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

It does continue The Hobbit’s strong vein of comedy. It also leads to a sort of ‘eucatastrophe’, to use Tolkien’s own term, as Mr Baggins and the sympathetic reader with him find themselves and the modern code of humility and compromise regarded with gratifying wonder by the Elvenking and Gandalf himself. Still, the comedy is not all one way, for Bilbo remains faintly ridiculous; no one should see The Hobbit as a straight progression from satire against the modern world to satire against the ancient one. What chapter 16 and the scenes around it do most powerfully, perhaps, is to enforce a plea for tolerance across an enormous gap of times and attitudes and ethical styles. On the one hand there is Bilbo Baggins, with his virtue of ‘moral courage’ or readiness ‘to encounter odium, disapproval, or contempt rather than depart from what he deems the right course’ (first recorded 1822); his corresponding vice is ‘self-distrust’ (1789). On the other we have Beorn, Thorin, Dain, whose virtue can only be described by such a non-English noun as the Old Norse drengskapr – magnanimity, the awareness of being a warrior and so on one’s dignity, the quality Dain shows in ratifying Thorin’s agreement even though Thorin is dead – and whose vice is a kind of selfish materialism. Neither side is better than the other, or has any right to criticise. The contrast is one of styles, not of good and bad. Accordingly, though throughout The Hobbit there have been scenes where the pretensions of one have been exposed by the other (Bilbo sneering at Thorin’s elevated language, p. 198, Gloin cutting Bilbo very short at p. 19), by the end even the two linguistic styles have become invulnerable to each other’s ironies:

‘Good-bye and good luck, wherever you fare!’ said Balin at last. ‘If ever you visit us again, 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!’ (p. 269)

There is not much in common between the language of these two speakers; nevertheless it is perfectly clear that they are saying the same thing. Going on from his beliefs in ‘the reality of language’ and ‘the reality of history’, Tolkien was perhaps beginning to arrive at a third: ‘the reality of human nature’.

The bewilderment of Smaug

This is a slippery and a dangerous concept. If there is one thing which twentieth-century anthropology has proved, it is that people are different, and that even matters which appear entirely natural or instinctive are so enmeshed in nets of custom as to make it impossible to detect ‘human universals’. There is no sign that Tolkien took any notice of modern anthropology, but then he hardly needed to. Ancient texts would provide him with any number of examples of how what is now considered natural might be in another age unthinkable, or vice versa. People’s behaviour all too evidently changes. But isn’t there something underneath the nets of custom that remains the same? Something that would link modern Englishmen with their Anglo-Saxon ancestors just as philology sees, beneath a thousand years of change, essential continuity between the language of Beowulf and that of today?

Tolkien must have been brooding on this question for many years. In 1923 he published in The Gryphon (the magazine of Leeds’s Yorkshire College) a poem called ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’, the first version of what was to become in 1970 ‘The Hoard’. The first title is better, though, for it means ‘the gold of ancient men, wound round with magic’, it is line 3052 of Beowulf’, and it points to a notorious difficulty in that poem over the hero’s motives. When he went to fight his dragon he appeared to do so for the best of reasons, i.e. to protect his people. On the other hand he also showed a keen interest in the treasure, which the dragon was only trying to guard, having been provoked by the theft of a cup by a passing runaway (or ‘burglar’). At one point indeed, in a violently-disputed passage, the poet seems to say that there was a curse on the gold, so that the man who plundered it ‘should be guilty of sin, be shut up in devil’s haunts, bound in hell-bands and tormented grievously. Yet by no means too eagerly had Beowulf before gazed upon its owner’s treasure of gold with the curse on it.’18 Was Beowulf guilty or not? Did the curse punish him or not? Certainly the hoard he wins brings death to him and disaster to his people. Maybe this is also a punishment for the spark of avarice the poet is hinting at. But then maybe the dragon-curse is itself avarice. So Tolkien suggested in the 1923 poem, tracing in successive stanzas the transmission of a treasure from elf to dwarf to dragon to hero and ending with the picture of an old and miserly king overthrown by his rivals and leaving his gold to oblivion. All the characters in it are the same: they begin with vitality, mirth and courage, they end in age, wealth and squalor. Their decline is caused by gold. Could their progress also be a kind of analogue of human history, beginning in heroic endeavour and ending in ‘commercialism’, ‘materialism’, ‘industrialism’, that whole series of distinctively modern concepts which nevertheless centre if not on gold, on that ‘idolatry of artefacts’ which C. S. Lewis called, in evident agreement with Tolkien, the ‘great corporate sin of our own civilisation’?19 If one does think that for a moment, there is a further corollary: just as old miser grew out of young hero eager for treasure, so the ‘great corporate sin’ of modernity must have had some ancient origin. This sinful continuity between ancient and modern must have been on Tolkien’s mind as he finished The Hobbit.

