Like Bilbo Baggins, there is more to the Christ Child than appears: he too is a riddle, and Christmas poems
and carols rightly love to extend the contradictions of his birth into paradox. Credit: shutterstock.com
The Gift "Half" Understood: Tolkien and the Riddle of Christmas
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/12/24/3916953.htm
ABC Religion and Ethics
December 24, 2013
Although Tolkien's novel The Hobbit begins in the
Springtime and ends in Midsummer, it is pure Christmas. It begins with
overwhelming numbers of unexpected visitors and much consumption of good food
and drink, and ends with a cascade of present-giving.
"Dragon-sickness" - the lust for gold and material goods - strikes not only
children at this season. Indeed, recent years have shown up the greedy hoarding
of money, houses and yachts among the rich in a manner reminiscent of Smaug's
bewildering "glamour": some earn salaries many times larger in proportion to
other workers' wages than in earlier times, while making us all believe that
their value in the market dictates, and thus justifies, this obscenely large
remuneration.
The Hobbit is a story which shows that it is not just the rich who
become enthralled by the glitter of wealth, but also the dispossessed. The great
dwarf craftsmen in metal who are on a quest to regain their stolen gold are
possessed by "a fierce and jealous love" for it. Even Bilbo the hobbit, who is
generally more interested in breakfast than gold, is bewildered and seduced by
coming upon the dwarves' great ancestral jewel, the Arkenstone. Like the Ring he
chanced upon under the Misty Mountains, the stone is quickly tucked away in his
pocket, and he does not tell his companions that he has it: he becomes the
burglar that his name, Baggins, suggests he has the potential to be. Soon
Lakemen, elves and birds all gather round the dragon hoard, wanting a share of
the spoils.
What breaks the deadlock as these groups lay siege to the mountain where the
dwarves refuse to share any of the treasure, is another theft by Bilbo. He takes
the Arkenstone and offers it to the besiegers, so that they can use its glamour
over Thorin the dwarf king to force him to make peace. As a result of this
burglary, Bilbo is thrown out of the dwarves' company, and is lucky to escape
with his life.
Yet at many crucial stages on their journey, it had been Bilbo's underhand
ways that had ensured their safety: like Odysseus, who hid his men as sheep to
evade the Cyclops, Bilbo smuggles the dwarves out of the Elven-King's prison in
barrels, which are floated down the river; Bilbo's invisibility allows him to
rescue the dwarves from the Mirkwood spiders.
Even Bilbo's riddles, fair as they are in a riddle contest in Anglo-Saxon or
Norse conventions, smuggle truth in disguised form: "A box without hinges, key
or lid, / Yet golden treasure inside is hid." What the riddle does is to state
the reality of an object in paradoxical form, in contradictory ideas. How can a
box lack any mode of ingress? How did the treasure get into the box? Our normal
categories are questioned and for a moment, a riddle makes the world seem
strange or bizarre. In deciphering the answer, we are forced to look at the
object in a new way. After the "making strange" comes the illumination; once a
riddle is solved it is blindingly obvious - but "the egg" takes on a new depth of
meaning.
The burglar Bilbo is himself a kind of riddle, and of course, the last riddle
question Bilbo asks Gollum is "What do I have in my pocket?" Bilbo is thus the
key to the riddle whose answer is the emblematic Ring, "the precious" object of
desire. Bilbo is the key as he is associated with keys in the course of the
plot. He finds the key to the trolls' hoard, which contains important weapons,
including the sword, Sting, which Gandalf gives to him, and which will have so vital
a role in this story, and in The Lord of the Rings.
Bilbo can take this role precisely because he is not in quite such thrall to
gold as the other characters, and where Gollum riddle's [are] words associated with his
alienated life underground, Bilbo's riddles all point towards relationships and
the social in some way - as in "No-legs lay on one-leg, two-legs sat near on
three-legs, four legs got some," which conjures up a whole society of a man
and a cat sharing a fish-supper. Bilbo is rather like a fairy-tale trickster: a
trump card who changes situations and rules and makes new connections.
