Monday, January 28, 2013

The Hobbit: Part 2: Riddles in the Dark

Last week we began a look at the precursor to Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. We met Bilbo Baggins, a solid, well-to-do hobbit who is quite comfortable in his quiet, adventure-free life until the wizard Gandalf dragoons him into accompanying a group of dwarves on a quest to recover their ancestral gold. While escaping from goblins in the Misty Mountains, Bilbo has become separated from the rest of his party. He is now lost in a tunnel deep under the mountains, abandoned and alone. Well, not quite alone...


In a hole in the mountain there lived a Gollum.

Not a warm, comfortable, well-furnished hole such as Bilbo was accustomed to, but a dark, damp, forsaken hole which even the goblins avoided if at all possible. But is suited Gollum.

The chapter in which Bilbo encounters Gollum is an important turning point in the story. Up to now, Bilbo has felt like -- and has been -- a piece of useless luggage in the dwarves' expedition. His single attempt at burglary at the Troll's camp went horribly wrong and nearly ended in disaster. But here he has the opportunity to be bold and to escape from a difficult and dangerous situation by using his wits and a fair amount of luck.

His first bit of luck, and perhaps the most important bit of all, comes when he reaches out in the darkness and puts his hand on something round and metal which he absently puts into his pocket without thinking. Then he meets Gollum.

We aren't told Gollum's real name in The Hobbit; he is identified by the "gollum" noise he makes in the back of his throat. All we are told is that he has lived many, many years in the dark bowels of the mountain, subsisting on the blind fish from his subterranean lake and the occasional small goblin he was able to catch unawares. Bilbo is probably the most succulant thing he has seen in ages. But Bilbo is also armed with an elvish dagger, a souvenir of the Troll's hoard, and this gives Gollum some pause.
Apprehensive of Bilbo's blade, Gollum tries to break the ice by suggesting a riddle contest. If Gollum wins, he gets to eat Bilbo; and if Bilbo wins... ah, but we'll get to that.

Riddle games, such as the one Gollum and Bilbo plan, were a common feature of the old Sagas that Tolkien used as inspiration. Tolkien devotes as much attentiond to this duel of wits as some writers give to a sword fight; he gives us not only the riddles, but play-by-play commentary on the strategy of each player; why he chose a specific riddle and how his opponent tried to work out the answer. In doing so, he encourages the reader to play along and match his own wits against Bilbo's and Gollum's.

In the end, Bilbo wins through another bit of luck. As he's wracking his brains trying to think of his next riddle, he puts his hand in his pocket and finds the ring he had picked up before and forgotten about. He mutters, "What have I got in my pocket?" Technically, this is not a riddle, as Tolkien admits; but Gollum accepts it, and failing to answer the question, is bound to his agreement.

And here we come to a point of divergence. As originally written, Gollum agreed to give Bilbo a present, which happened to be this magic ring he owned. But when Gollum couldn't find the ring, Bilbo has him show the way out of the mountain instead.

Later on, when Tolkien began writing his sequel to The Hobbit, and decided to upgrade Gollum's magic ring from a Convenient Plot Device to a Full Throttle MacGuffin of Power, he realized that the story of Bilbo's encounter with Gollum did not really fit this new theme. He made the retcon work to his advantage, though, by saying that the version told in The Hobbit was actually the story Bilbo told the dwarves and that the truth was slightly different. And he cited this untruthfulness on the part of the otherwise honest hobbit as a symptom of the Ring's malign influence.

While working on Lord of the Rings, Tolkien did a re-write for his own amusement of the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter to make it consistent with LOTR. He showed it to his publisher, who revised the next edition to reflect these changes. Then a few years later he was asked to make more revisions to create "Authorized Editions" of Hobbit and LOTR to compete with the pirated version published in the United States.

In both editions, Gollum is pitiable creature, for all his cannibalistic habits, but his character is developed a bit more. In the earlier version, when Gollum says "my precious," he is clearly speaking to himself. In the revision, it's a bit more ambiguous as to whether he's referring to himself, or to his Ring.

Another aspect of Gollum's transformation is that he goes beyond just being a hobbit-sized menace for Bilbo to best. He becomes a twisted reflection of Bilbo. Both are small, hole-dwelling creatures, comfortable in their ordered existence until strangers come to upset things. Both come to possess the Magic Ring. But where Bilbo is friendly and open and even generous to strangers within limits, Gollum is secretive and suspicious. Bilbo, at least at the beginning of his adventure, is plump and complacent; Gollum is thin and driven by hunger. Bilbo uses the Ring to help his friends and to avoid trouble; Gollum uses it for nastier ends.

In Lord of the Rings, Gandalf confirms that Gollum actually is a descendant of one of the early tribes of hobbits, something Bilbo's nephew Frodo finds abhorrent. But in the end, Frodo finds that he and Gollum have more in common than he ever imagined. But that comes much, much later.

Instead of forcing Gollum to led him out of the caverns, in the revision Bilbo follows Gollum, using the magic ring to make himself invisible. As Gollum pauses at the opening to the main passage, Bilbo has the chance to kill him and the simple children's story suddenly gets serious.
Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tired to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding  a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo's heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped.
Bilbo spares Gollum, and later on in LOTR Gandalf regards this act of Bilbo's as the most important thing Bilbo did.
"It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy not to strike without need... Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.
For the moment, however, Gollum, does not feel any gratitude for this merciful impulse of Bilbo's; he knows only rage as he realize he has been tricked and that hobbit has made off with his Precious. As Bilbo runs down the passageway he hears Gollum furious cry:
"Thief, thief, thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever!"
NEXT:  Reunion with the Dwarves; Party with the Wargs; Dinner with Livestock and the perils of Mirkwood

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

The Hobbit, Part 1: Unexpected Journey

(No, I still haven't seen the Peter Jackson movie yet, and this is not a review of it; this a series I wrote on Tolkien's novel last month for another site.)

