“The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.”
as Bilbo sings, on his way away from the Shire to Rivendell.
(JRRT)
We, however, are currently standing at the broken bridge
at Osgiliath,
(from The Encyclopedia of Arda)
but, through the magic of the internet, we’ll hop over the Anduin and continue our journey along the roads of Middle-earth, this time to the worst possible place (unless you’re an orc)—
(Alan Lee)
Mordor.
To get there, we walk the old road which, in the days before Sauron’s previous invasion attempt, ran from Minas Anor (the “ Tower of the Sun”—now Minas Tirith, “Tower of Guard”),
(Ted Nasmith)
to Minas Ithil (the “Tower of the Moon”)—now Minas Morgul (the “Tower of Black Sorcery”).
(another Ted Nasmith)
This will lead us eastwards to the crossing of the Ithilien north/south road, where there is a much- abused seated figure—
“The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 7, “Journey to the Cross-roads”)
(and one more Ted Nasmith. Notice—except for the figure’s size, perhaps, which here wouldn’t be called “huge” nor its chair “mighty”—how carefully the artist has paid attention to the text—typical of Nasmith’s always fine work.)
Frodo and Sam pause here, but we’ll keep moving eastwards on the road towards Minas Morgul.
(the Hildebrandts, with a very different view of it and of Gollum)
We don’t appear to have a description of this road, but, if you’ve read the previous postings on roads, you’ll know that I would like to imagine that it’s not just a worn dirt track,
but the sort of thing which the Romans built all over their empire,
but now grassgrown and abandoned, like the figure at the crossroads.
Frodo, Sam, and Gollum skirt Minas Morgul, climbing around it, and we’ll join them, although we’ll avoid the tunnel in which Shelob lives,
(and one more Ted Nasmith)
to come down into Mordor itself.
(Christopher Tolkien)
This is, to say the least, a very bleak place,
(in reality, this is Mt Haleakala National Park, on the island of Maui)
but it seems heavily populated with camps of orcs and Sauron’s allies.
“As far as their eyes could reach, along the skirts of the Morgai and away southward, there were camps, some of tents, some ordered like small towns. One of the largest of these was right below them. Barely a mile out into the plain it clustered like some huge nest of insects, with straight dreary streets of huts and long low drab buildings.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 2, “The Land of Shadow”)
(Alan Lee)
There are clearly roads, at least in the northern area—
(from the Encyclopedia of Arda)
and when Frodo and Sam disguise themselves as orcs,
(Denis Gordeev)
they make their way along a major one, only to be taken for potential deserters and driven into an orc marching column.
(Denis Gordeev)
Before they reach such a road, however,
“…they saw a beaten path that wound its way under the feet of the westward cliffs. Had they known, they could have reached it quicker, for it was a track that left the main Morgul-road at the western bridge-end and went down by a long stair cut in the rock to the valley’s bottom.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 2, “The Land of Shadow”)
We’ll follow them down this path and eventually reach a road:
“…at the point where it swung east towards the Isenmouthe twenty miles away. It was not a broad road, and it had no wall or parapet along the edge, and as it ran on the sheer drop from its brink became deeper and deeper.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 2, “The Land of Shadow”)
When Frodo and Sam are picked up and driven along in the column,
(John Howe)
we can now see that the column is headed for Isenmouthe and the entrance to the northernmost part of Mordor, Udun,
(from Karen Wynn Fonstad, The Atlas of Middle-Earth)
but the two manage to escape just before the entrance, dropping
“…over the further edge of the road. It had a high kerb by which troop-leaders could guide themselves in black night or fog, and it was banked up some feet above the level of the open land.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 2, “The Land of Shadow”)
(perhaps something like this on the right?)
Frodo and Sam now try cutting across open country, which, although full of places to hide, is hard going—
“As the light grew a little [Sam] saw to his surprise that what from a distance had seemed wide and featureless flats were in fact all broken and tumbled. “ (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 3, “Mount Doom”)
The going, however, is simply too rough for them in their current condition, and they return to the road, as will we, approaching Orodruin (Mt. Doom), where, for the first time since finding a spring on the eastern slope of the Mountains of Shadow, they find water—
“All long ago would have been spent, if they had not dared to follow the orc-road. For at long intervals on that highway cisterns had been built for the use of troops sent in haste through the waterless regions.
In one Sam found some water left, stale, muddied by the orcs, but still sufficient for their desperate case.” (The Return of King, Book Six, Chapter 3, “Mount Doom”)
Struggling to the foot of Mt. Doom (Orodruin), Sam discovers a path—our last road in this series of postings—which is actually part of Sauron’s road from the Barad-dur to the volcano.
(from the Encyclopedia of Arda)
“…for amid the rugged humps and shoulders above him he saw plainly a path or road. It climbed like a rising girdle from the west and wound snakelike about the Mountain, until before it went round out of view it reached the foot of the cone on the eastern side.” (The Return of King, Book Six, Chapter 3, “Mount Doom”)
Finally coming to the path, they find
“…that it was broad, paved with broken rubble and beaten ash” The Return of King, Book Six, Chapter 3, “Mount Doom”)
But, before the eagles come to rescue Frodo and Sam, we’ll take our own eagle back to the door where our roads began.
(the Hildebrandts)
As always, thanks for reading.
Stay well,
Remember how perilous it may be to step out your front door,
“Just can’t wait to get on the road again The life I love is makin’ music with my friends And I can’t wait to get on the road again And I can’t wait to get on the road again”
As always, welcome, dear readers. This is from a Willie Nelson, a US country and western singer’s,
virtual theme song, and it seemed to fit where this posting wanted to go.
Having just written two postings about traveling to Bree, it struck me just how many Western adventure stories, as a main element of the plot, require the characters to travel, often long distances. (I’m sure that there are lots of Eastern stories which do this, too—see, for example, Wu Cheng’en’s (attributed) Journey to the West, which appeared in the 16th century—see, for more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West You can read an abridged translation of this at: https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20230303/html.php )
Such adventures are commonly quests—that is, journeys with a particular goal and are commonly round- trip adventures. (For more on quests, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest )
There are lots of folktales with this pattern, but the literary begins for us with the story of Jason, and his task of finding the Golden Fleece and bringing it back to Greece. (You can read a summary of the story here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece The full Greek version we have of the story is from a 3rd century BC poem, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, which you can read in a translation here: https://archive.org/details/apolloniusrhodiu00apol And you can read about the poem itself here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonautica )
Then there’s the Odyssey, a later story, in mythological time, in which the main plot is that of Odysseus, a Greek and ruler of the island of Ithaka, who, having participated in the war against Troy, spends 9+ years of many adventures getting home to his island once more.
It’s no wonder, then, that Tolkien, originally destined to be a classicist, in telling a long story to his children, would make it a quest.
This quest would take the protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, from his home in the Shire hundreds of miles east, to the Lonely Mountain (Erebor) and back.
(Pauline Baynes—probably JRRT’s favorite illustrator—and whom he recommended to CS Lewis, for whom she illustrated all the Narnia books. You can read about her here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Baynes )
In the last two postings, we first followed Bilbo eastwards to Bree—only to find that, in The Hobbit, there is no Bree. We then retraced our steps and followed Frodo and his friends as they journeyed in the same direction, although this time with more success.
(Ted Nasmith)
Part of Frodo’s trip (with some detours), took him along the Great East Road, which ran through the Shire,
(Christopher Tolkien)
crossing the Greenway ( the old north/south road—more about this in a moment) at Bree and proceeding eastwards from there–
(Barbara Strachey, The Journeys of Frodo, 1981)
although Frodo and his friends, led by Strider,
(the Hildebrandts)
took an alternate route from there to Weathertop.
