Dora Baggins

Dora Baggins belonged to the Hobbits of the Shire, and within them to the Baggins family of Hobbiton, a household long settled near The Hill and reckoned by its neighbours as comfortable, predictable and entirely without appetite for adventure. The genealogical tables of the Bagginses place her as a daughter of Fosco Baggins and Ruby, of the Bolger family, and as the eldest of three children; her brothers were Drogo, who married Primula Brandybuck, and Dudo. Her position in that tree fixes most of the kinship for which she is remembered elsewhere: she was aunt to Frodo on his father's side, and, standing in her brother's generation, she was related to Bilbo in the same degree that Drogo was, as a second cousin. Nothing is recorded of a marriage or of children of her own, so that she appears in the record only as a Baggins by birth.

The surname she bore is not, strictly speaking, her own. The note on translation appended to the Red Book explains that the Hobbit names of the Shire have been given throughout in English forms standing for their Westron originals, so that Baggins is a rendering chosen to carry the associations of the original rather than a transcription of it. The same discussion observes that Hobbit women commonly bore the names of flowers or of jewels, a habit borne out immediately around her by her mother Ruby and her sister-in-law Primula. Dora falls outside that pattern: it is one of the short, plain personal names, of no evident meaning, which the Shire also used freely. What her family did observe was alliteration, the three children of Fosco all being given names in D, a decorative habit visible up and down the Baggins pedigree.

Of her character the narrative preserves a single, sharply drawn trait. By the last years of Bilbo's residence at Bag End she had become the senior woman of the connected Baggins and Brandybuck kin, and she had spent more than half a century supplying her relatives with counsel by letter, in quantities that outran any request for it. The habit is presented without malice and without admiration: it is simply what she was known for, an old lady of settled respectability whose correspondence was as regular as it was unsolicited.

The dates that fix Dora Baggins's life come not from the narrative but from the genealogical table of the Bagginses of Hobbiton, which sets her birth in the year 1302 of the Shire Reckoning. She was accordingly some six years older than Drogo and nine years older than Dudo, and she had passed her middle years before any of the events that the Red Book records began to touch her family. Of those first seven decades nothing whatever is preserved: no office, no journey, no quarrel, only the fact of her continuing presence in the tables as the years are entered against the names below hers. The same tables set no husband beside her and no children under her, so that her whole recorded life is passed within the family she was born into and among the descendants of her brothers. Long life was not unusual in that connection, but hers was to prove unusually long even by the measure of her kin.

The first dated event that certainly concerns her is a bereavement. In 1380 her brother Drogo and his wife Primula were drowned in the Brandywine while out on the water after an evening at Brandy Hall, and their only child, Frodo, was left an orphan at twelve years old. The accident was still being chewed over in Hobbiton a generation later, where the talk ran to the state of the boat, the size of Drogo's dinner and less charitable suggestions besides; the narrative reports the gossip without endorsing any of it. Dora takes no part in the account. The boy remained where the disaster had left him, at Brandy Hall among his mother's people, and it was the Brandybucks and not the Bagginses who brought him up through his boyhood.

Nine years later the balance shifted back. When Frodo reached twenty-one, in 1389, Bilbo brought him from Buckland to Bag End, named him his heir and made the Hobbiton house his home, so that Dora's nephew was restored to the Baggins side of his kindred and settled within reach of her. Her other brother's line continued quietly in the same years: Dudo's daughter Daisy married Griffo Boffin, and it is through him and through Frodo, not through Dora, that Fosco's descendants appear in the later tables. She stood by then at the head of her generation, the eldest of the three children and the survivor of both her parents and, before long, of both brothers. The habit for which she is chiefly remembered, the flow of written advice to her relatives, must have been well established before this date, since it was reckoned at more than half a century by 1401.

Her one appearance in the action falls on 22 September 1401, the day of the joint birthday feast at which Bilbo kept his eleventy-first and Frodo his thirty-third. Dora was then ninety-nine and the oldest woman living among Bilbo's and Frodo's relatives, a standing the narrative pauses to note when it comes to the presents. Bilbo vanished from the pavilion in the middle of his speech and left the Shire that night; the following morning the parcels he had labelled were set out in the hall and study at Bag End for their recipients to collect, each with a note attached, and a good many of the notes carried a sting under the courtesy. What was reserved for Dora was a large basket for waste paper, inscribed to her in memory of the correspondence she had maintained with him over so many years and closed with his love. The dedication is presented flatly, as one item in a long list, and no reaction of hers to it is recorded.

