I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
Bilbo Baggins is one of the most quietly radical protagonists in modern fantasy. What begins as a comfortable, marmalade-scented existence in a tidy hobbit-hole ends, by the close of The Hobbit, with a hobbit who has picked locks, kept his word to murderous dwarves, and refused to murder a creature simply because the rules of his new trade permitted it. The distance between those two endpoints is what makes Bilbo such a compelling subject for any reader who lingers over Tolkien's pages.
What I find most striking, returning to The Hobbit as an adult, is how gradual the change feels. Bilbo does not wake one morning and decide to be brave. He is coaxed, cornered, and at times almost bullied into growth, yet each shift is also a small act of will on his part. The arc from Baggins to burglar happens in the small spaces, in the words he chooses to speak and in the deeds he allows himself to perform.
In Australia, where readers tend to encounter Tolkien through community book clubs and in the wooden-floored aisles of shops like Readings in Carlton or Dymocks in the city, there is a particular appetite for this kind of interior transformation. Local fantasy writers often cite Bilbo as the template for the reluctant hero, and at sessions of the Melbourne Writers Festival it is not uncommon to hear a panelist describe their protagonist as "a bit of a Baggins at heart." That shorthand, spoken over a flat white in Brunswick or on the train to Flinders Street, captures exactly what Tolkien spent three hundred pages demonstrating.
What follows is a close reading of how that metamorphosis unfolds, paying attention to the moments when Bilbo speaks differently from how a Baggins should speak, and acts differently from how a Baggins should act. It is in those word-and-deed pairings that the burglar is born, and the Baggins quietly steps aside.
Bilbo at the opening of The Hobbit is a creature of comfort. He enjoys a quiet breakfast, a good book, and the predictable rhythms of Bag End. Tolkien specifies that his family, the Bagginses of Hobbiton, are respectable and well-off, and that Bilbo himself wants nothing more than to be counted among the well-to-do hobbits who never have adventures. The portrait is affectionate, but it is also pointed: a hobbit who has never travelled past the borders of the Shire is, in Tolkien's moral economy, a hobbit who has not yet been tested.
The setting reinforces the point. Hobbiton, with its green hills and round doors, has often been compared by Australian readers to the rolling countryside of Tasmania's Derwent Valley or the patchwork farms of the Southern Highlands. Both landscapes are undeniably beautiful, and both gently enforce a sense that the world ends at the property boundary. Bilbo's first sentence in the novel, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," places him squarely inside that bounded world. To leave it is, for a Baggins, almost a category error.
And yet the Shire is not merely a prison of habit. It is also a training ground. Bilbo has manners, language, and a sense of contract. When Gandalf marks his door with the dwarves' rune, Bilbo does not yet know that those marks will lead him into a year-long commitment. The Shire has taught him how to keep his word once it is given, and how to behave politely even to strangers. Those small Shire-taught virtues turn out to matter enormously once the adventure gets under way. The burglar that Bilbo will become is, paradoxically, built from Baggins-shaped materials.
The first real transformation of Bilbo's self-understanding happens in language. When Thorin Oakenshield and his company sign the contract written by Bilbo himself, the wording is dry and businesslike: burglar, expert treasure-hunter, payment, funeral arrangements. Bilbo signs because Gandalf nudges him, but the words he has chosen commit him far more deeply than he realises. To speak the role of burglar is to begin inhabiting it.
This is a Tolkien theme that recurs throughout his legendarium, and it is one that I have explored elsewhere in a piece on the gift of men death as a mystery. There, the focus is on how the free peoples of Middle-earth frame their mortality through words that carry weight. Here, the pattern is simpler but no less striking: Bilbo names himself a burglar before he has done anything burglarious. The deed follows the word, as if the word has already begun doing the work.
Tolkien renders this with characteristic humour. The morning after the contract is signed, Bilbo regrets it in the usual way after a sleepless night. A fair dinkum reader, several chapters in, can still picture the hobbit pacing his pantry in the dark, wondering if perhaps one could simply not go. The comedy of the moment depends on our understanding that Bilbo has now been pinned by his own prose. He cannot unwrite the contract without becoming a different sort of person altogether.
