Bag End

• 1. Introduction

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  Bag End announces itself in a single sentence: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Scholars have ranked it among the most famous first lines in literature. It names a place and a creature at once. The sentence promises comfort, and it promises strangeness.

  The protagonists of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, both lived at Bag End. Both set out from it into danger, and both returned. That pattern turns out to have a precise name, a real-world counterpart, and meanings that scholars have been tracing for decades. Tolkien once wrote, "I am in fact a Hobbit," and scholars have taken him seriously. What does a hole in a hill reveal about the man who first imagined it, and why is it so difficult to leave?

• 2. Real-World Origins

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  "Bag End" was the real name of a Tudor home dated to 1413, in the village of Dormston, Worcestershire. It belonged to Tolkien's aunt Jane Neave. The name passed unchanged into fiction.

  The scholars Steven Woodward and Kostis Kourelis suggest that Tolkien may have modeled his Hobbit-holes partly on Iceland's turf houses, which were built directly into the earth. Examples of these structures still stand at Keldur.

  Good food, gardening, smoking a pipe, and a familiar home: these were the Hobbit-like traits Tolkien listed as his own. The Tolkien scholar Thomas Honegger writes that Bag End is the kind of place where "most readers feel severely tempted to put on their imaginary slippers and settle down to a piece of cake and some tea."

  Honegger argues that the hobbit-hole establishes the fundamental character of what Tolkien's Old English called "hol-bytlan," or hole-dwellers: beings with "a deep-rooted aversion against travelling outside the Shire." Travelling abroad, Honegger writes, "belongs to the same class as adventures." Bilbo puts it plainly in The Hobbit: "Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!" Tolkien drew Bag End and Hobbiton multiple times, only gradually settling on the home's final location and architecture.

• 3. Architecture as Character

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  The panelled walls, the tiles, the carpet, and the round windows set deep into the hillside all point in the same direction. Johanna Brooke, writing in the Journal of Tolkien Research, argues that every one of those features could have been made by Morris & Co. She identifies Bag End as an Arts and Crafts building, fitting within the ideas of the designer William Morris and his circle between 1880 and 1920.

  "Suitable sites for these large and ramifying tunnels...were not everywhere to be found," Tolkien wrote in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings. Only the richest and poorest Hobbits could continue the traditional practice of living in holes. The poor might have "burrows of the most primitive kind... with only one window or none." Bag End's position at the top of The Hill, Brooke writes, "demonstrates a physical and social elevation above other hole-owners."

  Its best rooms have "deep-set round windows," and its comforts include a dining-room, multiple pantries, and wardrobes. Brooke notes these Victorian-era luxuries suggest an owner who is "indulgent, overly-luxurious, too comfortable, a tad vain even." Yet the hanging-space for many hats and coats tells a different story: welcoming guests mattered.

  Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, published between 1898 and 1905, contains an entry for "hobman" noting that "each elf-man or hobman had his habitation, to which he gave his name." The Tolkien scholar Michael Livingston comments that from this entry it is easy "to recall the man-like, elf-friend, hole-dwelling hobbit Mr. Baggins of Bag-End, hired by the not-too-dissimilar dwarves to commit thievery."

  The cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad drew a floor plan of Bag End based on clues Tolkien scattered through his novels. Her plan makes Bag End some 130 feet long and up to 50 feet wide, cut into the Hill, with multiple fireplaces, chimneys, cellars, and pantries. Thomas Honegger writes that Fonstad's work has contributed substantially to giving Middle-earth an "independent existence."

  Morris himself once wrote that "the working man cannot afford to live in anything that an architect could design; moderate-sized rabbit-warrens are for rich middle-class men." Brooke finds the rabbit-warrens remark "aptly suits Bag End." The name of the place, it turns out, carries its own architectural argument, one that the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey has traced to a specific piece of French snobbery.

• 4. The Name's Meaning

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  "Bag End," Tom Shippey writes, is a direct translation of the French cul-de-sac, meaning "bottom of a bag." Shippey calls cul-de-sac "a silly phrase... a piece of 'French-oriented snobbery,'" used in England to mean a dead end. The French say impasse for the same thing.

  In both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Bag End forms one end of the main story arc. Since the Hobbits return there, it also forms the end point of what scholars call the story circle. Don D. Elgin wrote about Tolkien's Walking Song, which appears in The Lord of the Rings repeatedly, changing form as the quest progresses. In Elgin's reading, the song describes "the roads that go ever on until they return at last to the familiar things they have always known."

  Tolkien's own drawing titled The Hall at Bag-End, Residence of B. Baggins Esquire shows 20th-century fittings, including a wall clock and a barometer. A character named Lobelia Sackville-Baggins spent most of both novels trying to claim that interior for herself.