After that morning the record lets her go. The table gives her death in 1404, three years after the party, at the age of a hundred and two; she outlived her father, her mother and both her brothers, and in the end she outlived Bilbo's residence at Bag End as well, though not Bilbo himself, who was then in Rivendell. Her death falls fourteen years before Frodo sold Bag End and left the Shire in 1418, and a good deal further before the troubles that reached Hobbiton at the end of the War of the Ring, so that she has no place in any of it. What survives of her, therefore, is a set of dates in a pedigree, a sentence of description and a joke made at her expense by a relative who signed it affectionately. It is a slighter record than most of the names around hers, and it is all the more precisely dated for that.

Dora Baggins holds no office and exercises no authority that the Shire would have recognised as formal. The account of how the country was ordered names only a few positions of any standing — the Thain, held in her lifetime by the head of the Took family; the Mayor of Michel Delving, chosen at the Free Fair and charged chiefly with presiding at banquets and with the Messenger Service and the Watch; and, outside the Shire proper, the Master of Buckland. None of these ever falls to her, and none of them is recorded as falling to a woman at all. Her function in the record is instead genealogical and domestic: she is a fixed point in the pedigree of the Bagginses of Hobbiton, one of the names by which the paternal side of Frodo's kindred can be reckoned, and she belongs to the class of respectable, propertied Shire-hobbits whose weight in local life came from age, connection and reputation rather than from any post.

The single kind of influence attributed to her is persuasion by letter, and the narrative is careful about its scale. Half a century of counsel is a long exercise of family standing, and by 1401 her seniority among the living women of the connected families was worth a sentence of notice; but the counsel is described as helpful advice sent in excessive quantity, which is to say that it was offered rather than heeded. The limits show plainly in what happened around her without her. The arrangements that mattered for her brother's son — his upbringing among the Brandybucks after he was orphaned, and his later adoption as Bilbo's heir at Bag End — were made by others, and no consultation of hers is mentioned in either. Nor does she appear in any of the decisions taken at Bag End in Bilbo's last years there.

Nothing preternatural attaches to her. The only faculty the Prologue claims for hobbits generally is a knack for slipping out of sight quietly when large folk blunder past, and it is expressly explained as a skill grown from practice and inherited constitution rather than as any art of magic; Dora is not distinguished even in that. What she does carry is evidential weight of a modest sort. The list of parting gifts works by fitting each label to a known failing of its recipient, so that the objects and their dedications amount to a series of small character sketches; hers is the entry that records the correspondence, and it is the whole of what the narrative says she did. She stands in the story as an instance of the settled Shire that Bilbo and Frodo both left, and her powers are exactly those of an elderly relative with a pen and a good address.

Every tie the record grants Dora Baggins runs sideways or downward through her brothers, never through a household of her own. She is sister, aunt and cousin, and the family trees give her no other station; what accrues to her instead is the authority of simply having lasted longer than the rest of her generation. That produces an unusual shape of kinship for the Shire, where standing was ordinarily measured by a farm, a hall or a body of descendants. Dora has none of these, yet by the closing years of Bilbo's tenancy she was the person to whom the label of eldest surviving woman of the connected families attached. Her relation to Bag End is likewise oblique: she is close kin to both its master and its heir, and a party to neither the adoption that joined them nor the departure that separated them. Through her mother she belonged also to the Bolger connection, one of the several respectable families with whom the Bagginses regularly matched, so that her name sits at a junction of pedigrees rather than at the head of one.

The one relationship the narrative documents at any length is with Bilbo, and it is documented from a single direction. Half a century of letters passed from her to him; nothing is preserved of any reply, and the answer that survives is not a letter at all but an object left behind with a dedication attached. That dedication is double-edged, naming the correspondence as the reason for the gift while making plain what he thought should be done with it, and it closes with an expression of affection all the same. The combination is informative about the terms between them: the joke assumes a relative secure enough in her position to be teased without offence, and old enough in his acquaintance that the teasing needed no softening.

Set beside the other recipients that morning, she occupies a mild place. One kinsman by marriage received writing materials because he never answered his letters at all, which sets him at the opposite pole of the same habit and suggests that Bilbo had been keeping a private ledger of his relatives' epistolary manners. A young cousin was given a mirror, and the Sackville-Bagginses spoons, in a transaction carrying decades of grievance over silver and over the ownership of Bag End itself. Dora is reproached for an excess of family feeling; the others for vanity and for acquisitiveness. No quarrel, claim or enmity of hers is recorded anywhere, and she leaves the story without an opponent.