Because I’m always interested in the physical world of Middle-earth, I try to imagine what, in our Middle-earth, either suggested things to JRRT, or at least what we can use to try to reconstruct something comparable.
For the Great East Road, because it was constructed by the kings of Arnor, and had a major bridge (the Bridge of Strongbows—that is, strong arches), across the Brandywine,
(actually a 16thcentury Ottoman bridge near the village of Balgarene in Bulgaria. For more on Bulgarian bridges, some of which are quite spectacular, see: https://vagabond.bg/bulgarias-wondrous-bridges-3120 )
I had imagined something like a Roman road, wide, paved, with perhaps drainage on both sides.
The Romans were serious engineers and roads could be very methodically laid out and built.
This may have been true once, but the road Frodo and his friends eventually reach doesn’t sound much like surviving Roman work—
“…the Road, now dim as evening drew on, wound away below them. At this point it ran nearly from South-west to North-east, and on their right it fell quickly down into a wide hollow. It was rutted and bore many signs of the recent heavy rain; there were pools and pot-holes full of water.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 8, “Fog on the Barrow-downs”)
Following the road, however, has made me consider just how many miles of roads we actually see in Middle-earth and over which various characters travel and how they might appear. Just look at a map—
(cartographer? clearly based on JRRT and Christopher Tolkien’s map)
The Great East Road (named “East-West Road” there) is drawn and identified, and we can see the North Road (as “North-South Road”), but these are hardly the only roads in Middle-earth and certainly not in the story, and, as we’re following Frodo & Co. on their journeys, I thought that it would be interesting to examine some of the others—the main ones, and one nearly-lost one.
So, when Frodo and his friends eventually reach the edge of Bree, they’re actually at a crossroads—
“For Bree stood at the old meeting of ways: another ancient road crossed the East Road just outside the dike at the western end of the village, and in former days Men and other folk of various sorts had traveled much on it. ‘Strange as News from Bree’ was still a saying in the Eastfarthing, descending from those days, when news from North, South, and East could be heard in the inn, and when the Shire-hobbits used to go more to hear it.”
With the fall of the northern realm of Arnor about TA1974, however, things had changed:
“But the Northern Lands had long been desolate, and the North Road was now seldom used: it was grass-grown, and the Bree-folk called it the Greenway.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)
We’re not given a detailed description of this road—was it like what I had imagined the Great East Road might have looked like, Roman and paved, but overgown?
If so, it led back to the city of Tharbad to the south, which had had its own elaborate bridge at the River Greyflood—
“…where the old North Road crossed the river by a ruined town.”
Of this bridge we know:
“…both kingdoms [Arnor and Gondor] together built and maintained the Bridge of Tharbad and the long causeways that carried the road to it on either of the Gwathlo [Greyflood]…” (JRRT Unfinished Tales, 277)
It must have been massive—could it have looked something like this?
As we also know, it had fallen into ruin, becoming only a dangerous ford, as Boromir found out, losing his horse there on the way north (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 8, “Farewell to Lorien”)
In “To Bree (Part 1)”, we had followed Bilbo & Co.
(Hildebrandts)
(Hildebrandts)
eastwards,
but only as far as Bree, echoing the remark in The Lord of the Rings:
“It was not yet forgotten that there had been a time when there was much coming and going between the Shire and Bree.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)
Oddly, however, although I supposed that we were traveling through the East Farthing
the description in The Hobbit was wildly different:
“Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”)
with, eventually, a surprise for us Bree-bound folk: no Bree.
So, back we went to the Green Dragon, in Bywater, where Bilbo started and now we begin again, with Frodo. Times have changed, however, and unlike the innocent Bilbo, we are in a different world, where Mordor isn’t just a distant place name and its servants are looking for Baggins.
(Denis Gordeev)
Frodo doesn’t take the Great East Road,
(Christopher Tolkien)
but cuts across country, narrowly avoiding one of the searchers,
(Angus McBride)
taking shelter with a local farmer, and finally reaching the ferry across the Brandywine just ahead of his pursuers.
Although this is a very indirect route, Frodo and his companions eventually reach Bree, but even though I would love to meet Tom Bombadil,
(the Hildebrandts)
I prefer a direct route, so we’ll continue on the Great East Road, cross the Bridge of Strongbows, and head eastwards.
(from Barbara Strachey, The Journeys of Frodo, a much-recommended book, if you don’t have a copy)
So what do we see?
Over the bridge—and here’s another possibility for it, the Clopton Bridge at Stratford-upon-Avon—
the road runs, not surprisingly, due eastwards and here, consulting our map,
is the Old Forest to our right,
described, by our narrator, as Frodo and his friends see it on their detour away from the Great East Road:
“Looking ahead they could see only tree-trunks of innumerable sizes and shapes: straight or bent, twisted, leaning, squat or slender, smooth or gnarled and branched; and all the stems were green or grey with moss and slimy, shaggy growths.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”)
Keep in mind, however, that we’re seeing it through a long line of trees planted alongside the road, probably as a windbreak.
We know that they’re there because Merry says:
“ ‘That is a line of trees,’ said Merry, ‘and that must mark the Road. All along it for many leagues east of the Bridge there are trees growing. Some say they were planted in the old days.’ “ (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 8, “Fog on the Barrow-downs”)
As we travel farther along the road, if we look to our right, through the trees, we then come to the edge of the Barrow-downs,
with their ancient standing stones
and tumuli—
where Frodo and his friends almost end their trip.
(Matthew Stewart)
But we haven’t strayed, as they did, and, passing the Downs, we see, again on our right:
“The dark line they had seen was not a line of trees but a line of bushes growing on the edge of a deep dike, with a steep wall on the further side.”
A dike is a ditch, usually with an earthen embankment made from the spoil of the ditch. There are several of these in England, like Offa’s Dyke—
The narrator adds:
“…with a steep wall on the further side”
and I’m presuming that that is the earthen embankment, with:
“…a gap in the wall” through which Frodo and friends rode and
…when at last they saw a line of tall trees ahead…they knew that they had come back to the Road.”
If you’re read the first part of this posting, you will know that I’ve been assuming that that Road, laid in ancient times to a stone bridge and beyond, would be like a Roman road, and be paved,
if a bit weedy, but now we find:
“…the Road, now dim as evening drew on, wound away below them. At this point it ran nearly from South-west to North-east, and on their right it fell quickly down into a wide hollow. It was rutted and bore many signs of the recent heavy rain; there were pools and pot-holes full of water.”
Does this suggest that it was, at best and in the past, simply a dirt road, through well-kept? Or is it a very run-down road, worn and covered over with leaves and dirt, the ancient blocks gradually becoming separated under the weight of centuries, allowing for pot-holes?
In any event, we now continue our journey with Frodo and his compantions until–
“…they saw lights twinkling some distance ahead.
Before them rose Bree-hill barring the way, a dark mass against misty stars; and under its western flank nestled a large village. Towards it they [and we] now hurried desiring only to find a fire, and a door between them and the night.”
We’re not in Bree yet, however, as:
“The village of Bree had some hundred stone houses of the Big Folk, mostly above the Road, nestling on the hillside with windows looking west. On that side, running in more than half a circle from the hill and back to it, there was a deep dike with a thick hedge on the inner side. Over this the Road crossed by a causeway; but where it pierced the hedge it was barred by a great gate. There was another gate in the southern corner where the Road ran out of the village. The gates were closed at nightfall; but just inside them were small lodges for the gatekeepers.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)
We’ve seen a dike just now, at the Great East Road, but now we have to add a hedge
For me, one of the great pleasures of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is that they are both so wonderfully imagined. Consider the beginning of The Hobbit, for example, where the opening could just have been the bare line “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Instead, it continues:
“Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
(JRRT)
And even this is not enough, as it continues:
“It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle.”
