Inversions in the Wilderness - The Hobbit, Ch. VI

Tolkien may be more widely appreciated as a storyteller than as a stylist, but his combination of simplicity and sophistication continues to amaze me.  Consider the following passage, as the group escapes from the goblins: “at times they were marching along quiet as quiet over a floor of pine-needles; and all the while the forest-gloom got heavier and the forest-silence deeper.”  Aside from the obvious, but delicate and effective, instances of repetition, we have a subtle but effective inversion.  It seems to me that gloom would normally get “deeper” while silence would be likely characterized as “heavy.”  Yet here the darkness has weight and the silence has dimension.  Perhaps I’m making too much of this, but the linking of the two menaces to the word “forest” at the least encourages the reader to move back and forth between the concepts, making it easier to imagine their substitution for one another.

Let’s consider a clearer instance of inversion – and one that is utilized for comic rather than rhetorical effect.  When the dwarves take refuge up some trees, the narrator notes, “You would have laughed… if you had seen the dwarves sitting up in the trees with their beards dangling down, like old gentlemen gone cracked and playing at being boys.”  Here, expectations are wildly inverted – old men, after all, don’t belong in trees.

As a third example, we might focus on what I’ll call “cosmological” inversion – the flipping of the natural order of things, the transformation of the biological and spiritual rubric by which humans orient themselves.  Simply put, we’re introduced to talking animals.  The wolves provide a dramatic scene: “hundreds and hundreds, it seemed” “went and sat in a great circle in the glade; and in the middle of the circle was a great grey wolf.  He spoke to them in the dreadful language of the Wargs.”  By inverting animal and human behavior (the dwarves like birds in trees, wolves talking below) Tolkien stretches and twists our sense of reality on a number of levels.

Image: Princeton University