There is in the final chapters a continuum of greed. Least reprehensible is the Elvenking’s: he likes artefacts, but for their beauty, and is satisfied in the end with the emeralds of Girion. Bard is more modern in tone, but is let off as well since his motives are so clearly constructive. Bilbo too, with his ethic of being ‘well-to-do’ rather than vulgarly ‘rich’, is relatively immune. The dwarves, though, have very strong feelings about treasure, especially their ‘pale enchanted gold’ or gold galdre bewunden;20 they even put ‘a great many spells’ over the trolls’ hoard, just in case. As soon as they come within range of Smaug’s treasure its spell starts to work on them. They send Bilbo down the tunnel; they rejoice prematurely; on first sight of the treasure they have to be dragged away from it by Bilbo, ‘not without many a backward glance of longing’. Finally Thorin himself is obsessively determined to give nothing to Bard or elves or Lakemen, and when forced to disgorge by Bilbo’s theft of the Arkenstone, thinks against normal dwarvish behaviour-patterns of breaking his word. ‘So strong was the bewilderment of the treasure upon him, he was pondering whether by the help of Dain he might not recapture the Arkenstone and withhold the share of the reward.’

‘Bewilderment’ is a good word there. In modern parlance it means ‘mental confusion’, which is fair enough as a description of Thorin’s state; he has no idea how he will reach his ends, or what these ends are, only that parting with treasure is not among them. The modern sense however arises from the physical one of being ‘lost in the wild’, and Thorin is that too, being stuck in the centre of the Desolation of Smaug with plenty of gold but little to eat; he could end up as literally ‘bewildered’ as the Master of Laketown who, fleeing with his city’s share of the treasure, ‘died of starvation in the waste’. There is even a third sense of the word to remind us of the visible, tactile source of the treasure’s power, the quality that makes the dwarves run their fingers through it: it means ‘a tangled or labyrinthine condition of objects’, says the OED, quoting (1884) ‘What a bewilderment of light and color met her eyes’. When one thinks of the dim images of gold and jewels and ‘silver red-stained in the ruddy light’ which is Bilbo’s first glimpse of the hoard, one sees that this sense for ‘the bewilderment of the treasure’ is appropriate too.

Thorin’s ‘bewilderment’ is physical and mental and moral as well. The ‘dragon-sickness’ which he and the Master of Laketown catch is also simultaneously magical and moral. At the bottom of it there lies an old superstition which says that dragons are actually misers who have in greed and despair walled themselves up alive, ‘lain down on their gold’ as sagas say. Naturally the gold on which they have brooded (see Hobbit, p. 243) exudes a miasma of avarice. Yet one has the sense of an external force meeting an internal weakness, especially strong in the artefact-worshipping dwarves, and in the Master whose mind was given ‘to trades and tolls, to cargoes and gold’, who despises old songs and speaks on occasion (p. 233) with a distinctive post-Industrial Revolution modernity. This is in fact a complex and successful presentation of the motives behind a real historical change; one might usefully compare the scene at the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), where the revolutionaries against the Automated State turn obsessively, with their first success, to tinkering with machines. Both books are making the same sort of (not very liberal) point: things, metal things, are genuinely fun to play with, but it’s very hard to stop the fun from getting out of hand, though only in the twentieth century have we become really aware of that. Hence the ‘continuum of greed’ from Elvenking to Master. Hence, too, the brooding from 1923 on the word galdor. Besides ‘spell’ and ‘bewilderment’ it also means ‘poetry’; you could say that the ‘enchantment’ of the treasure is a kind of wicked equivalent of ‘glamour’.

