing did not lessen [the dwarves’] opinion of Bilbo at all; for they saw that he had some wits, as well as luck and a magic ring – and all three were useful possessions.’ There is something provocative in this last statement, for it seems to deny that owning a magic ring could be an accident. Still, the very arguability of Bilbo’s status shows how the ring changed The Hobbit: it brought a new possibility of action which would be simultaneously ‘heroic’ and credible, it developed the opposition of ancient and modern motifs into something like a dialogue.

The main subject of that dialogue is courage. Few modern readers of Beowulf, or the Elder Edda, or the Icelandic ‘family sagas’, can escape a certain feeling of inadequacy as they contemplate whole sequences of characters who appear, in a casual and quite lifelike way, not to know what fear is. How would we manage in such a society? With our culture’s characteristic ‘softness, worldliness, and timidity’15 would we be fit for anything but slavery? To this self-doubt Bilbo Baggins makes a sober but relatively optimistic response. His style of courage shows up when he is in the dark and alone. He faces fear first in the escape from Gollum, when he takes a ‘leap in the dark’ rather than kill a defenceless enemy (this comes only in the second edition). A more significant scene is when he faces the giant spider and kills it ‘all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else’. A third is as he creeps down the tunnel to his first sight of Smaug, but stops as he hears dragon-snoring ahead. Tolkien lays great stress on this:

Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. At any rate after a short halt go on he did … (p. 200)

Such scenes remind us that even Samuel Colt’s ‘Equalizer’ did not make all men heroes: it only made them all the same size. They also provide a behaviour-model which is not quite beyond emulation (no one can fight a dragon, but everyone can fight fear). Mainly they place in a kindly light that style of courage – cold courage, ‘moral courage’, two o’clock in the morning courage – which our age is most prepared to venerate.

They further expose the dwarves to something like the satire turned on Mr Baggins’s modernisms at the start of the story. Thorin Oakenshield, for all his heroic name, sends Bilbo down the tunnel, and the rest do little but look embarrassed. The narrator insists (p. 199) that ‘they would all have done their best to get him out of trouble … as they did in the case of the trolls’, but he may not carry entire conviction. When he escaped from the goblins Bilbo had just decided he had to go back into the tunnels and look for his friends when he found his friends deciding just the opposite about him! ‘If we have got to go back into those abominable tunnels to look for him, then drat him’, is their last word. Maybe Gandalf would have talked them round. But before this begins to sound like treason against the images of the ancient North (the ‘great contribution’ of whose early literature, Tolkien had said, was ‘the theory of courage’, ‘Monsters’, p. 262), it needs to be said that The Hobbit’s dialogue contains many voices. There is something splendid in the narrator’s reversion to laconicism at the end, when he says (as a matter of course) that since Thorin is dead Fili and Kili are too; they ‘had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother’, a motif immemorially old. Much can be said too for Thorin Oakenshield, while for some considerable stretch of the story, say chapters 6 to 8, one can see Tolkien exploring with delight that surly, illiberal independence often the distinguishing mark of Old Norse heroes. Gandalf’s own reaction to being treed is just to kill as many enemies as possible; the rescuing eagles are, the narrator says euphemistically, ‘not kindly birds’; there is a fine scene of sullen insolence between Thorin and the elf-king; but the centre of the whole sequence is Beorn.

He is in a way the least invented character in the book. His name is an Old English heroic word for ‘man’, which meant originally ‘bear’, so that naturally enough he is a were-bear, who changes shape, or ‘skin’ as Gandalf calls it, every night. He has a very close analogue in Bothvarr Bjarki (= ‘little bear’), a hero from the Norse Saga of Hrólfr Kraki, and another in Beowulf himself, whose name is commonly explained as Beowulf = ‘bees’ wolf’ = honey-eater bear, and who breaks swords, rips off arms and cracks ribs with ursine power and clumsiness. Beorn keeps bees too; is surly in disposition; not to be trusted after dark; and ‘appalling when he is angry’, a description not altogether different from being ‘kind enough if humoured’. The dwarves and Bilbo see both sides of him, but perceive them as one. On their second morning they find him in a good mood, telling ‘funny stories’ and apologising for having doubted their word – it has been confirmed by two prisoners:

‘What did you do with the goblin and the Warg?’ asked Bilbo suddenly.

‘Come and see!’ said Beorn, and they followed round the house. A goblin’s head was stuck outside the gate and a warg-skin was nailed to a tree just beyond. Beorn was a fierce enemy. But now he was their friend … (p. 124)

‘The heart is hard, though the body be soft’, said Tolkien of fairy-tale readers. But actually in context Beorn’s ferocity is attractive. It goes with his rudeness and his jollity, all projections of that inner self-confidence which as Tolkien knew lay at the core of the ‘theory of courage’. ‘What do you believe in?’ ask whole sequences of kings to Icelandic wanderers in sagas. ‘Ek trúi á sjálfan mik’, runs the traditional response, ‘I believe in myself’. Killer-Glúmr, an axeman like Beorn, widens this to believing in his axe and his moneybag and his storehouse as well. Both characters have the air of men who have ‘been into’ a crisis of existentialism – and straight out the other side, leaving the crisis sadly tattered.

