It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.

This verse is posed as a riddle in J. R. R. Tolkien’s children’s fantasy novel The Hobbit. In the story, the creature Gollum challenges Bilbo Baggins to a riddle-contest deep beneath the Misty Mountains; Bilbo’s life depends on answering correctly. The riddle’s solution is “dark,” a natural fit for the subterranean setting and for Gollum’s own existence in isolation and shadow. The riddle-contest scene, written in the early 1930s and published in 1937, draws on traditional English riddle-poetry while advancing the plot by testing Bilbo’s wits at a moment of extreme peril.

The riddle personifies darkness as an omnipresent force defined by absence: it cannot be perceived by the senses, yet it is everywhere—“behind stars and under hills”—and it “fills” emptiness. The paradox underscores how darkness is experienced not as a thing but as the negation of light and life. The final lines—“Ends life, kills laughter”—extend the idea from physical obscurity to existential threat, linking darkness with fear, death, and the extinguishing of joy. In The Hobbit, this meaning resonates with Bilbo’s situation: he is literally in the dark and metaphorically confronting the perilous unknown.