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

downfall is assured. But actuallyI want to argue that Tolkien’s ents literalise a deeper, older riddle than Shakespeare’s. I want to suggest their solution is to be found in the New Testament:
    He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, ‘Do you see anything?’ And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. (Mark 8:23–4)
    Commentary upon this passage tends to stress its mimesis, its closeness to our sense of the way the world actually works. Cures for impaired sight take time to work. The blind man’s sight does not return immediately, but rather by a process of indistinct strengthening and gradual improvement (the next verse is: ‘once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.’) In other words the passage might mean ‘I see men; for I see [them] as trees [except that, unlike trees, they are] walking’. The man miraculously cured could distinguish them from trees only by their motion. On the other hand it is clear enough that a typological reading is available to us here too. For Christ is the tree of life; the dead wood of his cross, and his own dead body, become vivid and full of motion again at the resurrection, to spread across the world. It is characteristic of Tolkien’s literalising creative imagination—what we might think of as his mode of sub-incarnating—that he feeds this miraculous moment into his own writing as
actual
walking tree creatures. The passage in Mark is all about blindness and sight, about visibility and invisibility. It is about (to be a little more theologically specific) the way we can only
see
truly through Christ. It is easy to imagine that Tolkien, arbophile as he was, found peculiar resonance in the notion that the new sight of divine grace magically transforms ordinary men into fantastical walking trees. The destruction of Sauron’s ring, at the end of
The Lord of the Rings
, is a way of destroying invisibility itself; in terms of a Christian logic, it is the global overcoming of ‘blindness’, of not-seeing; the making plain of God’s grace in the world. It is in this, I think, that a solution to ‘the ents’ is to be found.
    This unpacks into a larger thesis about Tolkien’s approach to his art. In the ents, Tolkien imaginatively gifts an inanimate object with life, motion and personality. At the heart of
The Lord of the Rings
is asimilar, though inverted and malign, process of reification: the ring itself—made of a substance more inert than the organic matter of arboreal life, yet somehow, mysteriously alive, possessed of volition and influence. ‘Mysteriously’, there, is meant in its fullest sense. How the One Ring is able to work its evil in the world is a riddle that is, in turn, one of the ways Tolkien articulates the riddle of evil more generally. In
The Hobbit
the Old English sense that treasure, though inanimate, can ‘possess’ living humans finds dramatic form in Smaug’s hoard. The ring, at this stage in the story, gifts invisibility and nothing more. As the story grew in Tolkien’s imagination, the heaps of treasure are replaced by a single golden ring.
The Hobbit
is a quest-narrative in which the object of the quest is to gain a quantity of golden treasure;
The Lord of the Rings
—this is one of the most frequently repeated critical aperçus about that novel—upends this venerable template, being the story of a quest not to find but specifically to
lose
one particular piece of golden treasure. But what links these two things is the quasi-animate power of the gold. When Saruman gives a kind of life to the inanimate by ‘industrialising’ the shire it entails the poisoning of the organic, and the scouring of the shire at the novel’s end is precisely the undoing of this wickedness. Underlying this is a very profound riddle about life and nature, the