There is however another character in this continuum, indeed at one end of it, and that is Smaug. His name is another ‘asterisk word’, being the past tense *smaug of a Germanic verb *smugan, ‘to squeeze through a hole’, as Tolkien said in his 1938 Observer letter; also the Old Norse equivalent of an Old English magic word found in a spell wið sméogan wyrme, ‘against the penetrating worm’. But he has a mental sense as well as a physical one, since O.E. sméagan also means ‘to inquire into’ and in adjectival form ‘subtle, crafty’.21 All round it is appropriate that Smaug should have the most sophisticated intelligence in The Hobbit.

Bilbo’s conversation with him is indeed a brilliant stroke. Like so much in the book it has a model in an Eddic poem, Fáfnismál, in which Sigurthr and Fáfnir talk while the dragon dies of the wound the hero has given him. Like Bilbo, Sigurthr refuses to tell the dragon his name but replies riddlingly (for fear of being cursed); like Smaug, Fáfnir sows dissension between partners by remarking on the greed that gold excites; the dissension actually breaks out when eating the dragon’s heart helps Sigurthr to understand bird-talk (another prominent Hobbit motif). Nevertheless Fáfnismál once again did not offer Tolkien enough. It drifted off into mere exchange of information, it contained as Tolkien said of Beowulf too much ‘draconitas’ and not enough ‘draco’, not enough of the ‘real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own’ (‘Monsters’, pp. 258–9). Tolkien therefore set himself to repair this gap, and did so once more by introducing a strong dose of anachronistic modernity.

Thus the most remarkable thing about Smaug is his oddly circumlocutory mode of speech. He speaks in fact with the characteristic aggressive politeness of the British upper class, in which irritation and authority are in direct proportion to apparent deference or uncertainty. ‘You have nice manners for a thief and a liar’ are his opening words to Bilbo (their degree of irony unclear). ‘You seem familiar with my name, but I don’t seem to remember smelling you before. Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?’ He might be a testy colonel approached by a stranger in a railway carriage; why has Bilbo not been introduced? At the same time the ‘bestial life’ of the worm keeps intruding, as he remarks on Bilbo’s smell and boasts parenthetically ‘I know the smell (and taste) of dwarf – none better’, or when he rolls over, ‘absurdly pleased’ like a clumsy spaniel, to show the hobbit his armoured belly. One result is a frequent and vivid sense of paradox, which the ancient world, innocent of scientific rationalism, could hardly have developed: Smaug has both wings and weight, as we are reminded when he leaves his lair and ‘float[s] heavy and slow in the dark like a monstrous crow’ (my italics); and in the cold reptilian belly he keeps hot fire, which peeps out from under his eyelids when he pretends to sleep and flashes ‘like scarlet lightning’ when he is amused. The paradoxes, the oscillations between animal and intelligent behaviour, the contrast between creaky politeness of speech and plain gloating over murder, all help to give Smaug his dominant characteristic of ‘wiliness’, and what the narrator calls with utter modernity (the noun dates in this sense from 1847) his ‘overwhelming personality’.

All this gives great plausibility to another unexpected datum which the narrator springs on us, i.e. ‘the effect that dragon-talk has on the inexperienced’, the ‘dragon-spell’ which keeps prompting Bilbo to run out and confess. No ancient text contains any such motif, but as Smaug oozes confidentially on – ‘I will give you one piece of advice … I suppose you got a fair price. Come now, did you? … Well, that’s just like them … I don’t know if it has occurred to you … Bless me! Had you never thought of the catch?’ – he assumes the ‘Old experienced’ end of the polarity so strongly that it is no surprise for Bilbo to find himself pressed towards the ‘young innocent’ one. Yet the combined magico-moral effect (is it ‘spell’ or is it ‘personality’?) reminds one also of the ‘dragon-sickness’ that Smaug and his treasure between them seem practically and magically to generate. The character of Smaug is part of a Zusammenhang: nothing could be more archaic or fantastic than a dragon brooding on its gold, and yet the strong sense of familiarity in this one’s speech puts it back into the ‘continuum of greed’, makes it just dimly possible that dragon-motivations could on their different scale have some affinity with human ones – even real historical human ones.