• 5. The Most Desirable Residence

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  The journalist Matthew Dennison noticed a connection between Lobelia Sackville-Baggins and the aristocrat Vita Sackville-West. Both coveted a great house they could not inherit. Vita Sackville-West was unable to claim Knole House, her family seat. By the time The Lord of the Rings was published, she had become famous as a novelist, a poet, and as The Observer's gardening columnist. Dennison notes that Lobelia is a garden flower; readers in the 1950s would have made the connection at once.

  Tom Shippey argues that the Bagginses and the Sackville-Bagginses are "connected opposites." The opposite of a bourgeois, he points out, is a burglar, someone who breaks into bourgeois houses. In The Hobbit, Bilbo is asked to do exactly that: act as a burglar and break into the lair of Smaug the dragon. The name Sackville-Baggins, Shippey observes, is a philological joke. Sack-ville can be translated as the French form of the humble "Bag Town," an attempt to reinforce the family's status by, in Shippey's word, "Frenchifying" their surname.

  The joke about "Frenchifying" a surname from "Bag Town" depends on Bag End itself being worth coveting. What made it worth coveting, scholars have argued, was partly everything it stood against.

• 6. Contrasts with the World

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  The historian Joseph Loconte set Frodo's light and serene Bag End directly against Saruman's dark and industrially destructive Isengard. He noted a parallel in C. S. Lewis's 1950 children's book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There the humble home of Mr. and Mrs. Beaver stands against the icy opulence of the White Witch's palace. In Loconte's view, both Tolkien and Lewis had "reintroduced into the popular imagination a Christian vision of hope in a world tortured by doubt and disillusionment."

  Thomas Honegger traces a different set of contrasts, grounded in Tolkien's own visual work. Tolkien's drawing The Hall at Bag End shows, in Honegger's words, "the homely yet narrowly limited space of a hobbit-hole." His The Forest of Lothlórien in Spring offers a different world entirely. Honegger describes it as "no particular place, but an airy glade in a forest filled with sunlight, evoking a feeling of sheltered openness."

  If the Shire is what Honegger calls a "secluded, remote petit bourgeois idyll," then Lothlórien is a "transcendental, idealised idyll." The Hobbit-holes also stand against the untamed Old Forest, the idyllic Rivendell, and the Dwarves' promised land of Moria. Honegger argues the contrast extends to time itself. Bag End and the Shire sit anachronistically in the present, while the Old Forest, Rivendell, and Lothlórien represent journeys back into the past.

  Ted Sandyman, a character in the novel, called Bag End "a queer place" and said its folk were "queerer." That word, queerer, would attract scholarly attention of its own.

• 7. Strangeness

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  David LaFontaine, writing in The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, describes Bilbo as a "confirmed bachelor" who is never linked romantically with any woman. He lives alone in what LaFontaine calls a "luxurious, lovely environment," and Tolkien, LaFontaine argues, admires Bilbo's "unconventional lifestyle... almost to the point of envy." LaFontaine reads Tolkien's account of Bilbo's "queerness" as a portrait of a homosexual man.

  Bilbo was also "very rich and very peculiar" in the eyes of the Shire, not least because he seemed not to grow old. He had left the Shire and come back changed, which set him apart from his neighbors. No amount of pantries and wardrobes could resolve that distinction. Frodo, after his own journey, was similarly marked.

  In 1969, the National Lampoon founders Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney published a parody novel called Bored of the Rings. In it, Frodo walks directly to his cozy fire and slumps in the chair, musing upon "the years of delicious boredom that lay ahead." His proposed entertainment: "Perhaps he would take up Scrabble." The joke depends on the reader knowing how appealing such boredom would feel. The absurdity of that ending would only deepen when a film director came along and built the whole place in the real world.

• 8. Jackson's Hobbiton

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  Peter Jackson built an elaborate Hobbiton film set on the Alexander sheep farm at Matamata, New Zealand. The set included a water-mill, the Green Dragon Inn, several Hobbit-holes, and Bag End itself built into a small hill with a garden. Jackson put his goal plainly: "It felt as if you could open the circular green door of Bag End and find Bilbo Baggins inside."

  Chad Chisholm and colleagues reviewed Jackson's 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey for the journal Mallorn. They noted that Jackson has the "rough and ready" Dwarves burst into Bilbo's "neat little home" and clean out his pantry. The reviewers called this "a sort of constant comic relief to the dangers in the dark."

  The Alexander sheep farm at Matamata gave Tolkien's imagined door a real hillside to open from.