Inklings // May 2026 (The Hobbit)

The prompt for May’s Inklings link-up (check out Heidi’s post for the rules here to link up!) is a riddle scene in book or film. Of course the first thing I thought of was the riddle scene in The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, and since nothing else has come to mind since (except one or two scenes in Marx Brothers movies which might sort of kind of count), I’m going to stick with that and share the beginning of Bilbo and Gollum’s riddle duel. (I’m only sharing the first part of it, partly so as not to give anything important away, and partly because the whole scene is quite long.)

“What’s he got in his handses?” said Gollum, looking at the sword, which he did not quite like.
“A sword, a blade which came out of Gondolin!”
“Sssss” said Gollum, and became quite polite. “Praps we sits here and chats with it a bitsy, my preciousss. It likes riddles, praps it does, does it?” He was anxious to appear friendly, at any rate for the moment, and until he found out more about the sword and the hobbit, whether he was quite alone really, whether he was good to eat, and whether Gollum was really hungry. Riddles were all he could think of. Asking them, and sometimes guessing them, had been the only game he had ever played with other funny creatures sitting in their holes in the long, long ago, before he lost all his friends and was driven away, alone, and crept down, down, into the dark under the mountains.
“Very well,” said Bilbo, who was anxious to agree, until he found out more about the creature, whether he was fierce or hungry, and whether he was a friend of the goblins.
“You ask first,” he said, because he had not had time to think of a riddle.
So Gollum hissed:

What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?

“Easy!” said Bilbo. “Mountain, I suppose.”
“Does it guess easy? It must have a competition with us, my preciouss! If precious asks, and it doesn’t answer, we eats it, my preciousss. If it asks us, and we doesn’t answer, then we does what it wants, eh? We shows it the way out, yes!”
“All right!” said Bilbo, not daring to disagree, and nearly bursting his brain to think of riddles that could save him from being eaten.

Thirty white horses on a red hill,
First they champ,
Then they stamp,
Then they stand still.

That was all he could think of to ask – the idea of eating was rather on his mind. It was rather an old one, too, and Gollum knew the answer as well as you do.
“Chestnuts, chestnuts,” he hissed. “Teeth! teeth, my preciousss; but we has only six!” Then he asked his second:

Voiceless it cries,
Wingless flutters,
Toothless bites,
Mouthless mutters.

“Half a moment!” cried Bilbo, who was still thinking uncomfortably about eating. Fortunately he had once heard something rather like this before, and getting his wits back he thought of the answer. “Wind, wind of course,” he said, and he was so pleased that he made up one on the spot. “This’ll puzzle the nasty little underground creature,” he thought:

An eye in a blue face
Saw an eye in a green face.
“That eye is like to this eye”
Said the first eye,
“But in a low place,
Not in high place.”

“Ss, ss, ss,” said Gollum. He had been underground a long long time, and was forgetting this sort of thing. But just as Bilbo was beginning to hope that the wretch would not be able to answer, Gollum brought up memories of ages and ages and ages before, when he lived with his grandmother in a hole in a bank by a river, “Ss, sss, my preciouss,” he said. “Sun on the daisies it means, it does.”

I must say that I am very bad at riddle-ish sorts of games – obviously I know the answers to these riddles now, since I’m thoroughly familiar with the story, but when I was first introduced to it I don’t recall guessing even the easy ones. I guess we can just be thankful that I was not (and never intend on being) in Bilbo’s place here!

What’s your favorite episode in The Hobbit? Do you like riddles? Favorite Tolkien character(s)?