And like the Christmas burglar and chimney invader, Santa Claus, he is a
distributor and gift-giver. For The Hobbit takes us modern capitalists
- and Bilbo too with his formal contract - on a journey into more ancient
economic models of exchange, in which society operates through the giving and
receiving of gifts. To be a recipient of a gift is also to become a gift-giver
oneself, so we see the Lake Men restoring the Arkenstone to lie on the breast of
the dead Thorin. Bilbo himself is offered huge amounts of treasure but accepts
only as much as one pony can carry, and then proceeds to donate jewels as he
travels. Once home again in Bag End, he spends the rest in presents too. Tolkien
makes all this central to hobbit society, in which one gives as well as receives
presents on one's birthday.
The answer to dragon-sickness is not just simple generosity but giving as a
mode of exchange, which unites donor and recipient, and which prompts
reciprocity. Tolkien unites here gift-exchange practices of traditional
societies with the Distributist political vision of his own day, which sought a
more equal and just society not by removing private property but by distributing
it as widely as possible.
Reading this at Christmas, however, reminds us of the most widely distributed
gift of all: the Christ Child, who is given to all of us and to the earth
itself. God the burglar - the thief in the night - smuggles himself into the
world He made: "veiled in flesh the Godhead see" as Wesley's hymn reminds us and
another begins, "When came in flesh the Incarnate Word / The heedless world
slept on." Like Bilbo Baggins, there is more to this baby than appears: he too
is a riddle, and Christmas poems and carols love to extend the contradictions of
his birth into paradox, as in this example from Richard Crashaw:
Welcome all wonders in one sight,
Aeternity shut in a span.
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth, and GOD in MAN.
To read this riddle is to open a way to unlock the frozen gaze, fascinated by
the dragon hoard but not in such a way as to reject the beauty and value of
material objects so much as to pass them on. To see the baby hidden in the
manger is to recognise the true Arkenstone, the "heart of the mountain," shining
with "its own inner light." The - precious - gift of the Christ Child allows us
to be more wedded to the world than ever, but in such a way as to become aware
of its vulnerability and contingency.
On his death-bed, the dwarf king, Thorin commends Bilbo's blend of courage
and wisdom, adding, "if more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded
gold, it would be a merrier world." Food and cheer are transitory pleasures,
which take their value from the moment and the company. The Hobbit is
actually as much about food or lack of it - as well as the fear of being eaten -
as it is about the shiny solidity of metal. The dwarves are continually
tightening their belts or existing on cram.
Just as Bilbo teaches the dwarves the value of sharing their gold, so they
teach him at their first encounter - the unexpected party - the value of sharing
food and distributing it as widely as possible. What, one wonders, was one
bachelor hobbit going to do with a larder as full as his obviously was with
mince-pies and cheese, seed-cakes, pork pies, cold chicken and pickles?
Economics is not a party, and the Incarnation is not a political program, but The Hobbit has something profound to offer us at this festive
season about the true use of the bounty and beauty of the earth, which is to
distribute it in such a way as to enable and make visible as many relations
between producers and consumers, and fellow-workers as possible in contrast to
the barren golden abstractions and glamour of money-markets. Ruskin wrote,
"there is no wealth but life" and the hobbits are so successful a race as
enablers and burglars because deep down they know that too.
But even the comfort and the fellowship of the Shire must be given up, "made
strange" and riddled, so that one can travel "there and back again." When Bilbo
brings us back with him from the Lonely Mountain, ordinary hobbit and human life
can itself be received back as a gift, and seen as such, so that its comforts
may be shared with others.
Alison Milbank is Associate Professor of Literature and Theology
at the University of Nottingham, and Priest Vicar of Southwell Minster. She is
the author of Chesterton
and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real and, with Andrew
Davidson, For the
Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions.
The Hobbit 2 Trailer 2013 The Desolation of Smaug - Official Movie
The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug 2
No comments:
Post a Comment