A Socialist reads the Hobbit Part 10 – Mirkwood
Mirkwood is a great name. If you knew nothing else about it you’d get a lot of the idea just from the name. We have already got some information about it from previous references by Gandalf and Beorn, so we have some idea of what we are in for. It is a dark and gloomy place full of magical dangers. It is just the kind of place that you would find a wizard most helpful. But Gandalf makes one of his trademark disappearances right now. He doesn’t offer any explanation – he likes to be mysterious.
They enter Mirkwood by the Forest Gate. This confused me on first reading because forests are not generally gated, and certainly not very large ones. We have already heard that Mirkwood is the largest forest in the northern part of the world. I did wonder if it was supposed to be a fairy gate. When I was young any trees that grow together in such a way as to resemble a gate would invariably be referred to as a fairy gate. The gate to Mirkwood conforms to the pattern, but that seems to be the end of it. You don’t seem to be going into fairyland at all, or at least not just yet.
Entering Mirkwood is in fact much more like entering a tunnel. For the rest of the chapter we are very much in the dark. It is dull during the day and pitch black at night. After the sun goes down the only light they see initially is the large insect eyes around them. I have mentioned before that in Tolkien’s world the theory of Plato that the eyes emit light seems to hold. One consequence of this idea is that you need to explain why anywhere that eyes are found there isn’t plenty of light to be found from them.
One way round it is to assume that darkness is not so much the absence of light but something which itself has light absorbing properties. And this is something that recurs quite often in Tolkien’s writing – with the added concept that darkness has something inherently evil about it. So it makes sense that the problem with Mirkwood is a bit more deep seated than the simple inconvenience associated with poor vision.
The malaise caused by the darkness of Mirkwood is most clearly shown when Bilbo is sent up a tree to see how much more of the forest they have to travel through. He bursts out into the light and sees a gorgeous flight of butterflies. I was really pleased to see this on the face of it fairly minor incident making it into the film. The contrast highlights the dismal world they are having to live in. Mirkwood does however have quite a lot of interesting content despite the low wattage of the lighting.
At one stage they see a white hart and some other deer of unspecified colour. I am sure that must have some kind of deep symbolic significance, but I am afraid I draw a complete blank on it myself. They do however knock Bombur, the dwarf with the fuller figure, into the enchanted stream which they have been specifically warned to avoid without specifically being told what the consequences would be. Bombur’s symptoms turn out to be an extremely deep sleep requiring him to be carried by the rest of the company.
I remember on first reading of this assuming that this was going to be a major part of the plot, but in fact it doesn’t have much overall significance. Bombur wakes up several pages later, and aside from having a dream mildly predictive of the end of the chapter he is soon back to normal and no long term harm has been done. Although the deer have provided a minor obstacle their other role seems to be to indicate that the forest is getting a bit less evil. Up until this point all we have encountered have been nuisance insects, black squirrels and most significantly of all – spiders.
This brings us to Tolkien’s spider theme, which pops up in all his main books. Spiders are frequent Middle Earth villains, coming in a variety of sizes including very large indeed. One in the Silmarillion is big enough to wreck the original layout of the mythical world itself. The ones in Mirkwood seem to be in the region of the size of a coffee table. But they are all evil and malevolent. Tolkien might well have picked up his interest in spiders in Africa as a boy. But spiders are common enough in Britain and most small boys have at some point caught one and examined it closely. Spiders make ideal villains being extremely repulsive in appearance and being the very definition of carnivores.
They are also a great symbol of the capitalistic class taking advantage of others while contributing nothing in return – so they are a good indication of Tolkien’s subconscious inner socialist in action. They don’t have any precedent in folklore that I can think of. Giant spiders come straight from the prof’s brain.
The spiders take an interest in the dwarfs and when their guard is down make an attack. The sleeping dwarfs are easy prey and are soon captured in the traditional way of spiders by being enclosed in a cobweb cocoon. Bilbo however wakes up and kills the spider trying to do the same to him. This is a big deal for the hobbit, who is quite pleased with his own heroism and names his sword Sting to commemorate it. He then proceeds to use his new found self confidence, his ingenuity and his magic invisibility ring to rescue the rest of the dwarfs.
Or rather most of the dwarfs. It turns out that Thorin is missing, having already been captured by the elves – which Tolkien uses as another word for fairy. In fact the dwarfs have run into the elves before they reach the spiders but have so far failed to make contact with them. They have stumbled into the elves’ midnight feasts with the intention of begging for some food.