And it will go on for an entire paragraph beyond that sentence, listing rooms and even explaining why some are preferred.
Even with so much detail, I sometimes find myself wanting more—often more of the outside world. In this posting, then, I thought that we might take a trip to Bree and spend some time sightseeing as we go. Via the Great East Road, this is about 100 of our miles (160 km), according to the very useful website of Becky Burkheart (which you can visit here: https://www.beckyburkheart.com/traveltimesinmiddleearth ).
Why Bree? To quote The Lord of the Rings:
“It was not yet forgotten that there had been a time when there was much coming and going between the Shire and Bree.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)
If we use both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings together, however, we’ll soon encounter some difficulties, as we shall see.
Our starting point for Bilbo is the Green Dragon Inn, in Bywater.
(Christopher Tolkien)
Tolkien doesn’t describe the inn, but, using a real inn, we might imagine the Green Dragon as looking something like this–
Just to the south of Bywater is the spot where the Hobbiton road meets the Great East Road. Again, Tolkien gives us no description, but there may be a hint as to this road in the original grant of the Shire by Argeleb II in TA1601:
“For it was in the one thousand six hundred and first year of the Third Age that the Fallohide brothers, Marcho and Blanco, set out from Bree; and having obtained permission from the high king at Fornost, they crossed the brown river Baranduin with a great following of Hobbits. They passed over the Bridge of Strongbows, that had been built in the days of the power of the North Kingdom, and they took all the land beyond to dwell in, between the river and the Far Downs. All that was demanded of them was that they should keep the Great Bridge in repair, and all other bridges and roads, speed the king’s messengers, and acknowledge his lordship.” (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue I, “Concerning Hobbits”)
We’ll cross the bridge a little later in our journey, but we might start with the road. That it’s sometimes called “the Great East Road” suggests that it’s more than a dirt path.
Could Tolkien have been thinking of the bits of surviving Roman road which crisscross England? Most are now buried under modern roads, but, here and there some are still available on the surface, as here—
and perhaps we can use this as a model. As an ancient stone road, it would certainly fit in with the ancient stone Bridge, as we’ll see.
Just beyond the spot where the lesser road meets the greater, we see marked on our map, the “Three Farthing Stone”. A “farthing” is a “four-thing”—that is, a quarter, and it marks the spot where three of the quarters, the four farthings, of the Shire meet. This appears to be modeled on the “Four Shire Stone” in our Middle-earth
And, from here, we head eastwards—and meet our first difficulty. Here’s the description in The Hobbit—
“At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business.”
That fits our Shire map: we might be traveling through Frogmorton and Whitfurrows, villages which might look like this—
but then there’s—
“Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”)
The bridge is just ahead, but “dreary hills”? “old castles”?
And you can really see the difference here between the two books. Tolkien had yet to discover much of the East Farthing and was simply penciling in something which we might think of as “travel filler”, to indicate that the expedition was riding eastwards, but the trip was already becoming more difficult.
And then we come to the (here unnamed) bridge:
“Fortunately the road went over an ancient stone bridge, for the river, swollen with the rains, came rushing down from the hills and mountains in the north.”
As this is the first bridge mentioned, I’m going to assume that this is the “Bridge of Strongbows/Great Bridge” mentioned in Argeleb II’s grant to the original hobbit settlers.
(This is the Roman Pont Julien in southeastern France—over a bit drier patch than described in the book. For more on this ancient bridge, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_Julien )
Once over this bridge, we’re in a different world. We reach another river:
“Then one of the ponies took fright at nothing and bolted. He got into the river before they could catch him…”
Then, attempting to camp in the rain, Bilbo and the dwarves spot a fire, go to it, and find trolls.
(JRRT)
With the trolls dealt with by Gandalf, we move on to Rivendell–
(JRRT)
and suddenly we realize that: there’s no Bree!
It’s at the crossroads of the Great East Road and what the locals call “the Greenway”, the old north/south road, now long overgrown,
but, somehow, Bilbo and the dwarves have not encountered it. The reason is clear, of course: just as the Tolkien of The Hobbit had yet to discover the East Farthing, so, too, he had yet to discover Breeland.
So, it looks like we have to turn around, back to the Green Dragon, stop for a pint, as any hobbit would,
and try again—in “To Bree (Part 2”).
As always, thanks for reading.
Stay well,
When approaching a crossroads, be prepared for anything—especially monsters with questions–
The first part of this posting began as far from Middle-earth and its history as possible: the Biblical lands of our Middle-earth and the story of the ancient prophet, Daniel and specifically the event which gained Daniel his position in the court first of Belshazzar, the Babylonian king, and then in that of his conqueror/successor, Darius the Persian. Uniquely for early prophecy, Belshazzar hadn’t been warned that he would be deposed by any of the accepted means—the reading of the flight of birds
or the reading of animal intestines, for example,
(This is a bit of Etruscology, being a bronze model of a sheep’s liver believed to be used as a guide to interpreting what an Etruscan priest might find on an actual sheep’s liver. For more, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex )
but by a message written by a detached hand on an interior wall of his palace.
(Rembrandt—as I said in the first part of this posting, having no idea of what real Babylonians looked like, the artist went for the Magi look)
In that posting, I suggested that Daniel’s story not only confirmed his role as prophet, but, for the posting, that he was literate, which would have marked him out in a world in which literacy was a specialized skill, like being a boatwright.
This, in turn, had led to considering literacy in Middle-earth, chiefly among hobbits, and, in particular, the literacy of one rather unlikely hobbit, Sam Gamgee.
(Robert Chronister)
For more on this, see that earlier posting, “It’s in Writing (1)” 15 October, 2025, but my conclusion, based upon the final chapter of The Lord of the Rings, “The Grey Havens”, was that, as the story of Daniel makes Daniel literate in order to elevate him to a level of prophetic importance, so JRRT makes Sam literate in order to allow him to be the author who will complete the story of the Ring.
That posting briefly examined hobbits and even suggested some evidence of literacy among dwarves, but it was never meant to be a full inventory of mentions of literacy in Middle-earth—although I think that that would be a very interesting project and well worth doing—and one thing it omitted entirely was any mention of literacy in Mordor.
Did Orcs read and write, for example?
(Alan Lee)
Considering the conversation of people like Ugluk and Grishnakh, it would seem that they were mainly oral, as much of their and other talk is based upon what they hear, rather than read. (“ ‘What are they wanted for?’ asked several voices. ‘Why alive? Do they give good sport?’ ‘No! I heard that one of them has got something, something that’s wanted for the war…” The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”—for more on Orcs and gossip, among other things, see “Scuttlebutt”, 27 October, 2021)
And yet there’s this:
“The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn like the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it..Upon its knees were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 7, Journey to the Cross-roads”)
The “maggot-folk of Mordor” must certainly be the Orcs and “idle scrawls” suggests graffiti, like the World War 2-era favorite–
So what did they write in? Pippin, while a prisoner of the Orcs, notices that they seem to speak different languages—or at least dialects—but employ the Common Speech to understand each other:
“To Pippin’s surprise he found that much of the talk was intelligible; many of the Orcs were using ordinary language. Apparently the members of two or three quite different tribes were present, and they could not understand one another’s orc-speech.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)
Can we presume, then, that the “idle scrawls” were in the writing system called the Tengwar, as “[its letters] had spread over much of the same area as that in which the Common Speech was known” (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix E, II, “Writing”)? Or possibly the runic Cirith, as “[it] became known to many peoples, to Men and Dwarves, and even to Orcs, all of whom altered it to suit their purposes and according to their skill or lack of it.”
But what about the Black Speech?
