A Hobbity Weekend

As I'm sure you know, 'The Hobbit' was seventy-five on Friday last.  Clearly, the only possible response was to hurry off to a Party of Special Magnificence. Which is why I found myself in London for an evening of celebratory readings and conversation at the British Library.

The speakers were the academic and writer Adam Roberts (author of the spoof 'The Soddit'); the ebullient and talented writer and broadcaster Brian Sibley, who created the BBC radio versions of The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings; David Brawn of HarperCollins, who was there to show us many of Tolkien's own marvellous illustrations (published in a wonderful book called The Art of the Hobbit); and Jane Johnson, a Tolkien expert and lifelong enthusiast, who has also written the companion books to all the films.

The speakers were erudite and entertaining, the readings rich and marvellous, and the artwork haunting and evocative. I learned several things I'd never known (although I'm sure most Real Fans do) such as the fact that in the first edition of The Hobbit, Bilbo doesn't find the Ring; he merely wins it from Gollum as the prize for the Riddle Game - which must mean, unthinkable as it seems, that the famous line 'What has it got in its pocketses?' wasn't there in the first edition. (!) Apparently Tolkien revised the story for the second edition, having given further thought to the antiquity and significance of the Ring.  And Adam Roberts further explained that in Unfinished Tales (which I confess I personally never have finished) Gandalf comes up with several suspiciously after-thought-like reasons for sending Bilbo on the journey to the Lonely Mountain: claiming it all to have been part of his deep plan to prevent the Necromancer (Sauron) in Dol Guldur from forming an alliance with Smaug and using the dragon as a terrible weapon for evil.

As Adam Roberts remarked, it rather defies belief that Gandalf seriously decided to recruit, from the other end of Middle Earth, a band of the most unlikely possible adventurers (staid little Bilbo, plus assorted rather unfit dwarves: think of Bombur) and send them through a myriad dangers to combat Smaug, when he might more simply have addressed himself to the valiant Men of Dale who were on the spot anyway. Far easier to believe that, in The Hobbit, Gandalf never had any such master plan, and the whole thing was the serendipitous caprice of a batty old wizard. But of such things is fiction made, and perhaps Gandalf/Tolkien can be forgiven a little bluffing on this occasion.

I thoroughly enjoyed the evening.  But that was only the first part of my Hobbity Weekend.  Because on Saturday, although I should have been cooped up in my office with the curtains drawn, tapping away at the keyboard writing my book, it was such a bee-yoo-tiful day I couldn't bear to, so D. and I went off with the dog to do one of our favourite walks around the Avebury stone circle: you start below the barrows on Overton Hill (which you'll agree look remarkably like the Barrow Downs), and walk a circular four or five miles along the chalky hillside, down to the Avenue, up between the stones to the circle, and then back via Silbury Hill.

It's very Tolkieny countryside... And of course, this was the weekend of the Autumnal Equinox, so Avebury circle was full of colourful modern pagans holding their rites. Rings of folk dressed in long robes and cloaks, holding staffs and beating drums, striking huge gongs, praising the land and the spirits of the land, the oak trees and the stones, and praying as people have always prayed everywhere and in all religions, for good to befall them and their neighbours: for richness of crops and richness of soul.

We sat on one of the benches outside The Red Lion pub, in the sunshine, with a drink and a couple of packets of crisps.  It might as well have been The Prancing Pony. Everyone was happy, everyone was friendly.  Lots of people admired the dog. (She's worth admiring.) Everyone - well, almost everyone - was in what you might call fancy dress. They had beaded ribands around their brows, or feathered hats on their heads; they carried musical instruments or carven staffs or baskets full of fruit and flowers; they sported tattoos and silver nose-rings, they wore bright colours: crimson or scarlet or white satin, yellow or purple.  One had a wolfhound. On the way into the pub we quite definitely brushed past Aragorn (in his disguise as Strider): a young, lean, long-haired fellow in brown and green, with a broad, dull copper band encircling one brown wrist.  You half expected people to start dancing the Springle Ring.

