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Authors: Adam Roberts
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story is set at the seaside at Foley, but also encompasses the light side of the moon, where the Man in the Moon lives in a fine tower, and the dark side where sleeping children frolic in the valley of dreams and the undersea kingdom of the mer-king. The protagonist is a dog called Rover, who takes the name Roverandom to distinguish himself from two other dogs in the story (a moon-dog and mer-dog) also called Rover. These dogs get up to various larks, including teasing the Great White Dragon of the moon (‘white with green eyes and leaking green fire at every joint, and snorting black smoke like a steamer … the mountains rocked and echoed, and the snow dried up; avalanches tumbled down’) and rousing up the undersea serpent (‘when he undid a curl or two [of his tail] in his sleep, the water heaved and shook and bent people’s houses and spoilt their repose for miles and miles around.’) 12 It is certainly possible that Tolkien had the
Exeter Book
riddles at the back of his mind when writing this.
Dragons are huge and destructive forces, as likely to appear on land as at sea. But which dragon? One possible answer to Riddle 3 is Niðhöggr, the vast dragon who lies under the ground gnawing at the roots of the world tree and making the earth and oceans shake. The creature’s name means either ‘malice-striker’ or ‘striker in the dark’ and he is controlled by one figure only, the Norse god Hel, who rules the underworld. In the
Poetic Edda
Niðhöggr is described devouring the corpses of the dead, but also as coming out from time to time into the open air:
There comes the dark dragon flying,
the shining serpent, up from Niðafjöll
Niðhöggr flies over the plain, in his wings
he carries corpses. 13
‘Niðafjöll’ means ‘the Mountains of the Dark of the Moon’; another detail which feeds into Tolkien’s
Roverandom
story.
To take stock for a moment: we have, then, three possible solutions for these famous Anglo-Saxon riddles. In setting out these three I am following a Tolkienian lead—not in the specific answers I propose, for as far as I know he himself offered no solutions to these riddles, but in abroader sense, the one outlined in his celebrated lecture ‘The Monsters and the Critics’. In that work Tolkien insisted that although scholarship tends to want to downplay the fantastical and monstrous aspect of Old English literature in favour of rationalised, historical or social explanations, in fact the heart and soul of the literature is
in
the monsters. (I discuss Tolkien’s lecture in more detail below). So: let’s entertain the possibility that the answers to all three riddles are ‘dragon’. 14
Tolkien’s imagination was strongly drawn to Dragons. ‘I find “dragons” a fascinating product of imagination’, he wrote to Naomi Mitchison in 1949. At the same time he noted that ‘the whole problem of the intrusion of the “dragon” into northern imagination’ was, in effect, a riddle to which he had not yet found a solution. Another letter, written to Walter Hooper on 20 February 1968, may be relevant here. In this letter Tolkien confirms that he has never himself seen a dragon, and that he has no wish to. He then relates a story he heard from C. S. Lewis concerning an individual named Brightman, an ecclesiastical scholar of some repute, who sat in the Common Room of Magdalen College Oxford saying very little for many years. One night there was a discussion of dragons, and according to Lewis:
Brightman’s voice was heard to say, ‘I have seen a dragon.’ Silence. ‘Where was that?’ he was asked. ‘On the Mount of Olives,’ he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant. 15
The riddle of Brightman’s gnomic comment is not
so
very hard to unravel, except that it answers a riddle with another riddle, or perhaps it would be better to say: answers it with a religious mystery. The dragon he has seen presumably has to do with his personal
Exeter Book
riddles at the back of his mind when writing this.
Dragons are huge and destructive forces, as likely to appear on land as at sea. But which dragon? One possible answer to Riddle 3 is Niðhöggr, the vast dragon who lies under the ground gnawing at the roots of the world tree and making the earth and oceans shake. The creature’s name means either ‘malice-striker’ or ‘striker in the dark’ and he is controlled by one figure only, the Norse god Hel, who rules the underworld. In the
Poetic Edda
Niðhöggr is described devouring the corpses of the dead, but also as coming out from time to time into the open air:
There comes the dark dragon flying,
the shining serpent, up from Niðafjöll
Niðhöggr flies over the plain, in his wings
he carries corpses. 13
‘Niðafjöll’ means ‘the Mountains of the Dark of the Moon’; another detail which feeds into Tolkien’s
Roverandom
story.
To take stock for a moment: we have, then, three possible solutions for these famous Anglo-Saxon riddles. In setting out these three I am following a Tolkienian lead—not in the specific answers I propose, for as far as I know he himself offered no solutions to these riddles, but in abroader sense, the one outlined in his celebrated lecture ‘The Monsters and the Critics’. In that work Tolkien insisted that although scholarship tends to want to downplay the fantastical and monstrous aspect of Old English literature in favour of rationalised, historical or social explanations, in fact the heart and soul of the literature is
in
the monsters. (I discuss Tolkien’s lecture in more detail below). So: let’s entertain the possibility that the answers to all three riddles are ‘dragon’. 14
Tolkien’s imagination was strongly drawn to Dragons. ‘I find “dragons” a fascinating product of imagination’, he wrote to Naomi Mitchison in 1949. At the same time he noted that ‘the whole problem of the intrusion of the “dragon” into northern imagination’ was, in effect, a riddle to which he had not yet found a solution. Another letter, written to Walter Hooper on 20 February 1968, may be relevant here. In this letter Tolkien confirms that he has never himself seen a dragon, and that he has no wish to. He then relates a story he heard from C. S. Lewis concerning an individual named Brightman, an ecclesiastical scholar of some repute, who sat in the Common Room of Magdalen College Oxford saying very little for many years. One night there was a discussion of dragons, and according to Lewis:
Brightman’s voice was heard to say, ‘I have seen a dragon.’ Silence. ‘Where was that?’ he was asked. ‘On the Mount of Olives,’ he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant. 15
The riddle of Brightman’s gnomic comment is not
so
very hard to unravel, except that it answers a riddle with another riddle, or perhaps it would be better to say: answers it with a religious mystery. The dragon he has seen presumably has to do with his personal
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