Bilbo Baggins

Bilbo Baggins belonged to the hobbits, the small, home-loving folk of the Shire, and was born in the Third Age 2890 as the only child of Bungo Baggins and Belladonna Took. His father, a hobbit of comfortable means, excavated the luxurious smial of Bag End under the Hill at Hobbiton, where Bilbo grew up and lived as a bachelor of good standing. His parentage joined the two strains that the narrator of The Hobbit presents as the poles of his character: the Bagginses, prosperous and so predictable that their opinions could be guessed without asking, and the Tooks, a wealthy but eccentric clan given to occasional adventures. Belladonna was one of the three daughters of the Old Took, and neighbourly gossip even credited the family, absurdly, with a fairy ancestor — a way of saying that something not quite hobbit-like ran in their blood.

Within Tolkien's fiction the name is presented as a translation. Hobbit names of daily use were mostly short and, by the time of the tale, carried no remembered meaning; the appendices explain that such names have been anglicized, and that in the genuine Westron forms the ending -a was masculine, so that the English -o of Bilbo stands in for an original ending in -a. The family name is likewise a rendering chosen to preserve the original's association with the word for a bag, which also underlies the name of the family home, Bag End — a pun the translation deliberately keeps intact.

Most of Bilbo's bynames arose from a single role: Gandalf introduced him to Thorin's company as a burglar, a professional title the dwarves used in their contract with him, at first with audible doubt. Confronting Smaug, he prudently withheld his true name and instead described himself in a chain of riddling epithets — barrel-rider, ring-winner, luck-wearer and the like — since, as the narrative observes, it is unwise to give a dragon one's real name, though the clues in such talk carry their own risk. Among his own people his reputation ran the other way: his oddities made him a figure of fireside legend, remembered in Shire talk as Mad Baggins long after he had left Hobbiton.

In April of the Third Age 2941, Gandalf marked Bilbo's door and returned the next day with Thorin Oakenshield and twelve companions, drawing the startled host into their expedition to recover Erebor and its treasure from the dragon Smaug. Bilbo left Bag End at a run, without so much as a pocket-handkerchief, and the journey east soon tested him: the company was nearly eaten by three trolls, rested at Rivendell where Elrond read the moon-letters on Thorin's map, and was captured by goblins beneath the Misty Mountains. Separated from the others in the dark tunnels, Bilbo found a small golden ring on the floor and shortly afterwards met its former owner, the creature Gollum, beside an underground lake. He survived their contest of riddles — winning at last with the not-quite-fair question of what he had in his pocket — and, discovering that the ring conferred invisibility when worn, slipped past Gollum and out of the mountain. From this point his standing in the company began to change, for he now possessed a resource none of the others suspected.

The later stages of the quest were largely carried by Bilbo himself. In Mirkwood he killed the great spiders that had trussed up the dwarves, naming his elvish blade Sting in the fight, and when the company was imprisoned by the Elvenking he engineered their escape hidden in barrels floated down the Forest River to Lake-town. At Erebor it was Bilbo who twice went down the secret passage into the dragon's lair, noting the bare patch in Smaug's armoured underside — knowledge that, carried by a thrush to Bard of Esgaroth, made the dragon's death possible. When Thorin, besieged in the Mountain, refused any share of the hoard to the Lake-men and elves, Bilbo secretly handed over the Arkenstone to Bard and the Elvenking as a bargaining piece, an act that earned him Thorin's fury but was meant to force a settlement. The Battle of Five Armies followed nonetheless; Bilbo, knocked unconscious early, missed most of it, and was reconciled with the dying Thorin afterwards. Taking only two small chests of treasure, he travelled home with Gandalf and reached Hobbiton in mid-2942, in time to interrupt the auction of his own belongings, having been presumed dead.

A retrospective account published after Tolkien's death, "The Quest of Erebor", gives Gandalf's own explanation of these events, recounted to the hobbits in Minas Tirith after the War of the Ring. There the wizard describes how he happened upon Thorin at Bree in 2941 and came to insist, against the dwarves' scepticism and his own uncertainty, on including a hobbit in the venture — partly from his memory of the young Bilbo's eagerness for tales, partly from a foreboding that Smaug must not be left for Sauron to use. In this telling the choice of Bilbo appears not as whim but as a piece of long-sighted providence that Gandalf himself only half understood at the time.