“It is said that the Black Speech was devised by Sauron in the Dark Years, and that he had desired to make it the language of all those that served him…”
however—
“…after the first overthrow of Sauron this language in its ancient form was forgotten by all but the Nazgul. When Sauron arose again, it became once more the language of Barad-dur and of the captains of Mordor.”
It was the formal language of the top of the chain of command, then, but, as JRRT had written earlier of Sauron’s first attempt to make it the official language, “he failed in that purpose” and the Orcs picked and chose what they found useful and nothing more. (See The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F, “Of the Other Races”)
Save for what might be the Black Speech in a curse (“Ugluk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob bubhosh skai”, says one menacing Orc to Pippin– The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”), when we hear it, it’s Gandalf, reciting what he read when he “set the golden thing in the fire a while” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”).
And this brings us back to reading and writing. Why was there writing on that particular ring?
Not being a party to its maker’s mind, this is only my guess, but I think that it may have had several possible purposes.
First—and this seems the most obvious—comes from something Gandalf says, repeating a remark made by Saruman:
“ ‘The Nine, the Seven, and the Three…had each their proper gem. Not so the One. It was round and unadorned, as it were one of the lesser rings; but its maker set marks upon it that the skilled, maybe, could still see and read.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”).
Thus, Sauron had written on it to distinguish it from the other rings—and this writing was seemingly to be seen only by Sauron, as Isildur suggests:
“It was hot when I first took it, hot as a glede [a hot coal], and my hand was scorched, so that I doubt if ever again I shall be free of the pain of it. Yet even as I write it is cooled, and it seemeth to shrink, though it loseth neither its beauty nor its shape. Already the writing upon it, which at first was as clear as red flames, fadeth and is only barely to be read.”
Isildur’s explanation for this fading was:
“The Ring misseth, maybe, the heat of Sauron’s hand, which was black and yet burned like fire.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”).
The second purpose, then, might be that The Ring mirrored, in a way, its master, the inscription legible to him because it took its heat from his hand and, with that removed, it cooled, eventually, into silence. Isildur had guessed that heat might revive it (“…maybe were the gold made hot again, the writing would be refreshed”) but it was Gandalf, having read Isildur’s suggestion, who did, by placing it into an environment like to its original. That it would lose that inscription if the Ring were removed from its owner’s hand might also suggest a third purpose, which lies in what the writing actually said:
“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)
Although Gandalf says that this formed part of “a verse long known in Elven-lore”, the Ring itself was meant to be the master ring:
“He only needs the One; for he made that Ring himself, it is his, and he let a great part of his own former power pass into it, so that he could rule all the others.”
Thus, though it may have been part of a “verse long known in Elven-lore”, it sounds to me like a kind of spell Sauron would have chanted as he made the Ring, not only putting “a great part of his own former power” into it, but binding the lesser rings to it, as the words written on the Ring may have eventually been part of later tradition, but, logically, must have been his words long before they became part of that tradition.
These might have been Sauron’s purposes, but they also serve the narrative. As Bilbo’s ring, passed down traumatically to Frodo, is “round and unadorned”, Gandalf has to have some way to prove to himself and to Frodo that this ring is the Ring.
(Alan Lee)
When Gandalf begins explaining to Frodo in detail about it and about Bilbo’s connection to it, he first mentions that
“A mortal…who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness.”
and Bilbo, says Gandalf, “…was getting restless and uneasy. Thin and Stretched, he said.”
He speaks further about his worries about Bilbo and then tells Frodo that “There is a last test to make”, meaning in his confirmation that this is the Ring.
That last test takes place when, reluctantly, Frodo hands the Ring to Gandalf, and Gandalf throws it into the fire on Frodo’s hearth, where, when Frodo picks it up, he spots “fine lines, finer than the finest pen-strokes, running along the ring, outside and inside: lines of fire that seemed to form the letters of a flowing script” and that script says:
“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them.” (translation by Gandalf—earlier quotations from The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”, the Black Speech from Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond” For more on the Black Speech, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Speech )
For Gandalf, that inscription is the final element in his understanding of just what, long ago, Bilbo picked up in the tunnels under the Misty Mountains. He explains that it’s “only two lines of a verse long known in Elven-lore”, but those two lines are apparently all that’s necessary.
But where might the idea for an inscription have come to JRRT from originally? I have no proof, but, as a medievalist, Tolkien might have been aware of what we find in medieval bling and is later picked up in Hamlet.
If you, like me, are a Shakespeare fan, you may recognize the subtitle of this posting as a sharp little remark by Hamlet in Act III, Scene 2 (you can read it here in the First Quarto of 1603: https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_Q1/complete/index.html ). Hamlet is making fun of a very brief prologue before The Murder of Gonzago, the “play within a play” (renamed “The Mousetrap” by Hamlet) by which he hopes to force his uncle, Claudius, to reveal his guilt in the death of Hamlet’s father, but it’s the second half of that line, “a Poesie for a Ring” which provides an answer to my question.
What Hamlet is suggesting is that the prologue is as clumsy as the poetry found within a ring (although occasionally on the outside) usually given by one lover to another in the late medieval era at least into the 18th century, like this one—
where inside is written “When this you see, remember me.”
Often called “posy rings” (a contracted form of “poesie”, as in the Shakespeare quotation), there are hundreds of surviving examples—here are only a small number from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford—
The texts vary, from what appears confident–“In thee my choice I do rejoice”—to the less so: “I live in Hope”, but the general purpose of these little gifts is clear, if less sinister than Sauron’s. They are meant to remind someone that someone else is thinking of them. The difference, however, is that, if there’s one thing you wouldn’t want, it would be to have the Eye of Sauron looking in your direction.
set out on their quest, they’re aware that, at its end, they must face the reason the dwarves’ forebears died or fled Erebor, the “Lonely Mountain”.
(JRRT)
And yet they go, suggesting an almost foolhardy shrug of an attitude, particularly as Gandalf has suggested that they need someone right out of myth to help them:
“ ‘That would be no good…not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero.’ “
But:
“ ‘I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found.’ “ (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)
Everything about this trip already seems haphazard, having no map of their destination, till Gandalf furnishes them with one,
(JRRT)
and even then they have no idea of another, secret entrance until Elrond spots the inscription which describes it—and how to open it. Clearly, then, this is a case of “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Uh oh.
There’s also no clue in the text as to who or what may destroy the destroyer—until Bilbo, flattering Smaug, spots that fatal weak point:
“ ‘I’ve always understood…that dragons were softer underneath, especially in the region of the—er—chest…’ “
The dragon stopped short in his boasting. ‘Your information is antiquated,’ he snapped. ‘I am armoured above and below with iron scales and hard gems. No blade can pierce me.’ “
There’s a clue here, if not for Bilbo, for readers who are aware of something in Tolkien’s own past reading:
“Then Sigurd went down into that deep place, and dug many pits
in it, and in one of the pits he lay hidden with his sword drawn.
There he waited, and presently the earth began to shake with the
weight of the Dragon as he crawled to the water. And a cloud of
venom flew before him as he snorted and roared, so that it would
have been death to stand before him.
But Sigurd waited till half of him had crawled over the pit, and
then he thrust the sword Gram right into his very heart.” (Andrew Lang, ed., The Red Fairy Book, 1890, “The Story of Sigurd”, page 360)
And Bilbo persists, goading Smaug to turn over, where Bilbo sees—and says:
“ ‘Old fool! Why, there is a large patch in the hollow of his left breast as bare as a snail out of its shell!’ “ (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)
Still, although we might have a target now, who will make use of it and how and with what? Sigurd is just what Gandalf says is not locally available, a Hero, and it’s clear that neither Bilbo nor the dwarves are capable of taking on that role.
And here we can bring in another clue from Tolkien’s past.
