Many of the elements in the Enchanted Stream scene in The Hobbit are here, albeit
used very differently: the strange white hind, the fruitless hunt (as also in Sir
Orfeo), the eerie laughter in the dark wood, even (in lines 69–76 and 151–155) the
enchanted water that, when drunk, brings disaster upon the intruder.17 Similarly, in
Marie de France’s ‘Guigemar’, the first in her collection of twelve Breton lays, her
titular hero is out hunting one day when
Guigemar saw a hind with a fawn;
a completely white beast,
with deer’s antlers on her head.
Spurred by the barking of the dogs, she sprang
into the open.
Guigemar took his bow and shot at her . . .
—The Lais of Marie de France tr. Rbt Hanning & Joan
Ferrante [1978], ‘Guigemar’, lines 90–94.
In Guigemar’s case, his shot does strike and mortally wound the deer, but he is
unable to enjoy the meat because the arrow rebounds and injures him grievously as
well; if there were any doubt that the ‘completely white’ hind with antlers like a stag
were magical, they disappear when she speaks, laying a curse upon him for wounding
her. Perhaps an echo of this appears in The Hobbit, when Bombur is stricken at
the exact moment Thorin shoots the stag. Finally, in the Welsh tale ‘Pwyll, Prince of
Dyfed’, the First Branch of the Mabinogi, Pwyll meets with misfortune while hunting
a deer, although in this case it is not the deer but the hounds who are hunting it
who are white:
. . . of all the hunting dogs he had seen in the world, he had never seen dogs the
colour of them: the redness of the ears glittered as brightly as the whiteness of
their bodies.
—The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales,
tr. Patrick Ford [1977], page 37.
Naturally enough, since these particular hounds (the cwn annwn) belong to Arawn,
King of Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld (which is conceived of as both Faerie and
the Land of the Dead, depending on who is telling the story, rather like the faerie
realm in Sir Orfeo).18 White hounds also appear in Tolkien’s ballad ‘Ides Ælfscýne’
(‘Lady Elven-fair’), his own version of the belle dame sans merci legend which appeared
in Songs for the Philologists [1936] but had been written at Leeds sometime
in the first half of the 1920s as part of the Scheme B Songbook, where the narrator
describes his beloved’s unearthly homeland:
þær gréne wæs grund, ond hwít hire hund,
ond gylden wæs hwæte on healme
This passage may be translated as
There green was the ground and white her hound
And golden was the wheat in the fields [or: on the stalk].19
Even the horses being ridden by the elvenking, his knights, and damsels in Sir Orfeo
were ‘snow-white steeds/and white as milk were all their weeds’ [i.e., clothes]
(lines 145–146), as is the horse (‘her milk-white steed’) upon which the Queen of
Elfland takes Thomas Rhymer away with her after their tryst under the Eildon tree
(Child Ballad number 37, text A, stanza six); according to some versions of the
story, the two deer she sent years later to recall Thomas to Elfland were white as
well. Note the repeated insistence not just on whiteness as a feature of creatures native
to Faerie but on the strange intensity of the whiteness, which glimmered (The
Hobbit), glistered (‘The Lay of Aotrou & Itroun’), or glittered (The Mabinogi). And
once again we have the motif of a fruitless hunt that leads the hero into danger –
the deer Pwyll is hunting is actually killed before his pack reaches it by a strange
pack of white hounds, whom he drives from the kill, thus deeply offending their
lord, the King of the Underworld. Pwyll does not feast on deer-meat any more than
Guigemar or Bilbo’s companions, but instead rather than bear Arawn’s enmity he
willingly enters Faerie at Arawn’s bidding to take the faerie king’s place for a year
and, at the end of that time, kill Arawn’s great enemy and rival – a deed he accomplishes
so chivalrously that he thereafter to the end of his life bears the cognomen
Pwyll Pen Annwfn (‘Pwyll, Head of Annwn’).
Pwyll enters Faerie willingly, in order to make good on a debt he has incurred,
and perhaps for this reason comes back safely in the end to his own world and time,
winning the friendship of the Faerie King in the process and, shortly afterwards, a
faerie bride of his own, the Lady Rhiannon. More often, those who enter Faerie do
so unwillingly or unwittingly, like Lady Heurodis in Sir Orfeo, Lord Nann in the old
ballad, or the many prisoners carried off by the fairies – Briggs not only mentions
many similar tales in passing but devotes an entire chapter to the topic (The Vanishing
People, pages 104–17), as does Jacob Grimm in Teutonic Mythology (volume
three, chapter XXXII). And this in turn brings us to Tolkien’s final major borrowing
from fairy tradition in his depiction of the wood-elves: the theme of imprisonment
within an elf-mound.
