Bombadil. Later on, his 1949 short story Farmer Giles of Ham (which was originally written over about the same period as The Hobbit, see Wayne Hammond and Douglas Anderson’s Descriptive Bibliography, pp. 73-4) is set firmly in the land of nursery-rhyme, of Old King Cole and ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men’. Tolkien notes in a letter to Stanley Unwin in 1938 that a friend and Oxford colleague had written a long ‘rhymed tale in four books’ called Old King Coel – Coel, note, not Cole, for there is a ‘King Coel’ in old Welsh tradition. It may seem surprising that anyone should find nursery-rhymes worth quite so much time and trouble, if it does not quite extend to taking them seriously. But behind all these rewritings and reminiscences lies the philologist’s conviction that, just as the children’s fairy-tales of elves and dwarves had some long-lost connection with the time when such creatures were material for adults and poets, so modern playground riddles and rhymes were the last descendants of an old tradition. Tolkien had furthermore tried to fill the gap of time, as he often did, in this case by writing a version of the children’s ‘eggs’ riddle in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon. He published this too in 1923, as one of the ‘Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo’ (‘Two Anglo-Saxon Riddles recently Discovered’). Ten lines long, it starts:
Meolchwitum sind marmanstane
wagas mine wundrum frætwede…
‘My walls are adorned wondrously with milk-white marble-stones…’ This, one might say, is what the modern children’s riddle’s ancient ancestor must have looked like. It is (see p. xv above) an ‘asterisk-riddle’.
When Bilbo replies to Gollum’s ancient riddles with modern ones, then, the two contestants are not so very far apart. As Gandalf was to say to Frodo many years later (by which time the concept of Gollum had admittedly changed a good deal), ‘They understood one another remarkably well…Think of the riddles they both knew, for one thing’. What this suggests, though, is that while Bilbo remains an anachronism, a middle-class Englishman in the fairy-tale world, he is indeed ‘not quite like ordinary people’. The difference is that he has not quite lost his grip on old tradition. Nor, of course, have all ‘ordinary people’. But they have downgraded old tradition to children’s tales and children’s songs, become ashamed of it, made it into ‘folklore’. Bilbo and hobbits are in this respect wiser. Their unforgotten wisdom puts Bilbo for the first time on a level with a creature from the world into which he has ventured.
Bilbo also, after this point, has the ring: in The Hobbit, not yet the Ring, but still a potent force to help him gain the grudging respect of the dwarves. He has two other qualities besides. One is luck. The dwarves notice this more than once, with Thorin for instance saying, as he sends Bilbo down the tunnel to the dragon, that Bilbo is ‘full of courage and resource far beyond his size, and if I may say so possessed of good luck far exceeding the usual allowance’ (chapter 12). Earlier on, after Bilbo had rescued them from the spiders, ‘[the dwarves] saw that he had some wits, as well as luck and a magic ring – and all three were useful possessions’ (chapter 8). This belief that luck is a possession, which one can own, and perhaps even give away or pass on, may seem to be characteristically dwarvish, i.e. old-fashioned, pre-modern: it is a commonplace of Norse saga, for instance, where there are many lucky and unlucky cloaks, weapons, and people. But people do not think that way about luck any more. Or do they? In fact, superstitions about the nature of luck remain surprisingly common – they are a repeated sub-theme in Patrick O’Brian’s long series of historical novels about the nineteenth century, though one should note that they are there presented as definitely beliefs from the ‘lower deck’, from the seamen not the officers, the non-educated classes.(It would be a difficult business to extract all the mentions of luck from O’Brian’s twenty-volume sequence of ‘Aubrey and Maturin’ novels, but I note an especially prominent statement in The Ionian Mission (1982), chapter 9, which distinguishes ‘luck’ carefully from ‘chance, commonplace good fortune’, and calls it ‘a different concept altogether, one of an almost religious nature’.)
Tolkien probably thought that the very word ‘luck’ was Old English in origin (the OED insists that the ‘ultimate etymology…is obscure’, but see the discussion on p. 145 below); and that once again ancient belief had survived into modern times unnoticed (just like hobbits). As with his riddles, Bilbo’s ‘luck’ makes him seem more at home in the fairy-tale world, without being at all inconsistent with his modern English nature.
Bilbo’s other quality, meanwhile, as noted by Thorin above, is courage, as he is to show again and again. But it is a significantly different type or style of courage from the heroic or aggressive style of his companions and their allies and enemies. Bilbo remains always unable to fight trolls, shoot dragons, or win battles. At the Battle of the Five Armies, even after he has grown in stature as far as is at all possible, Bilbo stays ‘quite unimportant…Actually I may say he put on his ring early in the business, and vanished from sight, if not from all danger’. However, after Gollum and his escape from the goblins, Bilbo does show that he has a kind of courage, and one which is comparable with and even superior to that of the dwarves. Now he has the ring, should he not ‘go back into the horrible, horrible tunnels and look for his friends’? ‘He had just made up his mind that it was his duty, that he must turn back’ when he hears the dwarves arguing; they are arguing about whether they should turn back and look for him, and one of them at least says no: ‘If we have got to go back now into those abominable tunnels to look for him, then drat him, I say’. Gandalf, of course, might have made them change their minds, but Bilbo is here for the first time shown as actually superior to his companions. His courage is not aggressive or hot-blooded. It is internalized, solitary, dutiful – and distinctively modern, for there is nothing like it in Beowulf or the Eddie poems or Norse saga. Just the same, it is courage of a sort, and even heroes and warriors ought to come to respect it.
The dwarves do indeed start to respect Bilbo from this point on, and Tolkien marks the stages through which this grows. In chapter 6, ‘Bilbo’s reputation went up a very great deal with the dwarves’. In chapter 8, ‘Some of them even got up and bowed right to the ground before him’, while in chapter 9 Thorin ‘began to have a very high opinion [of Bilbo] indeed’. In chapter 11 he has more spirit left than the others, and by chapter 12, ‘he had become the real leader in their adventure’. None of this stops the dwarves from returning to their earlier opinion of him – ‘what is the use of sending a hobbit!’ – and much of the time he reverts to being a passenger, as in the scenes with Beorn. But Bilbo’s kind of courage is increasingly insisted on, always in scenes of solitude, always in the dark. Bilbo kills the giant spider ‘all alone by himself in the dark’, and it makes him feel ‘a different person, and much fiercer and bolder’. After he has done it he gives his sword a name, ‘I shall call you Sting’, something much more likely for a saga-hero to do than for a modern bourgeois. His great moment, however, is to go on by himself in the dark tunnel after he has heard the sound of Smaug the dragon snoring:
Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in that tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.
In all these ways Tolkien insists that Bilbo, or ‘Mr. Baggins’ as he is still often called, remains a person from the modern world; but that people from that world need not feel entirely alien in or inferior to the fairy-tale world.
Philological fictions
One aspect of the structure of The Hobbit, then, consists of Bilbo becoming more and more at home in the world of fairy-tale, in Middle-earth as it was to become. Another aspect, though, and one which Tolkien was uniquely qualified to create, consists simply of making that world more and more familiar: one might say, of making it up, though Tolkien himself might have rejected that description. Much of The Hobbit works, as has been said, by simply introducing a new creature (Gollum, Beorn, Smaug), a new species (dwarves, goblins, wargs, eagles, elves), or a new locale (the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, Laketown), generally one or two to a chapter. Some of these innovations are inventions. There is no known source for Gollum other than Tolkien’s own mind; it was his idea, and