In “On Fairy-Stories”, he writes:
“I had very little desire to look for buried treasure or to fight pirates, and Treasure Island left me cool. Red Indians were better: there were bows and arrows (I had and have a wholly unsatisfied desire to shoot well with a bow)…” (“On Fairy Stories”, 134)
This suggests that Tolkien may have been exposed to the works of James Fenimore Cooper, 1789-1851, who, beginning with The Pioneers, 1823, wrote a series of novels set on the 18th-century western Frontier (much of it what is now central and eastern New York State), called the “Leatherstocking Tales”,
the best known, even now, being The Last of the Mohegans, 1826.
These books were filled with battles between the British and French, with Native Americans on both sides and I wonder if it’s from the adventures depicted there that JRRT was inspired with his passion for bows and arrows?
(artist? A handsome depiction and I wish I could identify the painter.)
Another clue might lie in British history. During the medieval struggle for English control of France, the so-called “Hundred Years War” (1337-1453), the English enjoyed three great victories, at Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415), where companies of English longbowmen shot their French opponents to pieces.
(Angus McBride)
Tolkien would have read about this as a schoolboy, but, in an odd way, he might have had his knowledge of these long-ago events refreshed in 1914.
Outnumbered and in danger of being outflanked by massive German columns, the small BEF (British Expeditionary Force), in the early fall of 1914, retreated, one unit (2nd Corps) fighting a desperate battle to slow the Germans at Le Cateau.
The British managed to fend off the enveloping Germans and, considering the odds against them, some might have believed their escape miraculous.
Enter the fantasist Arthur Machen, 1863-1947.
In the September 29th, 1914, issue of The Evening News, Machen published a short story which he entitled “The Bowmen”. This was a supposed first-hand account of a British soldier who had seen a line of ghostly British longbowmen shooting down German pursuers, just as they had shot down the French, centuries before.
Machen subsequently republished it with other stories in 1915—
but was astonished when his fiction was believed to have been true, and widely circulated as such. We don’t have any evidence that JRRT actually read this story, but it was extremely widespread at the time and, once more, we see men with bows. (For more on this, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_of_Mons And you can read the stories in Machen’s volume here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_of_Mons )
I think we can add to this the legends of Robin Hood, which could appear in any number of sources—our first known reference being in William Langland’s (c.1330-c.1386) late 14th-century Piers Plowman, where Sloth—a priest deserving of his name, doesn’t seem to have any religious knowledge, but says,
In more recent times, perhaps Tolkien had seen Howard Pyle’s (1853-1911) The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, 1883,
or Paul Creswick’s (1866-1947) 1917 Robin Hood,
with its wonderful illustrations by N.C.Wyeth (1882-1945).
(If the Tolkien journal Amon Hen, is available to you–but, alas, not to me–you might also have a look at Alex Voglino’s “Middle-earth and the Legend of Robin Hood” in issue 284.)
And, although Tolkien may not have liked Treasure Island, we might add to this possible influence Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1850-1894) The Black Arrow (serialized 1883, published as a book in 1888).
“ ‘Arrow!’ said the bowman. ‘Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!’ “ (The Hobbit, Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”)
(Michael Hague, one of my favorite Hobbit illustrators)
So, we’re about to see that the Hero to kill Smaug is a Lake-town local, Bard, and his weapon of choice is Tolkien’s special favorite, the bow. But how to attack?
We first see Smaug on the ground, lying on his hoard.
(JRRT)
Angered at Bilbo’s teasing, he gets up long enough to attempt to flame him, but his real method of destruction is to take to the air.
(Ted Nasmith)
Fafnir was never airborne, dragging himself along the ground. Sigurd solved the problem of his scaly protection by digging a pit and attacking him from below with his sword. It makes good sense, then, with all of the possible bowman influences upon him, that Tolkien would imagine that the way to deal with a flying dragon would be an arrow from below.
(JRRT)
To which we might add one more potential influence from JRRT’s own experience.
In 1914, there were few military aircraft and their main task was reconnaissance.
By 1918, there were many different models, with different tasks, including heavy bombers.
To protect their troops on the ground, all of the warring nations developed the first artillery defenses: anti-aircraft guns, designed to shoot down threats from above.
JRRT would certainly have seen such guns and possibly even in action, attempting to knock flying danger out of the sky.
Some of those guns were rapid-firing, spraying the air with metal, hoping to guarantee the success of their defense. Bard, in turn, has his black arrow—and not just any black arrow, but one seemingly created perfectly for revenge: “ ‘I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well.’ “
That is, this is an arrow created by the dwarves, whom Smaug had driven out or killed—or eaten—and it’s also an heirloom from the days before Smaug destroyed Dale: what better weapon to deal vengeance to the wicked creature who had ruined so much? To take out such a flying danger, but with a glaring vulnerability below, what means of propulsion, especially one known to have defeated whole medieval armies? And, as the seemingly last descendant of the last lord of Dale, Girion, who better to take that revenge?
As ever, thanks for reading.
Stay well,
Always monitor the skies—who knows what’s watching from above?
And remember that, as always, there’s
MTCIDC
O
PS
For more on birds, Bard, and Smaug, see “Why a Dragon?” 28 May, 2025.
PPS
While looking for just the right Smaug images, I came upon this, entitled, “Dante aka Smaug on his hoard” and couldn’t resist.
A common motif is that of the apparent good-for-nothing—or at least for not much—who turns out to be of heroic material. I immediately think of King Arthur, who is, basically, a servant until he fetches that sword from the stone/anvil.
Heroes and heroines, then, can be anything from a demigod to a nobleman to a good girl who loves her father to a good-for-nothing who is more than he seems, and set out on adventures or, as in the case of Arthur, adventure finds them.
Ordinary—or seemingly ordinary—people can also be pulled into adventures, as Bilbo is.
(the Hildebrandts)
Then there are people who are literally dropped into adventures,
(WW Denslow)
sometimes beginning those adventures in a very dramatic—and ultimately decisive—way.
Dorothy, of course, has been whirled by a tornado from Kansas to Oz,
(from the 1939 film)
but, when she arrives in Oz in the film, Glinda, the Good Witch of the North
(also from the film)
sings:
“Come out, come out, wherever you are and meet the young lady
Who fell from a star.
She fell from the sky, she fell very far and Kansas, she says,
Is the name of that star.”
Not true, of course, of Dorothy, (although Kansas has its beauties, no doubt), but it is true of another hero, Superman,
who had been shipped in a rocket by his parents from the dying planet, Krypton, and discovered in a field by Ma and Pa Kent, who would become his foster parents.
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I don’t find negative reviews which are nothing but hatchet jobs
at all helpful and, in my own reviews, I try to understand what it is that the creators attempted to do and react to that, being aware, of course, that I do have my own perspective on things. I also buy DVDs of everything I can, so that I can watch things more than once before I review.
I’ve now seen “Rings of Power”, both seasons,
only once, so I’m not going to attempt to review the whole two seasons here. Certainly there have been some very impressive visuals and some very good acting. I’m not sure how I feel about the two as a whole—some of the plot I found rather confusing and I’m not sure how I feel about proto-hobbits with Irish accents, although the idea of using proto-hobbits was, I thought, pretty ingenious—but I want to end this posting by talking about Gandalf.
He first appears—like Dorothy in Oz, but even more so like the baby Superman, in a dramatic fashion, having been conveyed in which appears to be a kind of meteor which roars across the sky and slams into the earth, leaving a fiery crater.
(Thank goodness that, whoever sent him, dressed him in underpants so that he wouldn’t embarrass himself or us when he stood up.)