If one followed this line of reasoning too far The Hobbit could appear suddenly as a roman à thèse, or even an allegory, in which Bilbo Baggins as Modern Man embarks on his Pilgrim’s Progress (or Regress) into Fantasy, only to find that at the very heart of his monsterworld there is none other than an embodiment of his own worst nature, Greed or even Capitalism itself, skulking on its gold like a fiercer Miss Havisham. The moral would be that all bourgeois must turn Burglar, or something of the sort. Of course such a reading would only be a joke. Still, if by no stretch of the imagination an allegory, The Hobbit does begin to show by its conclusion some flickers of the ‘large symbolism’ Tolkien saw in Beowulf and tried more positively to reproduce in The Lord of the Rings. In its last scene, the conversation between Gandalf, Bilbo and Balin, the wizard is allowed to make the point that metaphors can ‘after a fashion’ be true, that romance and reality are differences of presentation not of fact. The logic of what he says is that if the matter behind old songs can contain someone as prosaic as Bilbo then maybe even the prosaic events of today will sometime be the matter of old songs. There is accordingly a reality, and a continuity, in human nature, even dwarf-hobbit-human nature.

Yet the reason why this hint should not be taken further is obvious enough. Most of The Hobbit suggests strongly that Tolkien did not work from ideas, but from words, names, consistencies and contradictions in folk-tales, things as localised as the dissatisfaction with Fáfnismál which produced Smaug, the brooding over the riddle-contests of Vafðrúðnismál or The Saga of King Heidrek which led (somehow) to Gollum. The two most powerful fragments of all ancient poetry for Tolkien at this time, I cannot help thinking, were the two similar bits from Beowulf and Sir Gawain which imply there are whole worlds the narrator simply cannot get round to. The Old English poet hints at the ‘wide journeys’ which Sigemund the dragon-slayer made, ‘the wicked deeds and battles which the children of men’ (but maybe not of monsters) ‘never knew clearly’. His medieval successor says of Sir Gawain six centuries later that he would never even have reached his main adventure ‘Had he not been stalwart and staunch and steadfast in God’, so many were his clashes with worms and wolves, with wood-trolls ‘and with ogres that hounded him from the heights of the fells’. In exactly the same spirit we are told that even going home Bilbo ‘had many hardships and adventures before he got back’, since ‘The Wild was still the Wild, and there were many other things in it in those days beside goblins’. Some of them have been half-glimpsed already: eyes in the darkness, ‘old castles with an evil look’, ‘startled ears’ responding to the news of the death of Smaug. But in essence the plot of The Hobbit is a tour through darknesses, with no more connection between Gollum and the eagles and Beorn and the spiders than that of one-after-another. The true end of The Hobbit, as opposed to the last scene of chaos and tidying-up,* is the regretful farewell to the Wild just before, as archaic Took cedes to Edwardian Baggins:

They came to that high point at morning, and looking backward they saw a white sun shining over the outstretched lands. There behind lay Mirkwood, blue in the distance, and darkly green at the nearer edge even in the spring. There far away was the Lonely Mountain on the edge of eyesight. On its highest peak snow yet unmelted was gleaming pale.

‘So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!’ said Bilbo, and he turned his back on his adventure. (p. 271)

Adventure in Middle-earth embodies a modern meaning, but does not exist to propagate it. Insofar as the two worlds are related it is because the ‘inner consistency’ of Secondary Art must necessarily (in order to be consistent) be the same as that of Primary Art or truth.

* There are too many of these to fit into an argument: one might note, though, that the skill of Tolkien’s elves in archery goes back to ‘elf-shot’; that their association with the sea and their taking of Frodo is very like the passing of Arthur in (and only in) the account of Lazamon, a twelfth-century Worcestershire poet whom Tolkien regarded as the last preserver of Old English tradition; that the gifts of Galadriel correspond to stories preserved in English and Scandinavian family traditions such as that of ‘the Luck of Edenhall’ or the one recorded in Sigrid Undset’s novel Kristin Lavransdatter, part 2, ch. 6; that ‘elvishness’ is a quality recognised in men several times in The Lord of the Rings, but also ascribed to himself by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Tolkien makes no use, however, of the very common ‘changeling’ belief.