I didn't have a camera with me, and in any case it might have been rude to snap photos of people I didn't know, but it was, I assure you, quite lovely. Perfect strangers even chatted merrily in the loos.

We bought a little empty cut glass bottle from a small antique shop run by a charming elderly village couple. (Maybe it's not empty.  Maybe it's filled with starlight. I haven't tried it out in dark places yet.) The old gentleman told us how he'd been born in Avebury, in a 16th century house just down the street, and how the Romans used to camp down by the river, and about all the Roman coins he'd found.  The kind lady gave our Dalmatian Polly a long drink of water in a cut glass bowl.  Polly, who had spurned the water in the pub's steel dog dish, lapped it all up thirstily and had seconds.

To add to the general fairytale feel, a large double-decker bus passing through the village had 'TROWBRIDGE' written as its destination. Yes, yes, it's the county town of Wiltshire, and probably the etymology has nothing whatever to do with trolls (aka trows) and billygoats, but on this particular day I thought it should, don't you? After that we walked around the circle and through the church yard, and back past mysterious Silbury Hill, the largest man-made mound in Europe, and up the chalk to the barrows, and got in the car and drove home, passing through Marlborough, a town which apart from the traffic looks as though the streets ought to be full of hobbits. Or if not hobbits, at the very least there should be dressed-up rabbits, and squirrels with shopping baskets on their arms.

Yes. At seventy-five, the Shire is alive and well.





Picture credits

The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water, 1937. (MS. Tolkien drawings 26) Copyright the Tolkien Estate, reproduced here under the fair use clause of the copyright law.

The 'Hedgehog' Hill Barrows near Avebury:  Wikimedia Commons, by Dickbauch
  
Part of Avebury stone circle and village, Wikimedia

The Red Lion, Avebury,  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Immanuel_Giel

Katherine Langrish and Polly by Silbury Hill, copyright Katherine Langrish

High Street, Marlborough, Copyright Brian Robert Marshall and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
 Tumuli on Overton Hill near Avebury, Wiltshire: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:UKgeofan

A Tour Around the Library of Imaginary Books

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (in case anyone here doesn’t already know), deep in the enclaves of Unseen University is the University Library, where the presence of so many books (not all of them magical) has warped space into a mysterious form called L-space (Library-space) expressed by the equation:

Books are entrances into other worlds: in UU Library this is not a metaphor. And, a consequence of the properties of L-space, the shelves of UU Library contain every book ever written, unwritten or yet to be written.

Librarian of the Discworld as he appears in The Discworld Companion, illustrated by Paul Kidby

I would like, then (if I have the Librarian’s permission), to take you on a small tour of a favourite section of mine: the section for Imaginary Books - that is, books which exist only within the covers of other books and are therefore fictional to the power two: fiction². I’ve delighted in many such titles over the years, so let’s tiptoe past the chained, uneasily-slumbering grimoires of UU Library’s extensive magical sections, and I’ll show you my favourites.

The first is ‘The Orange and the Apple’, which exists between the covers of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘A Fall of Moondust’, the story of a ‘moon-bus’ full of passengers which plunges into the deep soft dust of the Sea of Tranquillity following a moon-quake. During the desperate rescue operation which ensues, the trapped passengers organise an entertainment to keep their minds off claustrophobia and the fear of death. It may not be one of Clarke’s best known novels, but it contains some of his best character sketches, and is often very funny. The passengers take turns reading aloud the only two novels on board, Jack Schaefer’s classic western ‘Shane’ and a ‘new historical romance’ ‘The Orange and the Apple’, featuring an affair between Sir Isaac Newton and Nell Gwynne. Let me reach it down from the shelf for you: a cheap paperback with a lurid cover and a cracked spine…

The author certainly wasted no time. Within three pages, Sir Isaac Newton was explaining the law of gravitation to Mistress Gwynne, who had already hinted that she would like to do something in return.