At first, he seems stricken and quite clueless, not even really having language at first, although certainly having great powers, and it takes two seasons for him to begin to understand himself and what he’s been sent to do and I suspect that this stricken quality comes from a hint in Christopher/JRR Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales, where, under “The Istari” we find:
“For it is said indeed that being embodied the Istari had need to learn much anew by slow experience…” (Unfinished Tales, 407)
I understand that the creators of the series were somewhat hampered in their work—should they want to be as faithful as possible to Tolkien—because they were restricted in their sources, being confined, in this case, to The Lord of the Rings and its appendices. And, at first glance, the appearance in Middle-earth of the Istari does seem rather vague.
In Appendix B, “The Third Age”, of The Lord of the Rings, we read:
“When maybe a thousand years had passed, and the first shadow had fallen on Greenwood the Great, the Istari or Wizards appeared in Middle-earth. It was afterwards said that they came out of the Far West and were messengers sent to contest the power of Sauron, and to unite all those who had the will to resist him…”
No meteors are mentioned, but no other means of transport, either, yet turn the page and we then read:
“Gil-galad before he died gave his ring to Elrond; Cirdan later surrendered his to Mithrandir (aka Gandalf). For Cirdan saw further and deeper than any other in Middle-earth, and he welcomed Mithrandir at the Grey Havens, knowing whence he came and wither he would return.”
If you know The Lord of the Rings, you know that the Grey Havens is a seaport on the west coast of Middle-earth: it’s where Gandalf and others, including Frodo, depart for the Uttermost West—that is, Valinor.
(Ted Nasmith and a gorgeous view)
In fact, it was the Valar who had sent the Istari in the first place, as we know from Unfinished Tales, 406:
“For with the consent of Eru they sent members of their own high order, but clad in bodies as of Men, real and not feigned…”
And thus, from the source to which I’m informed the creators were confined, they would have learned that the Istari had sailed to Middle-earth, not been shot across the sky like Dorothy or Superman. Why make such a change, especially as, because Cirdan recognizes Gandalf’s worth, he gives him one of the original Elvish rings, Narya, which turns up on his hand in the subsequent The Lord of the Rings?
The title of this posting is a quotation from Shakespeare, from the prologue to “An EXCELLENT conceited Tragedie OF Romeo and Juliet” (as the First Quarto title page reads) in which the Prologue says of the protagonists: “A paire of starre-crost Louers tooke their life”.
The creators of The Rings of Power, even with evidence available to them, have veered away from that evidence with no explanation as to why they have made such a choice. What else may they have chosen to change and how might that affect JRRT’s view of the earlier history of Middle-earth, as well as ours?
As I begin my second viewing of The Rings of Power, then, I’ll be curious to see if another Shakespeare quotation, this from “The Tragedie of Julius Caesar”, Act 1, Scene 1, when Cassius, the leader of the plot against Julius Caesar, is trying to persuade Brutus to join him, may apply to the creators and their work:
“The fault (deere Brutus) is not in our Starres,
But in our Selues…”
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Stay well,
Think about what Cassius is telling us about horoscopes,
I think that I’ve always been a fan of the Marx brothers.
Their lack of respect for pompous men in silk hats,
opera-goers who are only interested because it gives them social status,
and self-important artists,
among many others, and their creative methods of deflating such people,
have always cheered me immensely.
There is another side to their comedy, however, which means just as much to me: their endless play with words, delivered always deadpan and with perfect timing—not to mention absolute absurdist nonsequiturism.
Take, for example, this fragment from The Cocoanuts, their first surviving film, from 1929. It’s set during the 1920s Florida land boom (read about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_land_boom_of_the_1920s ) and, in this scene, “Mr. Hammer”, Groucho, is explaining the layout of a real estate plot to “Chico”, Chico,
saying, at one point:
“Groucho: Now, here is a little peninsula, and, eh, here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
Chico: Why a duck?
Groucho: I’m all right, how are you? I say, here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
Chico: All right, why a duck?
Groucho: I’m not playing ‘Ask Me Another’, I say that’s a viaduct.
Chico: All right! It’s what…why a duck? Why no a chicken?
Groucho: I don’t know why no a chicken—I’m a stranger here myself. All I know is that it’s a viaduct. You try to cross over there a chicken and you’ll find out why a duck.”
By the same kind of logic which produced this, I found myself thinking about The Hobbit: and hence the title of this posting: why a dragon?
The plot of The Hobbit is, basically, a quest: a journey with a goal.
Quests are a familiar form of adventure story and still common—just think about Indiana Jones, with his Lost Ark
and his Holy Grail, for example.
Indiana has to travel to Tibet and Egypt and to an unnamed island in the Mediterranean for the Ark and to Germany and Turkey for the Grail.
Although Thorin doesn’t mention the travel in his “mission statement”, much of the story will be about travel, from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain and back again,
to reach the dwarves’ goal, as stated in the first chapter by Thorin:
“But we have never forgotten our stolen treasure. And even now, when I will allow we have a good bit laid by and are not so badly off…we still mean to get it back, and to bring our curses home to Smaug—if we can.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)
The goal, then, is in two parts:
1. to regain the treasure taken from the dwarves by the dragon
2. to take revenge upon said dragon
Because they are aware that the dragon can be lying on top of the treasure (“Probably”, says Thorin, “for that is the dragons’ way, he has piled it all up in a great heap far inside, and sleeps on it for a bed.”), it’s clear that 1 and 2 have to be dealt with as a sequence: no getting the treasure without getting rid of the dragon.
Which brings us back to my title. Indiana Jones commonly has Nazis (and eventually Communists and even Neo-Nazis) as opponents,
these being the characters who compete for his goal and stand in the way of his achieving his quest.
Tolkien was a medievalist, writing a sort of fairy tale, so what would be his equivalent and why?
We know that Tolkien had been interested in dragons since far childhood—at least the age of 6, when he tried to write a poem about a “green, great dragon” (to the Houghton Mifflin Company [summer, 1955?], Letters, 321—JRRT tells a somewhat different version of this to W.H. Auden in a letter of 7 June, 1955, Letters, 313) and he confesses to an early love for them in his lecture “On Fairy-Stories” where he mentions Fafnir and Sigurd, suggesting that he may have had read to him or had read for himself from Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book, 1890, the last chapter of which is “The Story of Sigurd”, and since, elsewhere, he mentions “Soria Moria Castle”, which is the third story in the same book.
Fafnir, the dragon in the Sigurd story, is described as, having killed his own father:
“he went and wallowed on the gold…and no man dared go near it.” (“The Story of Sigurd”, 360)
The next major dragon story with which Tolkien was probably involved saw the same draconic behavior, as, in Beowulf, we’re told that the unnamed dragon, having discovered a hoard in a tumulus:
“This hoarded loveliness did the old despoiler wandering
in the gloom find standing unprotected, even he who filled
with fire seeks out mounds (of burial), the naked dragon of
1915
fell heart that flies wrapped about in flame: him do earth’s
dwellers greatly dread. Treasure in the ground it is ever his
wont to seize, and there wise with many years he guards the
heathen gold – no whit doth it profit him.”
(from JRRT’s draft translation of 1920-26 in Christopher Tolkien’s 2014 publication)
Traditionally, then, dragons and gold go together—and, as JRRT admitted in a letter to the Editor of the Observer, “Beowulf is among my most valued sources” (letter to the Editor of the Observer, printed in the Observer, 28 February, 1938, Letters, 41)
There is a very interesting twist in Tolkien’s version of the story, however.
By lying in a pit below the dragon, Sigurd slays Fafnir
and Beowulf, along with his companion (and successor), Wiglaf, make an end of the nameless dragon,
Beowulf fighting against a dragon. Scene from the early medieval epic poem “Beowulf”. It is one of the most important works of Old English literature and was probably created after the year 700 and plays in the time before 600 AD in Scandinavia. Chromolithograph after drawing by Walter Zweigle (German painter, 1859 – 1904), published in 1896.
