A Rabble of Uninvited Dwarves

A Rabble of Uninvited Dwarves Paul Acker (bio) Tolkien's account of how he first began writing The Hobbit is well known, deservedly so, since it is a wonderful origin story. One version of the anecdote, which Tolkien gave in a 1968 interview for BBC television, reads as follows: I'd got an enormous pile of exam papers there, and marking school examinations in the summertime is an enormous, was very laborious and, unfortunately, also boring, and I remember picking up a paper and actually finding … one page of this particular paper was left blank. Glorious! Nothing to read, so I scribbled on it—I can't think why—"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit." (Lee 142)1 Here Tolkien emphasizes his delight at finding a page left blank by a student—he was tempted to give the student extra marks for it—because his or her complete failure meant that Tolkien was spared marking at least one page. The student's utter blank was alchemized into a fantastical beginning for Tolkien. The contrast is delectable, between the staggering tedium of an academic's worst job, grading papers (in this case, secondary school papers) and the pure invention of a word and sentence that seem to come from nowhere but will lead everywhere,2 to places with names like the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, Rivendell, and Lake-town. Most immediately, in the first pages of the ensuing novel, that inspired first sentence led to the creation of an original species of fantasy beings: half-sized, furry-footed, round-bellied rural folk who so valued their comfort that they burrowed in the ground like rabbits, if rabbits decorated their homes with paneled walls and stuffed their pantries with seed-cakes and tea. Naming the Dwarves But Bilbo the hobbit's slow, endless round of meals and snacks and pipe-smoking is of course interrupted—by a rabble of uninvited dwarves3—and that onset of incident has a different origin, if again a verbal one: not a set of names that came from nowhere, as the book's first sentence about hobbits seems to have done, but from a very [End Page 9] specific place, a locus in Tolkien's reading for pleasure rather than (pedagogical) pain, if an academic's special variety of pleasure. He had found a wondrous cache of Old Norse names for dwarves, and this fact is also well known, Tolkien having reported it privately in a letter to his friend G. E. Selby on Dec. 14, 1937 and then publicly in a letter to the Observer on Feb. 20, 1938, soon after the publication of The Hobbit on Sept. 21, 1937.4 I don't much approve of The Hobbit myself, preferring my own mythology (which is just touched on) with its consistent nomenclature … to this rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Völuspá, newfangled hobbits and gollums (invented in an idle hour) and Anglo-Saxon runes. (Shadow 7)5 The dwarf-names, and the wizard's, are from the Elder Edda (Letters 31).6 In a letter to Jennifer Paxman on September 26, 1947, Tolkien was a little more specific (Rateliff 2: 757; not in Letters): All these dwarf-names … come out of the list of dwarf-names inserted into the Völuspá or 'Prophecy of the Sibyl' that is the first poem of the Elder Edda. So also in August, 1967, Tolkien drafted a letter which stated: Thus the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit … are derived from the lists in Völuspá of the names of dvergar … In Völuspá, Eikinskjaldi rendered Oakenshield is a separate name, not a nickname; and the use of the name as a surname and the legend of its origin will not be found in Norse. Gandalfr is a dwarf-name in Völuspá! (Letters 383) The list of dwarf-names within Völuspá is called in Icelandic Dvergatal, the 'tally' or list or catalogue of dwarfs. The names in question, in the order in which they intrude upon hobbit Bilbo's solitude, are Dwalin, Balin, Kili, Fili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and Thorin Oakenshield (H, i...