This is classic folklore. Fairy rings are a common sight in the fields of southern England. They are rings of especially green and luxurious grass that sport small light brown mushrooms when they are in season. The story is that they mark the spots that fairies have their feasts on summer nights. They are lit up with fairy lights. But if you try and enter the ring while the fairies are there the lights will go out and the fairies vanish. And this is exactly what happens to the dwarfs. They see a slap up meal going on, but on approach everything vanishes.
Incidentally the size of fairies/elves is a bit of an issue with Tolkien. The best known data point in popular culture is Walt Disney’s Tinkerbell who is a couple of inches in height. The size of fairies in my head has been calibrated to the size of the fairy rings I am familiar with. These rings vary in size, but a diameter of about 10 feet would be typical. To be a suitable venue, any species holding an event in one would need to be in the region of 12 inches or so.
Never having seen Disney’s Peter Pan until long after I read the Hobbit my visual image of them was derived from a book called Flower Fairies where most are female and they have butterfly wings, but are rather more human looking than Tinkerbell. The wings don’t look particularly functional. The elves of Mirkwood however are clearly not much like these. Indeed Tolkien refers to them as having a fairy appearance, cleverly implying that they might have been taken for ordinary humans without saying as much.
But Tolkien is on solid ground in making fairies and elves synonymous and giving them a close to human size and appearance. That corresponds to how they appear in folk ballads, a good example being the magical ballad of Tamlin. This was one of a set of ballads collected by a man called Child and consequently called the Child ballads. I don’t know if Tolkien was familiar with these. I would have thought he would be and as a professor at Oxford he’d have been able to easily get to see samples of them. And they would presumably have interested him.
They weren’t really current cultural artefacts in the Britain Tolkien grew up in. But in the sixties and seventies there was a revival of interest in the folk tradition spearheaded by groups like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention. So I was able to hear Tamlin as recorded by Fairport with an up tempo rock beat only a few years after I read the Hobbit. I instantly recognised that the fairies or elves in this song were exactly like Tolkien’s conception of them.
Tamlin is a human but he has been captured by the queen of the fairies – also referred to as elves. He is now transformed into an elf and needs to be rescued. The heroine of the ballad becomes pregnant with an elf baby, and later needs to be told that Tamlin is on a white horse to distinguish him from the genuine fairies. The last line has the fairy queen regretting not turning Tamlin into a tree while she had the chance.
Although I suspect Tolkien was aware of the Child Ballads and of folk songs in general I don’t have any hard evidence of this apart from the fact that there is a recording of him singing the troll song from Lord of the Rings. The tune he sings it to is one that is used a lot in folk music. He might well have simply heard it being sung somewhere – that being how folk songs sort of work. But he may well have taken an interest in them as sources, even though he never seems to have mentioned this anywhere in writing. They ought to have been right up his street given his other interests.
Tolkien developed his ideas about elves over his writing career but the Hobbit elves sound a lot like folklore elves. They look good, are human sized, have magical powers and don’t sport butterfly wings. Above all, they follow their own agenda and are not particularly well disposed towards humans.
But we’ll look into elves more in the next episode.
Mirkwood was the part of the book that most impressed itself upon my imagination when I first read it. It was quite a surprise on rereading the chapter for this review to find how short it was. I thought it took up about a third of the book. But it is certainly the part of the book that Bilbo and the dwarfs seem to find the hardest to cope with. Their encounter with the spiders is the one where they come closest to death. The idea of being tied up with cobwebs is bad enough. To then get eaten by a giant spider is truly horrifying.
Real fairy stories of course have a long tradition of being extremely violent and horrible. Even those of us who try to avoid it are familiar with the Walt Disney treatment of Snow White. It is well worth reading the Grimm brothers’ original.(I know they didn’t originate the story but simply collected it, but you know what I mean). It is a really violent and gruesome story. Spoiler alert I am about to tell you the ending of it. The final conclusion of the original story has the wicked queen being forced to wear burning shoes and then dance herself to death. And that is typical of the tone of the whole story.
Bilbo grows in stature as the story goes on. His acquisition of a magic ring has increased his usefulness to the party, and his own skills have grown as well. Armed with a new self confidence, cloaking ability and a rather handy sword he is able to stage a rescue of the dwarfs from their capture by the spiders. This saves the day, but it does mean that once again the party has lost the equipment and supplies necessary to continue the mission.
But despite its darkness and generally horrible nature, Mirkwood is surprisingly short of actual danger. The spiders are the only creatures that actually pose a significant health risk to the travellers. And in the end it is the elves that actually capture them when they try to gatecrash their party in search of food.