(This is a pretty silly version, with costumes and armor which look like they came from the original production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, but finding a depiction of the two attacking the dragon has seemed surprisingly difficult.)
but, in The Hobbit, although we have the traditional dragon on the traditional hoard, we don’t have the traditional dragon-slayer, a fact underlined by Thorin’s “to bring our curses home to Smaug, if we can”.
This has always struck me as the potential weak point in the quest: to travel hundreds of miles through dangerous territory filled with trolls, goblins, wolves, hostile elves, and even giant spiders, to come to a mountain inhabited by a fearsome dragon—but to have no plan in mind as to how to deal with it, especially when the other half of the plan—to get back the dwarvish treasure—requires somehow eliminating the current guardian of that treasure.
(JRRT)
Faced with that possible weak point, so much now may appear to have a certain haphazard happenstance about it, the kind of attempted slight-of-hand which indicates an author who hasn’t the skill to create a narrative in which every element seems to fall naturally into place, and this might make us question the finding of the Ring, the convenient rescue at Lake-town, even the ray of sun which indicates the opening to the back door of the Lonely Mountain (suppose it had been overcast).
But this is where the burglar comes in—and the story of Sigurd once more.
It seems that Bilbo was not Gandalf’s first choice for the quest when he came to visit him.
(the Hildebrandts)
Thorin has just mentioned the inconvenient dragon and the awkwardness of his sudden appearance, to which Gandalf replies:
“That would be no good…not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found.”
And he continues:
“That is why I settled on burglary—especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-door. And here is our little Bilbo Baggins, the burglar, the chosen and selected burglar.”
Bilbo’s first attempt at burglary: picking a troll’s pocket,
(JRRT)
almost ends in disaster, but, with the eventual aid of the Ring, he even manages, first, to steal from Smaug, in a direct echo of Beowulf,
(artist? So far, I haven’t seen one credited.)
and then to confront Smaug in his lair and escape, at worst, with only a singeing.
(JRRT)
So far, it’s been burglary, with some help from the Ring, but then the Sigurd story comes in.
You’ll remember that, although the version in The Red Fairy Book doesn’t say so, it was clear that the vulnerable part of the dragon Fafnir was its underside, which is why Sigurd hid in a pit so that, when the dragon crawled over it, Sigurd could stab him in that unprotected underbelly.
Using his burglarious skills, as well as a fluent tongue, Bilbo actually persuades Smaug unknowingly to expose his own vulnerability:
“ ‘I have always understood…that dragons were softer underneath, especially in the region of the—er—chest; but doubtless one so fortified has thought of that.’
The dragon stopped short in his boasting. ‘Your information is antiquated,’ he snapped. ‘I am armoured above and below with iron scales and hard gems. No blade can pierce me.’”
And the smooth-tongued burglar actually flatters Smaug into rolling over, exposing “…a large patch in the hollow of his left breast as bare as a snail out of its shell”.
What to do with this potentially deadly piece of information requires the reverse of the Sigurd story.
In that story, Sigurd, having killed Fafnir, has been asked by his mentor, Regin, to roast the dragon’s heart and serve it to him. In the process, Sigurd burns a finger, puts it in his mouth, and suddenly understands that all of the birds above him are talking about him and telling him to beware of Regin.
In The Hobbit, the opposite happens: the thrush who had tapped the snail
(Alan Lee)
and therefore set off the chain of events which revealed the back door to the Lonely Mountain to Bilbo and the dwarves, overhears Bilbo telling the dwarves about Smaug’s vulnerable spot, which he then conveys to Bard the Archer, who is then the dragon-slayer
(Michael Hague—one of my favorite Hobbit illustrators)
needed to dispose of the one-time guardian of the hoard.
And so the dragon is disposed of—but he has one more use in the story: as a negative model.
Although Thorin has led the quest to retrieve the dwarves’ treasure, it seems that there’s only one which he craves, the Arkenstone,
(Donato Giancola)
and it’s clear that, in its pursuit, he becomes much like the Smaug who once reacted almost hysterically when he sensed that something was missing from his hoard:
“Thieves! Fire! Murder!…His rage passes description—the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)
Here’s his dwarvish parallel:
“ ‘For the Arkenstone of my father,’ he said, ‘is worth more than a river of gold in itself, and to me it is beyond price. That stone of all the treasure I name unto myself, and I will be avenged on anyone who finds it and withholds it.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 16, “A Thief in the Night”)
And, when he finds that Bilbo has taken it as a way to make peace between the dwarves, the elves, and the Lake-town men, Thorin almost does take revenge:
“ ‘You! You!’ cried Thorin, turning upon him and grasping him with both hands. ‘You miserable hobbit! You undersized—burglar!…By the beard of Durin! I wish I had Gandalf here! Curse him for his choice of you! May his beard wither! As for you I will throw you to the rocks!’ he cried and lifted Bilbo in his arms.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 17, “The Clouds Burst”)
So why a dragon?
First, to Tolkien the medievalist, gold and dragons go together: a quest for treasure needs a particularly powerful enemy and the dragon of Beowulf, who actually fatally wounds Beowulf,
who had previously defeated two terrible opponents in Grendel and his mother, provides a strong model.
Second, JRRT had, from childhood, a long-standing interest in dragons—he’ll return to them in his 1938/49 novella, “Farmer Giles of Ham”, where the practical farmer eventually not only tames the dragon, Chrysophylax (“Goldwatchman”, perhaps), but makes him disgorge much of his treasure—this time by doing nothing more than outfacing him and threatening him with his sword, “Tailbiter”.
It’s interesting, by the way, that, although, in “The Story of Sigurd”, the dragon talks, he has only one short speech: a curse on anyone who touches his gold, whereas, in perhaps the greatest draconic influence upon Tolkien, Beowulf, another wyrm who enjoys lying on a hoard, is mute.
Smaug, in The Hobbit, however, is not only positively talky, but, like Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, his voice and manner have their own dangerously persuasive power, at one point in his conversation with Bilbo even beginning to seed Bilbo’s mind with doubts about the dwarves Bilbo accompanies (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”).
Chrysophylax, in “Farmer Giles of Ham” is even more talkative than Smaug, and I wonder about the model for these chatty beasts. Tolkien was a great fan of Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) and of his well-known children’s book, The Wind in the Willows (1908),
mentioning in a letter to Christopher Tolkien that Elspeth Grahame, Grahame’s widow, is publishing a book with other stories about the main characters of The Wind in the Willows, a book which JRRT is very eager to obtain (letter to Christopher Tolkien, 31 July, 1944, Letters, 128). In 1898, Grahame published a collection of stories, Dream Days,
which included “The Reluctant Dragon”, in which we see another very loquacious beast,
(from the original book, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish)
(I couldn’t resist including E.H. Shepard’s 1938 version)
but rather more like the ultimately rather timid dragon of “Farmer Giles” than the grim and mute creature of Beowulf or the more-than-a-little-pleased-with-himself Smaug, but, in his garrulousness, could he have been a model for Smaug? (You can make your own comparison with: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35187/35187-h/35187-h.htm )
To this we add perhaps not a model, but a parallel: Thorin as becoming a kind of dwarvish dragon in his obsession with the Arkenstone. Fafnir dies with a curse, however, the Beowulf beast dies killing Beowulf, and Smaug dies destroying Lake-town,
but, in his own last moments, Thorin escapes such a poisonous model, saying to Bilbo:
“Farewell, good thief…I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed. Since I leave now all gold and silver, and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship from you, and I would take back my words and deeds at the Gate.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 18, “The Return Journey”)
I sometimes think that the world could be divided between those who love puzzles and can do them and those, like me, to whom puzzles don’t appeal—possibly because we can’t. For instance, can you guess the answer to the riddle above? I’ll give you a minute…
For that One Half of the world, the answer was probably embarrassingly easy: “a well”.
