Bilbo Baggins

• 1. Introduction

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  Bilbo Baggins, a creature of habit and comfort, was not the sort of person anyone expected to change history. He smoked his pipe, ate his meals on schedule, and lived in a round-doored hole in the Shire called Bag End. Then, in J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 novel The Hobbit, a wizard named Gandalf arrived at his door, and nothing was the same again. What kind of character sets out timid and comfort-loving and returns something else entirely? What does it mean that Tolkien based this unlikely hero on a real Victorian designer who also loved home comforts and grew through adventurous journeying? And why has Bilbo, a hobbit hired as a burglar, haunted readers' imaginations for nearly a century?

• 2. The Reluctant Burglar

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  Gandalf's recommendation of Bilbo to Thorin Oakenshield and his thirteen Dwarves rested on a careful calculation. In a manuscript Tolkien later collected in the Unfinished Tales, Gandalf is given the lines: "I want a dash of the Took... and I want a good foundation of the stolider sort, a Baggins perhaps. That pointed at once to Bilbo." Bilbo, in other words, was chosen precisely because he contained two strains: the adventurous Took side and the steady Baggins side.

  The quest sent Bilbo across the wilderness, through Rivendell, over the Misty Mountains, and through the black forest of Mirkwood. His single most consequential act came in the dragon Smaug's lair, where he stole a golden cup, then returned a second time wearing his magic ring. Smaug smelled him despite the invisibility, and Bilbo drew the dragon into a riddling conversation. During that exchange, Bilbo noticed a gap in Smaug's armour. An old thrush overheard him reporting this detail to the Dwarves, and flew directly to Bard in Lake-town. Bard killed the dragon with that information. Bilbo's words, not any weapon he carried, decided Smaug's fate.

  When the Dwarves reclaimed the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo found the Arkenstone of Thrain, described as the most precious heirloom of Thorin's family, and hid it. He then surrendered it in an attempt to ransom the treasure and prevent a war between the armies of Dwarves, Elves, and Men. Thorin called this act a betrayal and banished Bilbo on the spot. The Battle of Five Armies followed anyway, ended only when Eagles and Beorn arrived to turn the tide against the goblins and wargs. Thorin was fatally wounded in the fighting, but had time to make peace with Bilbo before he died.

• 3. The Ring and Its Cost

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  Sixty years passed between the opening of The Hobbit and the opening chapter of The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo had kept the magic ring the entire time, still with no understanding of what it was. It had prolonged his life well past any normal span, but the cost was described in precise and unsettling terms: the ring left him feeling "thin and stretched".

  Bilbo's 111th birthday, which he called his "eleventy-first", opens The Lord of the Rings. His younger cousin Frodo Baggins turned 33 on the same day, legally coming of age. Gandalf had to persuade Bilbo to leave the ring behind for Frodo rather than carry it away with him. After the party, Bilbo traveled to Rivendell and then to the Lonely Mountain before returning to settle at Rivendell and write books.

  The hobbits who destroyed the One Ring found Bilbo in Rivendell on their return journey. He looked "very old, but peaceful, and sleepy". Two years after the destruction of the Ring, Bilbo boarded a ship at the Grey Havens alongside Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and Frodo, bound for Tol Eressea across the sea. He had composed a poem about that voyage, titled "Bilbo's Last Song", describing his own contemplation of the forthcoming journey to the Undying Lands.

• 4. A Name From Yorkshire

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  The philologist Tom Shippey traced the name "Baggins" to the spoken dialect words bæggin and bægginz in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, where the term means a substantial meal eaten between main meals, particularly at teatime in the afternoon. Shippey's observation is that Bilbo is definitively "partial to... his tea". Tolkien's connection to that dialect was direct. He worked at the University of Leeds from 1920, first as a reader in English studies and later as a full professor. He even wrote the foreword to Walter E. Haigh's 1928 volume A new glossary of the dialect of the Huddersfield district, the very work that recorded those spoken forms.

  The name Bag End carried its own layer of meaning. It was the actual name of Tolkien's aunt's farmhouse, situated at the bottom of a lane with no exit. Shippey described the English equivalent of "cul-de-sac" as a piece of "French-oriented snobbery", and noted that the socially aspiring Sackville-Bagginses had similarly attempted to Frenchify their family name, since Sack-ville translates roughly as "Bag Town". Journalist Matthew Dennison, writing for St Martin's Press, called Lobelia Sackville-Baggins "Tolkien's unmistakable nod to Vita Sackville-West", an aristocratic novelist and gardening columnist who was passionately attached to her family home, Knole House, which she could not inherit.

  Shippey drew one further connection. The opposite of a bourgeois property-owner is a burglar who breaks into bourgeois houses. In The Hobbit, Bilbo is literally hired as a burglar, making the Bagginses and the Sackville-Bagginses, in Shippey's phrase, "connected opposites".