The following decades were outwardly quiet. Bilbo lived on at Bag End in comfortable eccentricity, visited by dwarves and by Gandalf, writing poetry and keeping up friendships with elves, while the ring — of whose nature he had told even Gandalf a doctored story — preserved him unchanged in appearance. In 2989 he adopted his young cousin Frodo, orphaned years before, and brought him to live at Bag End as his heir. At his joint birthday party with Frodo on 22 September 3001, celebrating his hundred-and-eleventh year, he put on the ring mid-speech and vanished before his guests, intending to leave the Shire for good. In the confrontation that followed at Bag End, Gandalf pressed him hard, and Bilbo — angrily, and only with the wizard's help at the last — left the ring behind for Frodo: the first of its keepers, as Gandalf later observed, ever to surrender it of his own accord.

After a last journey that took him again to Dale and the Mountain, Bilbo settled in 3002 as Elrond's honoured guest in Rivendell, where he spent his remaining active years on verse, on his memoirs, and on scholarly work from Elvish sources. Frodo found him there in October 3018, much aged now that the ring no longer sustained him; at the Council of Elrond the old hobbit offered, quite seriously, to finish what he had begun and carry the Ring to the Fire himself, an offer received with respect but gently set aside. Before the Company departed he gave Frodo his sword Sting and the mail-shirt of mithril he had been given from Smaug's hoard, gifts that would later save Frodo's life. When the hobbits passed through Rivendell again after the War of the Ring in 3019, they found him frail and drowsy, the long weight of his years falling on him at last.

Bilbo's place in the larger history of the Third Age rests not on any inherent power but on the consequences of two small acts. As the finder of the One Ring he became, unknowingly, the hinge on which the fate of the age turned; Gandalf later told Frodo that more than chance seemed to be at work in the finding, and that Bilbo was in some sense meant to have the Ring — though by a design other than its maker's. Equally weighty, in the wizard's judgement, was the moment under the mountains when Bilbo, invisible and armed, forbore to strike the wretched Gollum out of pity. Gandalf held that this mercy at the outset of his ownership governed all that followed: because Bilbo began his keeping of the Ring without violence, its grip on him stayed shallow, and the pity itself would in the end prove decisive for the fate of many.

In himself Bilbo possessed only the ordinary endowments of his kind, developed by practice: he moved almost soundlessly, saw and heard keenly in the dark, and threw stones with an accuracy hobbits cultivate from childhood, a skill that served him against the spiders of Mirkwood. His real weapons were verbal — riddling talk, patience, and a cool head in bargaining — and the narrative marks his solitary killing of a spider, alone in the dark, as the point at which he first felt genuine confidence. He was never a fighter in any serious sense; against trolls, wargs or armies he was helpless, and his successes came by stealth, wit and a luck so persistent that his companions came to rely on it.

What passed for magic in his story came from things he carried, and each had plain limits. The Ring made its wearer unseen but not undetectable: in bright sunlight it left a faint shadow, and it muffled neither sound nor scent, so that Bilbo still depended on hobbit-quietness while wearing it. Its deeper cost showed slowly — he spoke of it as his treasure in terms that echoed Gollum's, and even years after surrendering it the old attachment could flare, as at Rivendell in 3018, when he reached for the Ring at Frodo's neck and seemed for an instant a small grasping creature. That he could give it up at all, and then only barely and with Gandalf's insistence, marks both the strength and the boundary of his resistance.

Within his own family Bilbo's closest bonds and sharpest frictions ran along the same line: the question of Bag End. His cousins Otho and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins had long expected to inherit the smial, and the auction held during his supposed death left a grievance that never healed; his eventual choice of Frodo as heir was thus an act of affection that was also, unmistakably, a disinheritance. With Frodo he shared more than a birthday — the narrative presents them as kindred spirits, the two most Tookish Bagginses of their generations — and the parting gift he left Lobelia, a case of silver spoons alluding to some that had gone missing years before, shows the dry, needling humour he reserved for relations he disliked.