* ‘Orcs’ go back to the orcnéas, the ‘demon-corpses’ of the Beowulf-poet, and to another Old English word orcþyrs, ‘orc-giant’. ‘Wargs’ are a linguistic cross between Old Norse vargr and Old English wearh, two words showing a shift of meaning from ‘wolf’ to ‘human outlaw’. For the ‘ents’ see below and note Tolkien’s own comment in Letters, p. 208, that ‘As usually with me, they grew rather out of their name, than the other way about’. The ‘woses’ are perhaps primarily an apology for Sir Gawain line 721, where wodwos is offered as a plural, though historically a singular derived from Old English wudu-wása. It would not have escaped Tolkien, though, that his office at Leeds University (like mine) stood just off ‘Woodhouse Lane’, which crosses ‘Woodhouse Moor’ and ‘Woodhouse Ridge’. These names may preserve, in mistaken modern spelling, old belief in ‘the wild men of the woods’ lurking in the hills above the Aire. See further Tolkien’s notes on ‘Orc’ and ‘Woses’ in ‘Guide’.

* I do not know the origin of the personal name ‘Bilbo’, but can record that on one occasion I found myself using Ordnance Survey map no. 161, of S. Herefordshire, to locate churches of similar date to Ancrene Wisse and preserving fragments of the early Anglo-Norse style of stonework. As I did this my eye moved west from Kilpeck to Wormbridge to Abbey Dore to a hill called ‘Great Bilbo’. The Place-Name Survey has not done Herefordshire yet, and I have no explanation for the name; maybe Tolkien had one of his own.

* The contract he finally does deliver on p. 22 is typically more practical than Bilbo at his most business-like had thought. It covers profits, delivery, travelling expenses, but also defrayal of funeral expenses, ‘by us or our represenatives, if occasion arises and the matter is not otherwise arranged for’. This means, ‘you or all of us may die, and also be eaten’.

* There is a further weak analogue in the Grimms’ tale no. 195, ‘The Grave-Mound’, and a much stronger one in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (London: Bodley Head, 1945), end of chapter 16. There, though, the tale is given a moral significance, a little like Tolkien explaining ‘elf-time’ in Lothlórien.

* Even this, I suspect, has a philological root. In the 1928 introduction he wrote to W. E. Haigh’s Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, mentioned above in connection with ‘Baggins’, Tolkien had said that it was important to observe ‘the changes in sense that take place when words of more “learned” origin are adopted and put to everyday use in dialect (see keȩnsil, okshȩn, inséns)’. But okshȩn in Huddersfield dialect meant not ‘auction’ but ‘mess’. ‘Shu’z nout but ȩ slut; ȩr eȩs ȩz ȩ feȩr okshȩn’, quoted Mr Haigh, or for non-natives, ‘She’s nothing but a slut; her house is a fair auction’. When he gets home Mr Baggins finds his house a ‘fair auction’ in both senses. Not only are they selling his goods, they are failing to wipe their feet on the mat! The word has become a ‘fusion-point’ of outraged respectability.

CHAPTER 4 A CARTOGRAPHIC PLOT

Maps and Names

Seventeen years went by between the publication of The Hobbit and that of The Fellowship of the Ring. It is true that in the interim a World War was fought, and Tolkien’s family grew up, while Tolkien himself was committed to many professorial duties which, as he later insisted, he did not neglect. Nevertheless the main reason for the long hiatus was the pace and nature of Tolkien’s own creativity. He remained absorbed in Middle-earth, to it indeed he dedicated his ‘years of authority’ as a scholar; but he found the composition of The Lord of the Rings a matter which had to be allowed to obey its own laws. Thanks to the publication of (in particular) volumes VI to IX of ‘The History of Middle-earth’, we now know a good deal more about this process than we did when this book was first written.

To begin with, one can see that Tolkien was perhaps taken aback by, and was certainly not prepared for the success of The Hobbit and the very natural demand by his publishers for a sequel to it. As we again now know much more clearly, and as is discussed in chapter 7 below, he had been working on what was to become The Silmarillion for many years, and had a great deal of material available from that. He sent selections from this corpus to his publisher, Stanley Unwin, in November 1937 (The Hobbit had been published in September of that year), only to have them politely rejected, probably on the basis of a partial reading, a month later.1 Stanley Unwin wanted a sequel, not a prequel, and more about hobbits, not about elves. Between 16th and 19th December 1937 Tolkien accordingly began to write on from the end of The Hobbit, calling his initial chapter, as it was to remain right through to final publication, ‘A long-expected party’. However, what is bound to surprise anyone familiar with The Lord of the Rings who then reads through Tolkien’s early drafts in The Return of the Shadow is quite how little Tolkien had in the way of a plan, or even of a conception.