• 5. William Morris and the Hobbit Template

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  Medievalist Marjorie Burns identified a remarkably specific template for Bilbo's character in the Victorian designer William Morris and his account of traveling in Iceland in the early 1870s. Morris's party set out on ponies, just as Bilbo and the Dwarves did. Morris met a man called "Biorn the boaster" who lived in a hall beside Eyja-fell and who told Morris, tapping him on the belly, that he was "so fat" - a scene that mirrors Beorn poking Bilbo "most disrespectfully" and comparing him to a plump rabbit.

  Burns noted that Morris was "relatively short, a little rotund, and affectionately called 'Topsy', for his curly mop of hair". His companion, the painter Edward Burne-Jones, gently teased Morris by depicting him as very fat in Iceland cartoons. Burns suggested these images make "excellent models" for the Bilbo who runs puffing to the Green Dragon inn. Morris also loved a pipe, a bath, and regular well-cooked meals, just as Bilbo did; both found themselves visibly out of place in wild country; both feared dark caves; and both grew through their journeys.

  Tolkien's own positioning of Bilbo in historical time was also deliberate. Shippey identified tobacco, which arrived in Europe in 1559, and the postal service, introduced in England in 1840, as the two anachronistic details that place Bilbo squarely in the Victorian to Edwardian era. Bilbo was, as Shippey put it, "English, middle class; and roughly Victorian to Edwardian" - attributes that have no business in the ancient world of elves, dwarves, and wizards, and whose comic clash is precisely the point.

• 6. Pilgrimage and Psychology

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  Christian writer Joseph Pearce described The Hobbit as "a pilgrimage of grace, in which its protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, becomes grown up... in wisdom and virtue". Dorothy Matthews offered a different reading: a psychological journey in which the anti-heroic Bilbo faces challenges without ever abandoning his love of home, discovering himself in the process.

  Matthews traced Jungian archetypes throughout the story. Gandalf she identified as the Jungian wise old man. The giant spider functions as a devouring mother figure. The ring itself is the Jungian circle of the self. Bilbo's escape from the underground chambers of the wood-elves, and his emergence into sunlight and the waters of the woodland river, she read as a symbolic rebirth. The dragon guarding the treasure she called "an archetype of the self, of psychic wholeness". Later scholars extended Matthews' framework using Erik Erikson's theory of development as an additional lens.

  Tolkien scholar Jason Fisher observed that the hobbit family trees Tolkien included in The Lord of the Rings give the book what Fisher called a strongly "hobbitish perspective". The genealogy establishes that Bilbo was both "a Baggins and a Took", making him, like Aragorn, what Fisher described as "a distillation of the best of two families". That dual inheritance was, according to the words Tolkien gave Gandalf, the entire reason Bilbo was chosen in the first place.

• 7. A Century of Adaptations

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  Bilbo's first radio appearance came in the 1955-1956 BBC serialization of The Lord of the Rings, where Felix Felton played him. Paul Daneman took the role in the 1968 BBC radio version of The Hobbit. The 1969 parody Bored of the Rings, by Harvard Lampoon co-founders Douglas Kenney and Henry Beard, renamed the character "Dildo Bugger".

  Orson Bean voiced Bilbo in the 1977 Rankin/Bass animated version of The Hobbit, then returned to voice both the aged Bilbo and Frodo in the same studio's 1980 adaptation of The Return of the King. Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated Lord of the Rings used Norman Bird for Bilbo's voice, while Billy Barty served as Bilbo's physical model for the live-action rotoscoping. The 3000th story broadcast in the BBC children's programme Jackanory was The Hobbit, in 1979, with Bernard Cribbins playing Bilbo's part among four narrators.

  The 1976 Russian translation of The Hobbit was illustrated by Mikhail Belomlinsky, who based his visual interpretation of Bilbo on the actor Yevgeny Leonov, describing him as "good-natured, plump, with hairy legs". John Le Mesurier played Bilbo in the BBC's 1981 radio serialization of The Lord of the Rings. The Finnish broadcaster Yle cast Martti Suosalo as Bilbo in the 1993 television miniseries Hobitit.

  Ian Holm, who had played Frodo in that 1981 BBC radio series, became the face of elder Bilbo in Peter Jackson's films, appearing in The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 and The Return of the King in 2003. Martin Freeman portrayed the younger Bilbo in Jackson's Hobbit film series, with Holm reprising his role in An Unexpected Journey in 2012 and The Battle of the Five Armies in 2014. The character's authorial role inside Tolkien's fictional world remains one of the more unusual aspects of the mythology: in the conceit of the Red Book of Westmarch, Bilbo is credited as the author of The Hobbit itself, translator of works from the elvish, and the composer of poems including "The Road Goes Ever On" and "All that is gold does not glitter", which Tolkien based on a line from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.