His friendships crossed boundaries few hobbits ever approached. Gandalf remained the one figure who knew him whole, from tale-loving child to ring-keeper, and their bond survived even the bitter scene at Bag End in 3001. The dwarves counted him a companion for life: Balin, with Gandalf, called at Bag End years after the quest, and news of Erebor and Dale reached him ever after. Elves welcomed him as few mortals were welcomed, and in Rivendell he formed a late, easy friendship with Aragorn, whom he called the Dúnadan and enlisted as adviser on his verses. Nearer home his influence ran downward through Hobbiton society: he taught the young Sam Gamgee his letters and filled him with stories of elves and dragons, a private legacy that helped shape the Ring-bearer's most faithful companion.

His adversaries he met, characteristically, in conversation rather than combat: with both Smaug and Gollum the duel was one of words, flattery and riddles, fought where a hobbit's wits counted for more than a warrior's arm. The tie to Gollum proved the most consequential relationship of his life after all, for the creature's obsessive hatred fixed on the name Baggins, and when Gollum was captured and questioned in Mordor, the words he yielded — Shire and Baggins — were what first drew Sauron's servants toward Bilbo's country and his heir. Thus even his enmities carried his story onward: the burglar's trick played on a wretched creature in the dark became, decades later, the thread by which the Enemy hunted the Ring.

When Tolkien began the sequel to The Hobbit in late 1937, it was at first a further adventure of Bilbo himself: in the earliest version of "A Long-expected Party" it is Bilbo who gives the farewell feast and vanishes, his motive being restlessness and the fact that the treasure brought back from the Mountain was running low. The hero's role soon passed to a younger figure, first conceived as Bilbo's own son Bingo — a solution that briefly required Bilbo to have married, which Tolkien discarded as untrue to the character — and then as an adopted young cousin, Bingo Bolger-Baggins, who only in later phases of drafting was renamed Frodo. At this stage Bilbo's ring was merely one magic ring among many, and in the draft chapter "Ancient History", the forerunner of "The Shadow of the Past", Gandalf's account still followed the first edition of The Hobbit, in which Gollum honestly meant to give the ring away as a prize — a version increasingly at odds with the ring's darkening nature as the story grew.

Bilbo also figured in the long uncertainty over the ranger-hobbit Trotter, the precursor of Strider: among his notes Tolkien raised the possibility that Trotter was Bilbo himself in disguise, rejected it, and instead made him Peregrin Boffin, a young relative drawn into wandering by Bilbo's example, before the character was finally transformed into a Man. The drafts likewise show that the song Bilbo chants at Rivendell was no new composition but a thorough reworking, through many successive texts, of the earlier comic poem "Errantry", gradually turned toward the matter of Eärendil.

Bilbo has been portrayed across the major screen and radio versions of both books. In the Rankin/Bass animated television film of The Hobbit (1977) he was voiced by Orson Bean, who returned to the role in the same studio's The Return of the King (1980); in Ralph Bakshi's animated The Lord of the Rings (1978) he was voiced by Norman Bird. The BBC's 1968 radio serial of The Hobbit cast Paul Daneman as Bilbo, and in the 1981 BBC radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings the part was taken by John Le Mesurier — alongside Ian Holm as Frodo, the actor who two decades later played the elderly Bilbo in Peter Jackson's film trilogy (2001–2003). In Jackson's three-part film adaptation of The Hobbit (2012–2014) the young Bilbo was played by Martin Freeman, with Holm reappearing in framing scenes as the old hobbit writing his memoir.

The film versions alter several particulars of his story. Jackson's Hobbit trilogy keeps Bilbo conscious throughout the Battle of Five Armies, placing him at Ravenhill as a participant in the fighting and a witness to Thorin's final combat, where the book has him knocked senseless near the battle's start; it also gives him an invented heroic moment early in the quest, in which he physically defends the fallen Thorin against the orc Azog, who is expanded into a pursuing antagonist across all three films. In The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Bilbo's grasp at the Ring in Rivendell — which the book renders as a fleeting impression in Frodo's eyes — is realized on screen as a sudden, monstrous transformation of his face.