The Thousand-Year-Old Story That Inspired The Hobbit
By: Laura, L.E. Van Altfeldt
Tags: Movies, History, Literature, Britain, America

The Thousand-Year-Old Story That Inspired The Hobbit

What Old English poetry brought to our literary reality.

An image of the first page of the Beowulf manuscript at the British Library.

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,

þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

So begins the poem Beowulf, a story presumably around a thousand years old, and written down by presumably an Anglo-Saxon (in the literal sense) who was Christian but showed a strong appreciation and indeed fascination for his pagan heritage. So too did the Catholic author known under the penname J. R. R. Tolkien, famous for the stories centred in Middle-Earth. To grab an audience’s attention, the Spear Danes and later Old English speakers used ‘what’ — invariably translated as ‘listen’, since it demands an audience’s attention. All poetry of the period was recited aloud, thus the Beowulf poet had his work cut out for him in remembering it all.

It is in that sense not dissimilar to later poems, because even Shakespeare had his verse in mind with a kind of rhythm which, as the musical Something Rotten later proved, could be sung just as well. The story of Beowulf, a warrior-hero who comes from a land far away to save the king of the Danes from a horrendous monster known as Grendel, survives in but a single manuscript. It is known as the Nowell Codex, after Laurence Nowell who was a 16th century collector of many such ancient pieces of literature. And in a twist of fate worthy of Tolkien himself, the Beowulf manuscript almost went up in flames in 1731.

Scorched but still readable, the Nowell Codex resided at a place perfect for a portion of British dark humour, due to the fact that the library was located in Ashburnham House. Monty Python couldn’t have written it better, but fortunately for us, the manuscript stayed mostly intact. Even in person, it is still an impressive item to behold, though due protectiveness of the artefact didn’t allow us to take any pictures when we did see it. It is also not on any permanent exhibit as far as I’m aware, because no matter how we look at it today, it is the only one of its kind anywhere. At least we get to live in an age where things are permanently stored at least somewhere, since the internet never forgets.

Tolkien

As many people who love Lord of the Rings probably know, Tolkien was an avid learner of languages, as well as a cunning linguist in his time. So much so, in fact, that he was among those linguists requested to aid in the project that would see to the decryption of the enigma code during World War II. Any knowledge on Alan Turing’s deeds should explain why linguists weren’t much needed after all, but J. R. R. Tolkien still devoted time to his country when it was in need, thus there was a gap between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring in terms of their release dates. It is also said that, though Tolkien despised allegory in all its forms, participating in World War I formed a lot of what we see going on in Middle-Earth.

And yet what is certainly apparent from reading his stories, is that Tolkien was a mythology and legends buff, particularly when it comes to the Germanic stories of old, as well as the Celtic ones. I cannot bring myself to ignore the fact that when I see people calling something a ‘Tolkien clone’ to reminisce about Tolkien’s love for the Beowulf story. Being inspired by something of the past as others are inspired by him now, I’d say. In his case, it was so strong that Tolkien himself made one of the translations for Beowulf, driving home that he was fluent in Old English. If it wasn’t clear from the lines I put at the top of this article, it isn’t exactly readable for speakers of Modern English. And while we’re on the subject…

J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1940s, aged 40s-50s.

Beowulf’s Dragon and The Hobbit’s Smaug

The Beowulf story centres around three fights. While the first two are pretty standard, the first dealing with the aforementioned monster Grendel and the second with Grendel’s mother, the latter is different in several ways. The most prominent is that it requires a more or less retired Beowulf to get up for one last fight when he’s old and grey, and another is that Beowulf sort of loses this fight. The old Germanic peoples, particularly those in Scandinavia (Beowulf, though written in Old English, most likely features no characters from the British Isles), were keen believers in the concept of hoarding treasure, taking revenge, and boasting as well as heroism.

Hoarding treasure should ring a bell. Of course, the dragon in Beowulf sits on a massive pile of treasure. Grendel’s mother already had a hoarding problem, so to speak, as she kept the sword in her cave which Beowulf used to kill her. Though he’d managed to kill Grendel in a perfectly fair fight (wherein he used no weapons), he needed a bit more for his more powerful mother. A fire-breathing dragon posed a few additional difficulties. Luckily for Beowulf, this last fight was the one time where he wasn’t abandoned by all of his friends. One kinsman named Wiglaf (“Wee-laf”) stayed with him, taking up his crown as he lay dying because Beowulf bestowed it upon him for his loyalty.

Smaug follows the pattern of the dragons of old Germanic myths, wherein he guards his own hoarded treasure (or steals it from others), and the reason Bilbo must go to him has to do with him attacking a village later. Enter Beowulf, because this is precisely the reason why he had to fight a formerly dormant dragon. The only difference is that Bilbo isn’t Beowulf, and that he’s the thief, rather than the warrior-king who must solve the issue. That, indeed, is reserved for Thorin Oakenshield in the end. In a bit of a twist, not only does the Beowulf poet let slip some of his own Christian beliefs into the old poem, but so does Tolkien allow his Catholic beliefs to flow into his writing too.

But don’t take my word on that last point. In the words of the late Tolkien himself, ‘The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.’ It wasn’t merely something that showed up as a secondary factor in Beowulf, wherein it was likely not present originally but added under the creativity of a different writer (namely the poet we know), but it was an important factor which drove the crux of the The Lord of the Rings story.