As Tolkien later told it, the story began with a blank page he found in a student's term paper he was grading when he was a professor at Oxford. Never one to let a blank piece of paper go to waste, he jotted down a random sentence which came to mind: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." At the time he had no idea what a hobbit might be, but the line sounded like a good start for something. He was right about that. The first sentence of The Hobbit is one of the best-known opening lines in 20th Century literature.


J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist. Not just your typical scholar of languages who studies vowel shifts and tries to trace the development of the Indo-European tongue. No, he was a full-bore language geek: the kind of guy who starts a club to read Finnish epics to each other in the original Finnish -- and gets people to join who don't even speak it; the kind of guy who invents his own languages for fun. It's been said that his life's work, The Silmarillion, started because he had devised an Elvish language and then had to build a world for the language to fit in.

This is not entirely true. Tolkien's early ambition was to write a national epic for England, the way the Kalevala was the national epic of Finland or the Aeneid of Virgil was the national epic of Rome. He didn't quite succeed. His national epic sort of morphed into a sprawling history of the elves which he never in his lifetime was able to organize to his satisfaction into a consistent narrative. It fell to his son, Christopher, to complete The Silmarillion after his death. At the time , though, Tolkien couldn't find a publisher interested in his elvish saga. And, of course, he got distracted by Hobbits.

He began The Hobbit as a children's story, and the narrative voice of the book is that of a father reading aloud to his children. Some readers find this tone annoying, and those who try reading Tolkien chronologically and go from the sonorous tragedy of The Simarillion to the whimsical once-upon-a-timeness of The Hobbit can suffer narrative whiplash. But although Tolkien conceived The Hobbit as a children's story, he did not forget his elvish history. As he told his fireside tale about the befuddled hobbit and the thirteen dwarves, he filled in the background with hints of the greater deeds of the Elder Days. Perhaps it was inevitable that such a story fertilized by such a background rich in legend would grow into something grander; and the sequel Tolkien wound up writing grew into an epic of its own -- if not a national epic, then certainly an English one.

The story begins with Bilbo Baggins, a solid, well-to-do middle-class hobbit. It's been said that England is a nation of shopkeepers, but also that it is a nation of poets. Bilbo Baggins has a little of both in his make-up. Although he looks and acts much like a second edition of his conservative, respectable father, he also has a liking for beautiful things like flowers and fireworks, and probably more imagination than his father would have thought proper. The narrator ascribes these un-Baggins-like tendencies to his mother, who came from the more adventurous Took family.

This comfortable, complacent Baggins is sitting outside his home one day, when the wizard Gandalf comes by.
Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale. Tales and adventures sprouted up all over the place wherever he went, in the most extraordinary fashion.
Gandalf is looking for a volunteer to join an adventure he is arranging, but Bilbo will have none of it. "We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!" But not wanting to offend the wizard, Bilbo invites him to tea the following afternoon.

What Bilbo gets is a string of dwarves who show upon his doorstep the next day, one after the other. Note the spelling please. Tolkien was particular about this. The correct plural of "dwarf" is "dwarfs", but Tolkien preferred to spell it "dwarves" to give it a more archaic flavor and to differentiate his version from the cutesy Disneyfied versions which Victorian storytellers had left. Tolkien had no end of trouble with the proofreaders over his spelling, but in the end he scored a small victory: today "dwarves" is accepted as an alternate plural of "dwarf"

These dwarves are led by a chieftain named Thorin Oakenshield, the grandson of a great dwarvish king; and he intends to lead his companions on an expedition to the Lonely Mountain, where his people once lived until they were driven out by the Dragon Smaug. Gandalf has offered to help them, and has selected Biblo to accompany them in the capacity as a burglar, to help them break into the dragon's mountain fastness.

The dwarves are initially skeptical. "He looks more like a grocer than a burglar," one of them comments. Bilbo is not keen on the adventure either, and greatly resents being the butt of Gandalf's practical joke. But he finds his imagination stirred by the dwarves and their quest, and against his better judgement finds himself agreeing to join them before he even realizes what he's doing.

The story skims over the early parts of the journey, through lands described in better detail in Lord of the Rings. The first incident of note occurs one night when the party is far from settled areas and caught in a drenching rainstorm. Gandalf is missing; he tends to come and go depending on the needs of the plot; (something the dwarves find highly annoying: "Just when a wizard would be most useful," one of them complains); so they send Bilbo off to investigate a campfire they spot in the distant trees.
The campfire belongs to three cockney trolls, (Yes, I'm afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each), and Bilbo's encounter with them plays out very much like an old folktale, with Gandalf saving the day by tricking the trolls into arguing with each other until the rising sun turns them to stone.

Continuing onward, the party gets to pause in Rivendell, the elvish haven ruled by Elrond the Half-Elven, a figure from Tolkien's elvish history. Elrond is a descendant of Beren and Luthien and was present at Sauron's defeat during the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. But none of that comes up in this story. In the Hobbit he is a wise lore-master and a friend of Gandalf's who gives the party advice; little more.

Beyond Rivendell lie the Misty Mountains, a high mountain chain stretching across the continent; home of goblins and all manner of nasty creatures. Gandalf guides them up the mountain passes, but a violent storm forces the party to take refuge in a suspiciously convenient cave. During the night, the dwarves and Bilbo are attacked by goblins and dragged off into the mountain depths. Gandalf once again comes to the rescue, but as they are all fleeing the goblins, Bilbo becomes separated from the party.

NEXT:  Riddles in the Dark; or: It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Ring!