For although Tolkien never calls it by that name, the Elvenking’s Halls in many
ways fit the folktale descriptions of an elf-mound or fairy hill. A number of the hills
so identified in the British isles are barrow-mounds, and it is perhaps significant
that in several of the pictures he drew of the scene Tolkien gave the entrance to the
Elvenking’s Halls a lintel gate (trilithon) such as those found on many real-world
megalithic tombs.20 Even without the neolithic associations, that Tolkien’s woodelves
live in caves (as did the elves of Doriath and Nargothrond in The Book of Lost
Tales and other stories in the Silmarillion tradition) may be yet another of his realistic
touches rationalizing fairy mythology: many of the traditional tales feature a
cave as the entrance into a fairy realm or, in at least one famous case, out of the fairy
realm into our world.21 The Tuatha dé Danaan, the fairy-folk of Ireland whose martial
prowess seems to have been Tolkien’s main model for the great warrior-elves
of the Quenta Silmarillion (and who were to have featured in an unwritten chapter
of The Lost Road [1936]; cf. HME V.77–8),22 were so closely associated with the
elf-mounds or fairy hills that they came to be more commonly known as aes sidhe
or daoine sidhe, both literally meaning ‘the people of the fairy hill’, until sidhe shifted
from its original meaning of ‘elf-mound’ to mean the elves themselves (as in the
anglicized banshee, or bean sidhe: ‘woman of the sidhe’, faerie-woman). The sidhe
were thought to live within the hollow hills, a conception that no doubt gave rise
to the modern idea that fairies were smaller than humans in size, but in earlier lore
these were simply the entrances to the Otherworld, as in Sir Orfeo, where the hero
follows the faerie ladies when they enter an elf-mound:
with right good will his feet he sped,
for stock nor stone he stayed his tread.
Right into a rock the ladies rode,
and in behind he fearless strode.
He went into that rocky hill
a good three miles or more, until
he came into a country fair . . .
—Sir Orfeo, lines 345–351.23
 

One universal feature of elf-mounds, whatever else was believed about them, was
the difficulty of escaping from one once inside – cf. the Elvenking’s words (p. 380):
‘there is no escape through my magic doors, for those who are brought once inside’,
a point later re-affirmed by Bilbo’s experience (‘Magic shut the gates’, ibid.).24 One
motif often tied into this, as old as the myth of Persephone, is the idea that anyone
who eats fairy food becomes trapped in fairy-land and cannot thereafter escape;
Briggs recounts several tales of visitors being warned not to eat fairy-food, in at
least one case by someone who had already done so and become trapped herself who
prevents her beloved from sharing the same fate (‘The Fairy Dwelling on Selena
Moor’, British Folk-Tales and Legends [1977; rpt. 2002], pages 181–4). It is therefore
striking that The Hobbit contains no trace of this motif: the starving dwarves
(and the hobbit as well) eat the elven food as soon as it is offered and suffer no ill
effects whatsoever; in fact, it saves them from starvation and does not hinder their
eventual escape in any way.25
That eventual escape – originally after months of captivity, reduced in the published
version to a matter of weeks (see the calendaric reckonings accompanying
Tolkien’s notes for the 1960 Hobbit, p. 823) – comes after ‘a weary long time’. In
the folk-tales, those few captives in fairy-land who do succeed in escaping almost
always do so by one of two means. They are either rescued by someone outside the
elf-mound or fairy-circle – an idea Tolkien toyed with in Plot Notes A, as we have
already seen, but ultimately rejected – or they escape on their own by means of a
trick. Tolkien adopted the latter solution, and so far as I can discover the idea of escaping
in barrels was his own invention;26 there is nothing like it in the traditional
literature, and it may be taken as a typical intrusion of practical hobbitry into the
elven-dwarven impasse created by stubbornness, arrogance, and an unwillingness to
let go of ancient history.
Out of these motifs, drawn together from scattered passing references in various
medieval tales and some of their more modern descendents (e.g., the ballads) –
all the record we have left of a once-widespread belief system now recoverable
only through imaginative reconstruction of such remaining hints – Tolkien created a
seamless and satisfactory whole. To borrow Verlyn Flieger’s analogy, the individual
pieces of elf-lore that have by chance and good luck survived but shorn of their
original context are rather like broken pieces of ancient stained glass, retaining their
striking evocative quality but their original pattern lost; Tolkien has taken these fragments
and reassembled them, ‘remounting, as it were, the stained glass into a new
window’ (Interrupted Music, page 131).