The solitary conquest of fear: the fierce denial of it. These two conceptions, one modern, one archaic, circle round each other most of the way through The Hobbit. It would be wrong to say they are ever resolved, but they do at least reach climaxes of anachronism and clash of style near the end; first in the death of Smaug, then around the Battle of the Five Armies.

To take these in order, it may be said that killing Smaug is the basic problem of The Hobbit, and not just for the dwarves. Tolkien had few models to work from: Beowulf kills his dragon in plain fight, but without surviving, as is also to happen at Ragnarök with Thórr and the Midgard Serpent. Sigurthr kills Fáfnir in the Edda by stratagem and via the notorious draconic ‘soft underbelly’, Vítharr at Ragnarök again is to slay the monstrous Fenriswolf by putting foot on lower jaw and hand on upper and tearing the beast apart. This last is implausible for men or hobbits, Beowulf’s case and Thórr’s are depressing, and Sigurthr’s frankly too obvious to be interesting: Tolkien thought of something like it to begin with, but if the dwarves are well up on ‘stabs and jabs and undercuts’ then probably Smaug would be too. In the end he had to use a variant on ‘soft underbellies’, but to it he adds a notion as anachronistic to old-style ‘heroism’ as are Bilbo’s decisions in the dark. This new element is ‘discipline’.

Like ‘glamour’, ‘discipline’ is a much-altered word. Its earliest English meaning, in the Ancrene Wisse, is ‘flogging’; the lady anchorites, says its author, must well tame their flesh mid herde disciplines. Later on the word comes to mean teaching or training, especially military training or drill; by the eighteenth century it covered the whole complex business of priming, loading, cocking, presenting and firing the ‘Brown Bess’ infantry musket to the beat of drum, a ritual which if carried out perfectly left British redcoats invulnerable to direct assault (as at Culloden), but when bungled left them, as an OED citation says, ‘fit only for the contempt and slaughter of their enemies’ (as at Falkirk the year before). In Tolkien’s day the word had come to signify the most prized of all British imperial qualities, a specialised cold-bloodedness and readiness to take punishment which the OED finds itself unable to define. Its classic case was perhaps the wreck of the Birkenhead troopship on 25th February 1852, when 500 soldiers found themselves on a sinking ship with inadequate lifeboats in a shark-infested sea. They were drawn up on deck, maintaining, says the Annual Register for 1852, ‘perfect discipline’, and told eventually to jump overboard and make for the few boats which had been launched. But the ship’s captain begged them not to, as the boats with the women in would inevitably be swamped. ‘“Not more than three”’, he reported, ‘“made the attempt.” Under this heroic obedience to discipline the whole mass were engulphed in the waves by the sinking of the ship.’16 The event became a part of British mystique, as did the quality. Lord Kitchener asked Tolkien’s army of 1916 to show ‘discipline and steadiness under fire’, with typical attention to passivity. Nothing like this can be seen in early Northern literature; the analogue to the Birkenhead disaster in The Saga of Eirik the Red has indeed a Norseman giving up his place in a lifeboat, but he does it with characteristic personal bravura (and rudeness).17 Nevertheless Tolkien had been taught to value discipline, and it solved his problem over Smaug.

It is Bard the Bowman who kills Smaug, heroically enough with a lost arrow saved as a family heirloom for generations. Before that, though, Bard has figured as a nameless participant in a crowd scene about the giving and taking of orders. He has the trumpets blown, the warriors armed, the pots filled with water and the bridge to the land thrown down; it is this last precaution which daunts Smaug for a moment as he sweeps in over the cold fire-quenching lake. Then the dragon is faced with ‘a hail of dark arrows’ from platoons of bowmen, urged on by ‘the grim-voiced man (Bard was his name), who ran to and fro cheering on the archers and urging the Master to order them to fight to the last arrow’. Fighting to the last round is of course the traditional phrase; being a ‘discipline’ concept it post-dates musketry. But Tolkien has here transferred the ethic of Waterloo or Albuera back to ancient days. He does it again as the dragon shatters the town and the townspeople break for their lifeboats: ‘But there was still a company of archers that held their ground among the burning houses. Their captain was Bard …’ The phrase ‘hold one’s ground’ is not even recorded by the OED till 1856, though there is a parallel in the Old English poem Maldon, where the English are exhorted to ‘hold their stead’ (which they don’t). Not that holding their ground does these particular archers any good, or Smaug any harm; he is killed by the last arrow, the one particular arrow shot heroically by Bard. Still, the whole pressure of the scene is towards modern coolness and preparation, not ancient ‘berserk’ fury (a ‘berserk’ being a ‘bear-shirt’, a man like Beorn). It is discipline that does for Smaug: discipline and that element of ‘complacency’ (OED 1650) which lets Smaug neglect his armour and so betray himself successively to hobbit, thrush and man.