…“Forsooth, Sir Isaac, you are indeed a man of great knowledge. Yet, methinks, there is much that a woman might teach you.”
“And what is that, my pretty maid?”
Mistress Nell blushed shyly.
“I fear,” she sighed, “that you have given your life to the things of the mind. You have forgotten, Sir Isaac, that the body, also, has much strange wisdom.”
“Call me ‘Ike’,” said the sage huskily, as his clumsy fingers tugged at the fastenings of her blouse.

Close beside this on the shelves is an array of titles from Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. There’s the Guide itself, of course, clearly an e-book on an e-reader:

…a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters.

That was written in the late 1970’s, so you can see the power of L-space right there. Perhaps the large friendly letters should be added to Kindles? Next to the Guide is an entire bookcase sagging under the weight of the many volumes of the Encyclopaedia Galactica. Oh, and here are a couple of paperbacks which look to have been much thumbed by the wizards of Unseen University - so long as they’re sure no other wizard is watching: Eccentrica Gallumbits’ ‘The Big Bang Theory, A Personal View’, and ‘Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Sex But Have Been Forced To Find Out’. Next on the shelf - in a far more pristine condition - is Oolon Colluphid’s galaxy-rattling series of popular theological texts: ‘Where God Went Wrong’, ‘Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes’, ‘Who Is This God Person Anyway?’ and ‘Well That About Wraps It Up For God’.

If you’re not interested in science, or philosophy, we can move on to the literary biographies.  Here's one I’ve always wanted to read: ‘Pard-Spirit: A Study of Branwell Brontë’ by one Mr Mybug - nestling within the pages of Stella Gibbons’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm’. It’s a handsome looking hardback. I suspect he had to pay for its publication, but he made sure there was a large black and white photograph of himself on the back of the dust jacket.

‘It’s goin’ to be dam good,’ said Mr Mybug. ‘It’s a psychological study, of course, and I’ve got a lot of new matter, including three letters he wrote to an old aunt in Ireland, Mrs Prunty, during the period when he was working on Wuthering Heights.’ He glanced sharply at Flora to see if she would react.


‘It’s obvious that it’s his book and not Emily’s. No woman could have written that. It’s male stuff… Secretly, he worked twelve hours a day writing Shirley and Villette - and of course, Wuthering Heights. I’ve proved all this by evidence from the three letters to old Mrs Prunty.  His letters to her are little masterpieces of repressed passion. They’re full of tender little questions… he asks her how is her rheumatism… has her cat, Toby, “recovered from the fever”… … how is Cousin Martha (and what a picture we get of Cousin Martha in those simple words, a raw Irish chit, high-cheekboned, with limp black hair and clear blood in her lips!) …’

Delicious! Then, sticking out quite a lot and leaning slantwise to fit the shelf, is a tall folio manuscript, bound in a red leather cover, written 'in a wandering hand' in spiky black ink with lots of curlicues. The catalogue label coming unstuck from the spine reads: 'Travel: Imaginary'.  I pull it tenderly out.  Odd though it seems, this may be the most valuable book in the entire section. 'The title page has many titles on it, crossed out one after another: so:

My Diary.  My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again.  And What Happened After.  Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring, complied by Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and those of his friends. What We Did in the War of the Ring.

Here Bilbo's hand ends, and Frodo has written:
THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING'.

Bilbo and Frodo's own autobiographical account!  I can see you'd love to stand here and leaf through it, but today I'm just showing you what's on the shelves, and we haven't time.  You can come back by yourself another day.

So do you fancy Victorian poetry? Courtesy of A S Byatt’s ‘Possession’, allow me to pull out this stout green book, the ‘Collected Poems of Randolph Henry Ash’ including of course ‘The Garden of Proserpina’ and ‘Ask to Embla’ -

Or (my own preference), this slim volume in limp violet suede, with faded spine and curling corners, whose embossed gold title reads simply ‘The Fairy Melusine’ by Christabel LaMotte. As we pluck it from the shelf, out flutters a loose manuscript poem:


It came all so still
The little Thing -
And would not stay -
Our Questioning -
A heavy Breath -
One two and three -
And then the lapsed Eternity -
A Lapis Flesh
The Crimson - Gone -
It came as still
As any Stone -



Now - is there anything you'd like to see that I haven't shown you?  It'll be here.  Just let me know...


