Fosco Baggins

Fosco Baggins was a hobbit of the Shire, and his place in the story is fixed by the genealogical tables rather than by the narrative. The table for the Bagginses of Hobbiton opens with Balbo Baggins, from whose sons the family divides into two lines: through Mungo it runs to Bungo and so to Bilbo of Bag End, while through Largo it reaches Fosco and the younger branch. He stands, in other words, one step aside from the household that the reader meets first, near kin to it but not of it, and the two lines converge again only in the generation of Frodo. The tree gives him three children — Dora, Drogo and Dudo — of whom the second carries the descent forward; Dora is also named in the narrative as Drogo's sister, which is as far as the story proper takes the family.

The first name follows the habit of the older Shire families described in the note on languages: such households liked sonorous given names that had, by the end of the Third Age, ceased to mean anything in the speech of their bearers. Fosco is one of these, and no sense is claimed for it anywhere in the works. Its shape, however, is not arbitrary. Tolkien explains that masculine names in the Common Speech of the Shire commonly ended in -a, and that he altered this ending in his rendering to avoid an effect that would sound feminine in English. Hence the run of -o names down this branch of the family — Largo, Fosco, Drogo, Dudo — which is a feature of the translation rather than of the original tongue.

The surname belongs to the same scheme. It is offered as an English equivalent of a Shire name, chosen to sound like an ordinary rural surname while keeping an audible link with the word bag and with the dwelling called Bag End. German editions accordingly give Beutlin, built on Beutel, and this is the form under which the family is known throughout the German-speaking reception. That practice answers directly to Tolkien's own position, argued at length when he objected to the treatment of Shire nomenclature in the first Dutch version: since the names are already presented as translations, a translator should carry their sense into the receiving language rather than leave the English standing or substitute inventions of their own.

Everything that can be said of Fosco Baggins in the order of time comes from the family tables, and the years they give are Shire years. That count runs from the settlement of the land itself and stands sixteen hundred years behind the reckoning of the Third Age, so that a Shire date is turned into the wider chronology by adding sixteen centuries to it. Within this frame Fosco was born in the year 1264 of the Shire, the son of Largo Baggins and of Tanta Hornblower; his life therefore falls wholly in the quiet stretch of Shire history that lies between the last of the old troubles in the north and the disturbances of Bilbo's day. No event of the wider world touches him in any record, and the tables note no office, journey or holding for him.

He married Ruby Bolger, a match that joined his line to one of the larger and more prosperous families of the eastern Shire, whose seat lay at Budgeford in the Bridgefields; the Bolgers appear elsewhere in the same tables and in the later narrative, so that the connection is not merely a name on a chart. Three children are entered under the marriage. Dora was born in 1302, Drogo six years later in 1308, and Dudo, the youngest, in 1311. The spacing is unremarkable and the record says nothing of where the household stood, though the branch as a whole is placed at Hobbiton by the heading of the table.

Fosco died in 1360, at the age of ninety-six, which is a full but not extraordinary span by the measure of his family; his own father had lived to ninety-seven. The date matters chiefly for what it excludes. Frodo was born in 1368, eight years after his grandfather's death, so that the two never met and the kinship between them is purely one of descent. By the time the events of the narrative begin to gather, Fosco has been dead for some four decades, and his part in them is the part of an ancestor: he supplies the line, and nothing else. It is for this reason that he never appears in the story proper, not even in the gossip of the Ivy Bush, where the older villagers reach back only as far as Drogo.

The consequence of Fosco's line falls to his second child. Drogo married Primula Brandybuck, whose mother was the youngest daughter of the Old Took, and the marriage is what draws the two Baggins branches back together: through it Frodo stood to Bilbo as first cousin once removed on one side and second cousin once removed on the other, a double reckoning that the villagers of Hobbiton worked out with some satisfaction. Drogo and Primula were drowned in the Brandywine in 1380, when their only child was twelve years old. The boy was taken in by his mother's people at Brandy Hall in Buckland, and remained there until Bilbo, then without an heir of his own, adopted him and brought him to Bag End at the age of twenty-one.

