Enlightening the Cave: Gollum’s Cave as a Threshold between Worlds in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Riddles in the Dark”

• Main Author: Katariina Kärkelä
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 2019-06-01
• Series: Fafnir
• Subjects: literature and philosophy; theory of forms; knowledge in fiction; plato; tolkien
• Online Access: http://journal.finfar.org/articles/1752.pdf

This article presents a parallel reading of the chapter “Riddles in the Dark” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that appears in The Republic. Plato’s metaphysical and epistemological views, known as the theory of forms, provide the theoretical foundation for the analysis in which the literal and figurative meanings of the cave motif are of primary interest. The Allegory of the Cave will be examined alongside the Analogy of the Sun in a manner that takes into account both their literal and analogous aspects, and The Republic will be seen not only as a theoretical work of philosophy but as an eloquent literary dialogue as well. The analysis focuses on the characters of Gollum and Bilbo and considers the moments of entering and leaving the subterranean cave as a transition between different metaphysical and epistemic positions. This article is centred around the cavethematic, but also takes into account the motifs of light, seeing, and blindness that are very common in Tolkien’s fiction: the preliminary assumption is that light and darkness have great epistemic value in Tolkien’s fiction not only symbolically but literally, and Plato’s Analogy of the Sun will be used to illustrate and justify this reading. The questions pondered in this article rise from the overall problems of the metaphysical structure of Tolkien’s fantasy universe as well as its epistemic laws as represented by the symbol of the cave.