Read Online The Riddles of The Hobbit by Adam Roberts - Free Book Online

actual marine turtles. But when this legend comes to Europe, Tolkien notes, the monster becomes less turtle-ish and more whale-like. He hardly needs to add, but does for clarity, ‘in moralized bestiaries he is, of course, an allegory for the Devil, and is so used by Milton’. In amongst the many other things Tolkien’s own ‘Fastitocalon’ poem is, it can be taken as an answer to the question asked by
Exeter Book
Riddle 2 (‘who separates me from the sea’s embrace?’), the answer being ‘God’, the pilot who steers this destructive marine force for His own reasons, the mystery of his grace. And the Anglo-Saxon sense of the sea as a monster, magnificent and wonderful but also alarming and terrifying is picked up in Riddle 3:
    Sometimes my Lord corners me;
    then He imprisons all that I am
    under fertile fields—He frustrates me,
    condemns me in my might to darkness,
    casts me in to a cave where my warden, earth,
    sits on my back. I cannot break out
    of that dungeon, but I shake halls
    and houses; the gabled homes of men
    tremble and totter; walls quake,
    then overhang. Air floats above earth,
    and the face of the ocean seems still
    until I burst out from my cramped cell
    at my Lord’s bidding, He who in anger
    buried me before, so shackled me that I
    could not escape my Guardian, my Guide.
    SometimesI swoop to whip up waves, rouse
    the water, drive the flint-grey rollers
    to the shore. Spuming crests crash
    against the cliff, dark precipice looming
    over deep water.
    The riddle continues for many lines in this vein, before concluding with the demand: ‘tell me my name, / and Who it is rouses me from my rest, / or Who restrains me when I remain silent.’ ‘God’ is a very good answer to these latter two questions, just as this and the two preceding riddles are, in the final analysis ‘about’ the combined grace and anger of God, the way he structures mortal existence on the largest scale via both giving and taking away (to quote the resonant line from Job 1:21). But the proper response to the first demand, ‘tell me my name’, must be more than simply ‘earthquake’ or ‘storm’—although that tends to be what the scholars offer by way of solution. Crossley-Holland notes that in line 50 of the riddle its subject is described as ‘
scripan
’, an Old English word ‘meaning a sinewy and sinister gliding movement; it is also used by the
Beowulf
-poet in describing both the monster Grendel and the dragon.’ 11 Is this also a riddle about a dragon?
    There is a celebrated story about dragons that exists in a number of variants. Two dragons, one red and one white, are engaged in a titantic struggle underground. It is possible these stories began as folk-explanations for earth tremors into which nationalistic significance was later read—as, for instance, that the Red Dragon was Wales and the White England. In the
Mabinogion
tale ‘Lludd and Llefelys’, the hero Lludd is faced with three riddling afflictions to the land, the second of which is a terrifying scream that comes every first of May and makes all the women in the kingdom miscarry. The solution to this conundrum is two battling dragons; and Lludd solves it by putting them both to sleep with mead and burying them in Dinas Emrys, in North Wales. Nennius’
Historia Brittonum
(written sometime in the 820s) takes up the story centuries later. King Vortigern’s attempts to build a castle at Dinas Emrys are thwarted, for the earth shakes his structures to pieces every time he tries. Eventually a soothsayer (according to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s retelling in his
Historia Regum Britanniae
(c.1140), this soothsayer is Merlin himself) reveals that these earthquakes are being caused by the subterranean battling dragons, and shows how to subdue them.
    Tolkienhad some light-hearted fun with this myth himself, combining it with stories of the Norse world-girdling ocean-dragon Jörmungandr, in
Roverandom
(written 1925, though not published until 1998). This