Picture credit: The Librarian, copyright Terry Pratchett and Paul Kidby
'Don't Panic': The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Riddles, Poems, Oracles

You remember, of course the riddle scene in ‘The Hobbit’, illustrated here by the amazing Alan Lee, where Bilbo Baggins pits his wits against hungry Gollum on the edge of the dark lake at the roots of the Misty Mountains? And how, after each has guessed a number of traditional riddles: ‘Thirty white horses on a red hill/First they champ, then they stamp, then they stand still’[1] and a number of others which Tolkien obviously enjoyed writing himself: ‘Alive without breath/As cold as death/Never thirsting/Ever drinking/Clad in mail/Never clinking’[2], Bilbo finally foxes his adversary with the simple and thoughtless question, ‘What have I got in my pocket?’

Riddles have a long history, and probably a long prehistory too.  There are riddles in the Bible, such as the one Samson baffled the Philistines with: ‘Out of the eater came something to eat/Out of the strong came something sweet’[3] (Judges 14,14) – still to be found, with its pictorial answer, on the green and gold tins of Tate and Lyle’s Golden Syrup. And one of the earliest known riddles, strikingly similar in form to Samson’s, is written on a Babylonian tablet and reads: ‘Who becomes pregnant without conceiving? Who becomes fat without eating?’[4]

(Oh, by the way, all the answers will be found at the bottom of this post.  I’m certain you are going to try and guess them, so I’m not going to provide the answers straight up…)

Everyone remembers the riddle of the Sphinx, which Oedipus guessed; but did you know that Plato refers to children’s riddles in ‘The Republic’? (‘A man who was not a man threw a stone that was not a stone at a bird that was not a bird, on a twig that was not a twig’[5])’ Or that there are Sanskrit riddles in the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata?  And what about the Norse riddles of the Elder Edda, such as ‘The Words of the All-wise’ in which the dwarf Alvis (literally ‘All-wise’) – anxious to win the hand of Thor’s daughter – answers a number of questions which might be called riddles in reverse:

Thor:   What is heaven called, that all know

            In all the worlds there are?

Alvis:   Heaven by men, The Arch by gods,

            Wind-weaver by vanes,

            By giants High-earth, by elves Fair-roof,

            By dwarves The Dripping Hall.

Thor:   What is the moon called, that men see

            In all the worlds there are?

Alvis:   Moon by men, The Arch by gods,

            The Whirling Wheel in Hel,

            The Speeder by giants, The Bright One by dwarves,

            By elves Tally-of-Years.

For verse after verse, Alvis provides the kennings – the riddling poetic descriptions – for all the elemental, important things in the world such as fire, rain, the moon and sun, the sea, forests, night and day (and beer)… until at last dawn breaks and he turns to stone.

When I talk to schoolchildren I usually ask them some Norse or Anglo-Saxon riddles, which of course are also poems: and it seems to me one of the best and easiest ways to show children what poetry is and why it might be fun to read. “So,” I say, “in a poem about the sea a Viking wouldn’t say ‘the sea.’  He’d call it the ‘whale’s home’ or the ‘swan’s bath’, and his audience would know what he meant. If you wanted to make a poem in which a king rewards one of his men with gold, you wouldn’t say ‘The king gave gold to his warrior.’  That would be plain boring.  Instead you would have to say something like ‘The Land-Ruler gave Sif’s Hair to his Sword-Bearer.’

“For your listeners to understand it, they’d have to know the story of how the trickster god Loki cut off the goddess Sif’s beautiful hair. The other gods were so angry with him that he went to the dwarfs and got them to make Sif some beautiful new hair out of pure gold, which magically grew just like real hair.”

