The Riddles of The Hobbit by Adam Roberts

mouths he has two,
    and on gold alone he goes?
    Ponderthis riddle,
    O prince Heidrek!
    Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar
! ‘That is the hammer, which is used in the goldsmith’s art; it screams shrilly when it beats on the hard anvil, and the anvil is its path.’ And so it goes on: twenty-eight riddles in quick succession are asked and answered one after the other. A number of them are similar enough to some of the riddles of the contest between Bilbo and Gollum to excite scholars.
    A cask of ale:
    no hand shaped it,
    no hammer built it,
    yet outside the islands
    its maker sits straight-up.
    Ponder this riddle,
    O Prince Heidrek!
    ‘Your riddle is a good one’, the king replies; ‘but I have guessed it.’ It is, of course, ‘egg’ (‘the egg-shell is not made by hand nor is it formed by hammer; and the swan that produces it carries himself erect, outside the islands’). Another riddle familiar to readers of
The Hobbit
is:
    Who is the mighty one
    That passes over the ground
    Swallowing water and forest?
    He fears the wind
    But flees no man
    And wages war on the sun!
    Ponder this riddle,
    O Prince Heidrek!
    The answer to this riddle is a particular sort of darkness, ‘fog’; and Tom Shippey argues that this riddle is behind the ‘dark’ riddle that Bilbo answers ‘without even scratching his head’ because ‘he had heard that sort of thing before’. We might want to pause and consider whether ‘a cask of ale’ is the same thing as ‘a box without hinges’; or whether ‘fog’ means quite the same thing as ‘darkness’; I discuss these near-analogues, or perhaps deliberate riddling swerves, in the next chapter.Each riddle is a doddle for Heidrek (
Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar
!) until the last one. Finally Gestumblindi asks this:
    What did Odin say
    Into Balder’s ear
    Before he was carried off to the fire?
    Of course Heidrek does not know the answer to this. Nor is it a riddle, or at least a riddle after the manner of the others; for it is not possible to guess or intuit it from the information given. Either one knows the answer or one does not; and in fact only two beings (Balder and Odin himself) can possibly know the answer to this one. In a rage, the king shouts that he has seen through Gestumblindi’s disguise (‘you alone know the answer to that riddle!’), whips out his sword and attempts to stab the god. To escape harm, Odin changes himself into a hawk and flies away, but not before cursing the king: ‘because you have attacked me with a sword, King Heidrek, you yourself shall die at the hands of the basest slaves!’
    What is the answer to this last riddle? The honest answer is: we do not know. Perhaps this is its point: that it is unanswerable. Tolkien, in what looks very like an imitation of this contest, concludes his riddle-contest between Bilbo and Gollum, with a similarly unanswerable question. ‘What have I got in my pocket’ is not a riddle in the sense that we cannot work out what the answer is; either we know, or we do not. Gollum does not know, and guesswork does not help him.
    And here we come back to the question of the riddle in the court of law. Asking an unanswerable riddle is a way of overmastering the questioned person. One of the things the
Gúbretha Caratniad
is interested in is the respective power rightfully due the law on the one hand and the king on the other. By acting out their riddling exchange, the Judge Caratnia and his king Conn Cétchathach are jockeying for power and status, one with the other. In a much smaller sense, this is also what Bilbo and Gollum are doing. In the words of Robin Chapman Stacey: ‘riddles function, in almost every culture in which they appear, as a means by which one person lays claim to power over another’. 26
    Like Bilbo and Gollum’s contest,
The Saga of King Heidrek
ends on a debatable point. As Tom Shippey notes, Tolkien’s mind was particularly drawn to the grey areas of