The Hobbit: Bilbo Baggins Has His Own Opinion

A review of The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

By H.R. Zimmerer

Spoiler warning: This review discusses the complete story and its ending.

Bilbo Baggins would prefer visitors to arrive in manageable numbers, at a reasonable hour, with some respect for the contents of his pantry. This strikes me as an entirely defensible position.

The dwarves do not share it. Their arrival turns his comfortable home into the beginning of an undertaking for which he has supplied neither enthusiasm nor convincing qualifications. Gandalf has decided that Bilbo is suitable, and the company is prepared to be sceptical at considerable length.

THE BOOK

The Hobbit

Author
J. R. R. Tolkien

First UK publication
September 21, 1937

Series
Middle-earth · The Hobbit

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The pleasure of The Hobbit begins in that difference between what an adventure looks like in a song and what it does to a person’s dinner. Tolkien understands that a comfortable chair is a perfectly substantial reason to hesitate before going out into danger. Bilbo’s eventual courage gains from the fact that the comforts he leaves are attractive.

Rereading the book, I value the domestic comedy as much as the larger landscape. The narrator is conversational, sometimes teasing, and quite willing to interrupt a grand occasion with a practical observation. Middle-earth is already old and dangerous, but the book introduces it through somebody who would appreciate knowing when lunch might be available.

The journey gradually changes Bilbo’s position within the company. Initially, he has to endure their doubts while trying to manage his own. His escape from Gollum, the rescue from the spiders and his ingenuity in arranging the barrel escape give those doubts less room to operate.

The change is not simply that Bilbo becomes more useful. He becomes increasingly capable of deciding for himself what being useful should mean.

His encounter with Gollum is important for reasons that reach beyond the Ring’s later significance. Bilbo has a chance to kill a creature who frightens and threatens him. The decision to spare him comes from an act of imaginative attention: he recognises something of the misery of living alone in the dark.

The scene does not make Gollum safe, grateful or suddenly pleasant. Mercy does not come with a guarantee of sensible behaviour from its recipient. Bilbo must still get away.

Tolkien gives the same independence a more public and contentious form through the Arkenstone. Once the company reaches the mountain, the recovery of treasure does not produce a straightforward restoration of justice. Thorin’s sense of entitlement hardens while the claims of others become inconvenient.

Lake-town has paid dearly for the disturbance of Smaug. Bard and the Elvenking possess interests that cannot reasonably be dismissed as an intrusion upon a private family triumph. The dragon’s death leaves a question of distribution that defeating the dragon has done nothing to answer.

Bilbo’s decision to give the Arkenstone to Bard is therefore the most interesting act of loyalty in the book. He risks Thorin’s friendship and his own standing within the company to create the possibility of a settlement. Obedience would be much easier to explain afterwards.

That is a remarkable place for the agreeable little companion to arrive. He can love the people he has travelled with and refuse their account of what they are owed.

Thorin’s anger makes the cost immediate. His later reconciliation with Bilbo matters because it includes the recognition that possession has distorted his judgement. The grief of his death is not diminished by acknowledging how difficult he has become.

Smaug, meanwhile, is a wonderfully articulate demonstration of the uses of malice. His conversation with Bilbo does more than establish the dragon’s vanity. He understands how to direct suspicion towards existing weaknesses in the company’s arrangement, including the doubtful practicalities of Bilbo ever receiving his promised reward.

Bilbo survives that conversation through intelligence and caution. He does not personally kill the dragon, and the distribution of achievement is part of the book’s good sense. A small person can make a decisive contribution without becoming the only person capable of doing anything.

The battle near the end also resists turning his journey into the acquisition of a glorious military identity. Bilbo is knocked unconscious during it. When the story returns to him, victory has losses to account for, and the people missing from the company matter more than an exhaustive inventory of heroic blows.

The book has limitations. Most of the dwarves remain far less distinct than Thorin, and some peoples are presented through broad types rather than the individual attention Bilbo receives. Its briskness can make a major event feel surprisingly brief. Readers arriving for the extended dramatic treatment of later adaptations may need to adjust their expectations.

But that briskness also protects the story’s peculiar character. It remains a tale about this hobbit’s encounter with a world larger than the social arrangements that once defined him.

When Bilbo comes home, his neighbours’ opinion has become less authoritative. His chair still matters. So do his books, his friendships and his freedom to be thought a little odd.

I find that ending more satisfying than a transformation into somebody unrecognisably grand. Bilbo has acquired the experience to disagree with a king and come home content to be Bilbo.