 

But there were plenty of other ‘kennings’ for gold.  For example, you could call it ‘Frodi’s flour.’ And to understand that, your audience would remember a completely different story, about a Danish king called Frodi who bought two giant slaves and set them to turn two huge magic millstones which would grind out whatever you told them to grind.  Instead of flour, King Frodi told them to grind out peace, prosperity and gold. (That’s why gold could be called ‘Frodi’s flour’.)  For a time, King Frodi’s people enjoyed a golden age.  Unfortunately, however, Frodi made the two giants work almost non-stop, not allowing them rest or sleep ‘for longer than it takes to hear a cuckoo call.’  In revenge, the two giants asked the millstones to grind out an army which attacked King Frodi and killed him.  And that was the end of his peaceful reign.

The Vikings thought more of a man if he could weave words: some of their most renowned warriors were also poets, like Egil Skallagrimsson, and Grettir the Strong. The murderous Harald Silkenhair in my book ‘Troll Blood’ is a warrior poet from this tradition, and keeps his men happy by asking them riddles (here are two I made up for him):

“I know a stranger, a bright gold-giver

  He strides in splendour over the world’s walls.

            All day he hurries between two bonfires.

            No man knows where he builds his bedchamber.”[6]

            “I know another, high in the heavens

            Two horns he wears on his hallowed head

            A wandering wizard, a wild night-farer,

            Sometimes he feasts, sometimes he fasts.”[7]

Spells, words, similes, riddles… the very word spell itself in Old Norse simply means speech. To describe the world is to apprehend it, to understand it.  To this day we retain this double meaning. A magician may cast a spell, but children spell out words aloud, syllable by syllable. Words do not only give power, words are power.  Even in the Judaeo-Christian sense: God creates the world with the words ‘Let there be light,’ and St John describes Christ as the ‘Word of the Father’. 

Ursula K Le Guin made wonderful use of this in her Earthsea books, in which the language of wizards is literally the language of ‘the Making’:  once you know the true name of a thing, you can summon it or reveal it: “the language dragons speak, and the language Segoy spoke who made the islands of the world…We call the foam on the sea sukien: that word is made from two words of the Old Speech, suk, feather, and inien, the sea.  Feather of the sea, is foam.  But you cannot charm the foam calling it sukien; you must use its own true name in the Old Speech, which is essa.”

‘Feather of the sea’:  a kenning, a knowing – which is what ‘kenning’ means.  Describing the foam is one way of knowing it better, of exploring its essence.

It seems to me that riddles may always have had dual purpose. They amuse us, but they do so in a different way from puns and jokes. If I ask you a riddle – even a simple child’s riddle like ‘What’s green and goes up and down?’[8] – and you can’t guess it, I score a point over you. More than that: I retain knowledge which I may or may not choose to tell you. I have the power to reveal or conceal. The riddle game is a contest which may once – as with Bilbo and Gollum, Thor and Alvis, Oedipus and the Sphinx – have had serious consequences.

The Delphic Oracle was traditionally delivered in obscure, riddling form. Today we may suspect that oracular utterances were made deliberately vague so as to be applicable to any variety of future events – but that seems to me false to the ancient way of thinking.  Much more likely, the sibyl or seer regarded riddling, poetic speech as sacred: the authentic voice of God. Just as with poetry today, whoever heard it had to find their own meaning in what was uttered, follow the clue through the maze to the centre of themselves. Riddling speech, like poetry, may have been thought of as the truest, the most revelatory way of communicating.

 

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths...

See how the floor of heaven's thick inlaid

With patines of bright gold...

Oh look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond dells, the elves' eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quick-gold lies!”

To describe the night sky in this way is to use riddles as riddles were meant to be used. Can you still feel the shiver of power? 

---

[1] Teeth

[2] Fish

[3] A bee’s nest full of honey in the ribcage of a dead lion

[4] Clouds

[5] A eunuch throwing a piece of pumice at a bat on a reed.  (Yes.  Really.)

[6] The sun (and the two bonfires are sunrise and sunset)

[7] The moon

[8] A frog on a trampoline