Fosco's other two children can be followed a little further. Dora outlived her brother by a long way and was ninety-nine at the time of Bilbo's farewell party in 1401, by then the oldest surviving relative of both Bilbo and Frodo; she had spent years sending Frodo letters of good advice, and the parting gift Bilbo left her acknowledged that correspondence with a dryness that the narrative does not trouble to explain. Dudo's line passes out of the family name at once: his daughter Daisy married Griffo Boffin, and the descent continues under that surname. Neither Dora nor Dudo leaves any further mark on events.

The branch that descends from Fosco therefore narrows to a single figure and then closes. Frodo held Bag End from 1401 until he sold it back to the other side of the family in 1418, and after the return from the War of the Ring he passed over Sea from the Grey Havens in the autumn of 1421, leaving no children; the tables record no further Bagginses in this line. Measured against the two Shire centuries that the Baggins tree covers, Fosco's own place is a short and undramatic one, and the chronology bears this out: a birth, a marriage, three children, a death well before the story begins. What the dates establish is the connection itself, which is the reason his name is preserved at all.

Whatever role belongs to Fosco Baggins is one conferred by record-keeping rather than by action, and it is worth asking why such a record existed at all. The hobbits took a pleasure in family history out of all proportion to the events they had to preserve; the Prologue observes their liking for books that told them what they already knew, provided the matter was set out in order and without contradiction, and genealogy suited that taste exactly. The tables printed at the end of the work are the outcome of that habit, and their function there is practical: they let a reader follow kinships that the narrative alludes to in passing and never pauses to explain. A name that occurs only in such a table is not therefore idle. It carries a line across a generation and makes the later connections calculable, and in this instance that is the entirety of the office held.

The question of ability answers itself in the general description of the people. Hobbits are said to possess no magic beyond an everyday sort, their one marked faculty being a knack of vanishing quietly when larger folk come blundering by, together with sharp hearing and good sight; they are tough at need but unwarlike by preference, and the Shire in their day maintained nothing that could be called a force. Nothing individual in this line is attributed to Fosco: no craft, no learning, no reputation for anything. What his household had instead was standing, of the kind the Bagginses were known for — comfortably off, settled, and respectable precisely because they could be relied on never to do anything unexpected. That is a social position rather than a power, and it is held collectively by the name, not by the man.

Descent did carry real consequence in the Shire, which is the nearest thing to influence that can be claimed here. Property and expectation followed kinship, as the narrative shows plainly enough in the aggrieved persistence of the branch that had long counted on Bag End coming to it. But consequence of that sort works after the fact and without the participation of the ancestor who supplies it; it is the shape of the tree that acts, not the name on it. The limit is accordingly absolute. There is no deed recorded, no speech reported, no opinion preserved, and no occasion on which the wider events of the age are said to have touched him or he them. What reaches the story is a position on a chart, and the sources make no larger claim.

Every relation recorded of Fosco Baggins is one of blood or marriage; the tables admit no friend, no associate, no dependent, and the narrative supplies none. What they do supply is his sideways position within the family. His father's eldest brother Mungo headed the senior line, so that Fosco and Bungo of Bag End stood as first cousins, and Bilbo, born of Bungo's marriage into the Tooks, was Fosco's first cousin once removed. Beyond the chart nothing links the two households, and neither man is said to have taken any notice of the other.

The women who married into his branch, and the men who took its daughters, come from the same small stock of names that recurs throughout the Shire gentry: Hornblower and Bolger in his own two generations, Boffin already at the head of the tree in his grandfather Balbo's marriage to Berylla, Brandybuck and Took in the generation after him. The Prologue observes that the hobbits of the Shire were much interrelated and kept their pedigrees carefully for that very reason, and this table is an illustration of the remark rather than an exception to it. Fosco's function in the pattern is to be one of the knots at which several of these names cross, which is why later kinships between otherwise separate households have to be traced back through him.

The same tree accounts for the one lasting hostility in the family. Longo, another son of the senior line, was Fosco's first cousin; his marriage to Camellia Sackville produced the doubled surname, and from their son Otho and their grandson Lotho came the grievance over Bag End that the story eventually allows to do real damage in the Shire. Fosco stands clear of all this by the accident of his dates, and yet the quarrel begins among the cousins of his own generation, in the branch nearest his own. Taken together, his relations describe a hobbit visible only through other people: a son, a husband, a father and a cousin, with no recorded attachment of any other kind.