The death of Smaug, like Bilbo in the dark, lets us see courage in a modern way. Their obverse is the Battle of the Five Armies (where Bilbo disappears from sight and heroic displays come from Thorin, Fili, Kili, Dain and especially Beorn), and the unusually complex scene of debate before it in chapter 15. Here Bard and Thorin oppose each other, and do so in highly unchildlike and ratiocinative style. To summarise Bard’s proposition to Thorin, he says in essence: (1) I have killed the dragon, so I deserve a reward, (2) I am also the heir of Girion lord of Dale, and much of Smaug’s treasure was his, so I should have it back, (3) Smaug’s destruction of Laketown has left destitute the people who helped the dwarves, and they deserve repayment, especially as (4) the dragon-attack was the dwarves’ fault (or actually Bilbo’s). To these points – split up in the original by heavy rhetorical questions – Thorin replies in the same mode, though not the same order. He ignores (1), perhaps out of pride, rejects (2), on the ground that Girion is dead and so can have no claim, and half-accepts (3) and (4); in dwarvish style he agrees to pay a fair price for earlier assistance, but refuses compensation for the dragon-attack since that was Smaug’s business not his own. Finally he refuses to parley under threat and asks a rhetorical question himself: ‘It is in my mind to ask what share of their inheritance you would have paid to our kindred, had you found the hoard unguarded and us slain’.

The laborious legalism of this is straight out of Icelandic saga: one thinks of the hero of The Saga of Hrafnkell ticking off the appropriate compensations for the murders he has committed, the hamstringing he has suffered, loss of goods during feud and even the natural increase of animals during periods of confiscation – all coexisting, of course, with an ethic of ruthless violence. It is clear that Tolkien was all but enchanted by that ethical and literary style. The whole scene is presented very much for our admiration, and when later on Dain and the dwarves of the Iron Hills appear, their stilted ceremoniousness – ‘But who are you that sit in the plain as foes before defended walls?’ – rings much more powerfully than the narrator’s modernistic translation: ‘You have no business here. We are going on, so make way or we shall fight you!’ Nevertheless between these two moments another scene has intervened, marked by the greatest cluster of anachronisms since chapter 1: Bilbo’s delivery of the Arkenstone to Bard, the Elvenking and Gandalf.

Bilbo has all along been (nearly) immune to the paraphernalia of heroism. He would like to see himself in a ‘looking-glass’ when Thorin outfits him with mithril armour, but fears he looks ‘rather absurd’, especially when he thinks of his neighbours on The Hill back home. He also listens with dismay and disapproval to the proud speeches of Bard and Thorin, and takes his own steps to break heroic deadlock.

‘Really you know,’ Bilbo was saying in his best business manner, ‘things are impossible. Personally I am tired of the whole affair. I wish I was back in the West in my own home, where folk are more reasonable. But I have an interest in this matter – one fourteenth share, to be precise, according to a letter, which fortunately I believe I have kept.’ He drew from a pocket in his old jacket (which he still wore over his mail), crumpled and much folded, Thorin’s letter that had been put under the clock on his mantelpiece in May!

‘A share in the profits, mind you,’ he went on. ‘I am aware of that. Personally I am only too ready to consider all your claims carefully, and deduct what is right from the total before putting in my own claim.’ (p. 250)

This speech and speaker could hardly be less like the ones that surround it. Bilbo’s behaviour is solidly anachronistic, for he is wearing a jacket, relying on a written contract, drawing a careful distinction between gain and profit, and proposing a compromise which would see Bard’s claim as running expenses (almost tax-deductible). Where Bard and Thorin used archaic words (‘Hail!’, ‘foes’, ‘hoard’, ‘kindred’, ‘slain’), he uses modern ones: ‘profit’, never used in English till 1604, and then only in Aberdeen, ‘deduct’, recorded in 1524 but then indistinguishable from ‘subtract’ and not given its commercial sense till much later, ‘total’, not used as here till 1557, ‘claim’, ‘interest’, ‘affair’, ‘matter’, all French or Latin imports not adopted fully into English till well after the Norman Conquest. It is fair to say that no character from epic or saga could even begin to think or talk like Bilbo. But what is the effect here of this final sharp juxtaposition between Bard and Bilbo, ‘hero’ and ‘businessman’?