Free The Riddles of The Hobbit by Adam Roberts

generates a third. This is, in other words, the action of metaphor, the leap into comprehension. The kenning mimics the process by which the mundane thing and the mundane thing can combine together to make something transcendent: meaning. 16

    Anglo-Saxon culture was fascinated by the intersection of the divine and the mundane, as was Tolkien. We can go further and suggest that it is in its
riddles
that this great mystery is most often given voice. By way of small example here, in Chris McGully’s elegant translation, is Riddle 85 from the
Exeter Book
:
My home’s noisy.
I’m not. I’m mute
in this dwelling place.
A deity shaped
our twinning journey.
I’m more turbulent than he,
At times stronger.
He’s tougher—durable.
Sometimes I come to rest.
He always runs on ahead.
For as long as I shall live
I shall live in him.
If we undo ourselves
death’s due claims me. 17
    Scholars tend to agree that the solution to
this
riddle must be ‘a fish in the river’; although I think we can be more precise, and say ‘a turbot in the Thames’. Of all the rivers in England, only the Thames was worshipped in the Dark Ages as a god—archaeologists have recovered, only from this waterway, large numbers of swords and other valuable metalware from this period that had once been offered upto the god of the river. The point of this riddle, it seems to me, is to do more than pose a puzzle. It is to suggest the ways in which the river is continually pouring its life out into the ocean and yet is continually renewing itself. The river is both living and immortal, a deity: and the fish, who is always in motion, is its holy inhabitant. It is puzzling and yet it is
right
that the mundane and the divine are twined round one another. (In the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter of
The Hobbit
, not one but two of the riddles have the answer ‘fish’). Nor is this confined to a pagan sense of the world. Here is riddle 51, once again in McCully’s version:
Four wondrous things
fall through my eyes,
travelling together.
Their tracks were black,
but pale their path.
Among these planing birds
swift was strongest:
swooped up through air,
dove under water.
He worked restless,
this pioneer
pointing the journey
all four must make
over filigreed gold. 18
    McCully himself follows conventional scholarly wisdom in proposing the solution: ‘four fingers holding a quill’. Personally, I do not see that this is a terribly good solution to the riddle. One holds a pen with two fingers and a thumb, not with ‘four fingers’; the digits of a writing hand can hardly be said to ‘fall through the eyes’ and it is not usual to plunge one’s hand under water before writing. As a kenning for ‘writing’
black tracks over a pale path
has a certain loveliness to it, I concede; but the filigreed gold at the end suggests to me that we are talking not about mundane writing but rather an elaborate, expensive illuminated manuscript. In other words I am suggesting that the answer to this riddle is not writing as such, but
the Gospels
. Producing beautifully illustrated versions of these texts was, of course, one of the main occupations of monks. Here, the four saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John make their journey via the writing of black ink on white page, but their work is also illuminated by gold, and other colours too. And each gospel author had his own animal: the eagle for St John, an ox for Luke, a winged lion for Mark and a winged man (or angel) for Matthew. That is to say, Matthew, Mark and John could all fly, and could be described as ‘planing birds’; but only St John, the eagle, is ‘the strongest’ bird, capable of swooping up through the airand diving down into the water—as both sea eagles and fish eagles do. John leads, ‘pointing the journey’ because he is the author of the prophetic Revelation with which the Bible concludes.
    But these two specific readings are a roundabout way of making a larger and I believe fairly uncontentious point. One