You got it, didn’t you? I got it—but only afterwards when I reread “draw it up”, which looks like it was planted as an obvious clue, as one “draws water from a…well”.
Riddle culture is clearly very old. Trying to go as far back in time as I could, suddenly there was Oedipus and the Sphinx sitting outside Thebes—
with her:
“What goes on four legs at dawn,
What goes on two legs at midday,
What goes on three legs at sunset?”
If you belong to the Other Half—my half—and you don’t know the play (and the footnotes), you might think for a while, then shrug. If you’ve read the footnotes, or are a member of the One Half, you’ll smile and say, “Easy. A baby–at the dawn of life, a grownup– in midlife, an old person leaning on a stick–in the ‘Sunset Years’, so, in short, Man.”
Having read the footnotes, you know the fate of that riddler—seemingly instant death—although I can imagine her flapping off, muttering to herself about finding suckers somewhere else, like Corinth.
And a little research produces—and this is just for western Europe—the following collections:
1. Symphosius (4th-5th century AD)
2. Aldhelm (c.609-739)
3. Tatwine (c.670-734)
4. Boniface (c.675-754)
5. Eusebius (8th century)
6. The Bern Riddles (early 8th century)
7. The Lorsch Riddles (8th-9th century)
8. The Exeter Book Riddles (10th century)
I’ve gotten this list (which I’ve rewritten slightly) from a very good site on the subject: “The Riddle Ages”, here: https://theriddleages.com/riddles/collection/ A rich site and a good read, if medieval literature appeals.
I think that my first riddle came from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,1865/6,
which generally has always been considered a children’s book, but, as a child, I really didn’t like it, mostly because I didn’t understand it. I now enjoy it, but still find it almost as weird as I thought it the first time I read it.
The riddle is in Chapter VII, “A Mad Tea-party” , which begins:
“THERE was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. ‘Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,’ thought Alice; ‘only as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.’ “
(In case you’re wondering, that’s supposed to be straw on the Hare’s head, a stagey sign of madness. The very useful site Word Histories (https://wordhistories.net/2018/06/01/straws-hair-origin/ ), points us to a Victorian source—Punch, January, 1842, 34, “Extemporaneous Dramas No.1 Hamlet”—where a stage direction says “Ophelia discovered with straws in her hair”, but this looks to be a misunderstanding of Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5, where a Gentleman says of Ophelia that “[she] spurns enviously at straws”—that is, “she reacts spitefully to trifles”, not that she’s wearing straw. You can read the Punch excerpt here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858029795295&seq=339&q1=extemporaneous )
It’s immediately clear that Alice isn’t welcome, as the Mad Hatter and March Hare, sitting at a large and nearly empty table, begin shouting “No room! No room!”, and out of nowhere the Mad Hatter remarks:
“ ‘Your hair wants cutting…’ “
To which Alice replies:
“ ‘You should learn not to make personal remarks…it’s very rude,’
The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ “
Alice puzzles over this throughout most of the scene until, pressed, she confesses that she doesn’t know the answer—and the Hatter replies that he has no idea either!
And, reading that then, and rereading it now, I agree with the Mad Hatter—although there are numerous modern answers, including my favorite: “Poe wrote on both.”—that is, Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849,
Knowing, then, on which side of the aisle I stand (or should I say, sit?) on the subject of riddles, I am brought to a scene which all Tolkien readers know well—
(Alan Lee)
It is, of course, The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”, and includes brain-teasers like Bilbo’s:
“No-legs lay on one-leg, two-legs sat near on three legs, four-legs got some”.
Without blinking, Gollum replies:
“ ‘Fish on a little table, man at table sitting on a stool, the cat has the bones.’ “
As one on the Other Side, however, I might have to rely upon Sting
and what I might find in my pocket!
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
Stay well,
Solve: “The more you take, the more you leave behind”,
And remember that there is always
MTCIDC
O
PS
In case you’ve a voracious appetite for riddles, try this site, which says that it has 10,337 riddles: https://www.riddles.com/archives
Ever since we saw the original Lord of the Rings films, we’ve been thinking about Gimli and his major weapon.
In The Hobbit, it would appear that the dwarves had not been armed until they used what was in the Lonely Mountain after Smaug had gone:
“Now the dwarves took down mail and weapons from the walls, and armed themselves. Royal indeed did Thorin look, clad in a coat of gold-plated rings, with a silver-hafted axe in a belt crusted with scarlet stones.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 13, “Not at Home”)
This is where the mithril coat which eventually protects Frodo in Moria and turns up in the hands of the Mouth of Sauron comes from, when Thorin gives it to Bilbo.
Not long after we first meet Gimli, at the Council of Elrond, however, we see Gimli already kitted out for war:
“Gimli the dwarf alone wore openly a short shirt of steel rings, for dwarves make light of burdens; and in his belt was a broad-bladed axe.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Ring Goes South”)
Certainly, the axe in Gimli’s right hand in the photo wouldn’t fit through a belt and allow for comfort or freedom of movement and we note that, in that same photo, Gimli appears to have another—but that looks too long for comfort, as well.
That the two axes fit in with the general persona of dwarves, however, seems to be true—after all, the translation of our title for this post is “Axes of the dwarves!” (to be followed by Khazad ai-menu! “the dwarves are upon you!”), which is the dwarves’ rallying cry. What kind (or kinds) of axes these are doesn’t seem so clear, then. Alan Lee, for example, shows us a dwarf with something which isn’t really an axe at all, but looks more like an adze, which is a tool used in woodworking to smooth and shape wood.
Because JRRT describes Gimli’s axe as being tuckable, we wondered whether he was thinking of the kind of throwing axe, a francisca, used by Frankish warriors (and which gave them their name).
When we actually see Gimli in battle, however, he isn’t throwing, but swinging his axe. At Helm’s deep he says to Legolas, “Give me a row of orc-necks and room to swing and all weariness will fall from me!” And then he swings that axe: “An axe swung and swept back. Two Orcs fell headless.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 7, “Helm’s Deep”)
This leads us to ask if perhaps JRRT himself wasn’t clear about Gimli’s weapon. He never throws it, using it always as a chopper, and, when we thinking of axes with a haft—that is, handle–long enough to do that, we don’t think of that odd item in the image above—which doesn’t look substantial enough to cut through cervical vertebrae—
but rather of the long-hafted axe, or “Dane axe” perhaps carried by the giant Viking who defended Stamford Bridge single-handedly against the Anglo-Saxons on 25 September, 1066,
with its razor-sharp blade.
This was the kind of axe that we see carried by the huscarl, the bodyguards, of the English king, Harold Godwinson, in the depiction of the Battle of Hastings, 14 October, 1066, on the so-called Bayeux Tapestry.
One of which Harold may himself been carrying when he was killed, if the caption on the cloth is referring to Harold being cut down by the mounted Norman in this part of the tapestry.
These same axes also appear to turn up as part of the armament of the Varangian Guard, the bodyguard of a number of Byzantine emperors from the 10th to 14th centuries, as depicted in the 11th-century Skylitzis Chronicle.
Much of this guard was made up of Norsemen and Anglo-Saxons, so the pattern of axe, we imagine, was something which both groups brought with them from their original homes.
This is clearly the sort of thing to whack off heads, even two at a time, and so, if we can quietly detach it from Gimli’s belt and have him stand, perhaps even leaning on it, we have the Gimli who competes with Legolas at Helm’s Deep in the number of orcs each has dispatched.
doubtfulsea 