The famous riddles scene in Gollum's cave is the first sustained test of Bilbo's newly claimed identity. Out of luck, out of sight, and armed only with a small Elvish knife, Bilbo does not slay Gollum when he could. He spares him. He chooses, in a moment of extreme personal danger, to behave like a creature of the Shire rather than a monster-killer. The act is small, but its consequences ripple through the rest of the story: it is the moment the burglar is differentiated from the warrior.
For readers sitting in a quiet corner of the Hobart Bookshop or browsing the Tolkien shelves at Kinokuniya in Sydney, this scene often lands differently than the dragon-fights later in the book. The dragon-fights are spectacular, but the riddles scene is intimate. Bilbo's victory there is internal. He proves that he can think, bluff, and restrain himself, a set of skills that turn out to matter far more than swordsmanship.
It is also worth noting that the riddles scene is structured as a verbal contest before it becomes a physical one. Words first, deeds second. Gollum loses not because Bilbo strikes him but because Bilbo asks the question "What have I got in my pocket?" and refuses to give a straight answer. That refusal is itself a Baggins-shaped act: polite evasion as a survival strategy. The burglar, it turns out, has been quietly rehearsing his craft in the very manners that the Shire taught him.
If the riddles scene is the birthplace of the burglar, the choice to spare Gollum's life is its ethical foundation. Bilbo could have killed the creature as he lay weeping on the shore. The dwarves would have approved. Even Gandalf might have nodded. But Bilbo feels suddenly what the narrative calls "a pity to put an end of his life." It is one of the first moments in Tolkien's published fiction in which a heroic character refuses the logic of kill-or-be-killed on principle.
The significance of this mercy is enormous, and not only because it preserves Gollum long enough to matter in The Lord of the Rings. It marks a turning point for Bilbo himself. From this moment on, the burglar is no longer simply a thief-for-hire; he is a person with a conscience. The Shire has shaped his manners, and now those manners have shaped his morals.
Australian readers often bring an outdoorsman's pragmatism to this scene. Sitting around a campfire in the Grampians or on a winter night in the Blue Mountains, a discussion of Tolkien tends to circle back to this moment. Did Bilbo do the right thing? Was it foolish? Was it un-Baggins-like? The question has no settled answer, but the debate itself is the point. Tolkien has built a scene so morally textured that readers fifty years on, in another hemisphere, are still arguing about it. That is the work of an author who understood that deeds, not words, finally define a person.
The barrel sequence down the river is where Bilbo's reputation within the company begins to catch up with his self-image. He has already begun to dress and behave like a burglar, but the dwarves still treat him as a liability. The river-ride, in which he escapes the elves of Mirkwood clinging to empty barrels and riding alone down the rapids, is the first great deed that wins their respect. He arrives at Lake-town thin, soaked, and grinning, visibly changed.
The change is also linguistic. Earlier in the story Bilbo apologises for nearly every sentence. By the time he reaches Esgaroth, he is speaking with quiet authority, negotiating with the Master of Lake-town, and standing toe-to-toe with Thorin as an equal. The burglar has stopped being a costume and become a self. Words and deeds are now travelling in the same direction, and the Baggins of the Shire seems a long way behind.
For readers in places like Brisbane, where fantasy conventions draw a wide and vocal crowd, this sequence tends to be the most-loved of the book. It is the moment when the adventure stops being something that happens to Bilbo and becomes something he is doing. He is no longer the apologetic hobbit dragged along by dwarves. He is, recognisably, the burglar of the contract.
By the end of The Hobbit, Bilbo returns to the Shire a different creature, and not only because of the gold and the mithril coat. He carries a capacity for strangeness that his neighbours cannot share. When he stands in the market and tells the truth about the dragon, the Shire-folk shake their heads and conclude that he is "not quite himself." They are right. The Baggins and the burglar now share the same waistcoat, and there is no going back.
What Tolkien offers, then, is not the simple story of a coward becoming brave. It is the more interesting story of a respectable person discovering that respectability is not the same thing as goodness, and that the deeds we choose to perform — to spare a creature, to honour a contract, to ride alone down a dark river — quietly reshape the words we are able to speak about ourselves. Bilbo ends The Hobbit as both Baggins and burglar, and the richness of his character is precisely that he never fully resolves the tension between the two.
For anyone walking past the shelves at a suburban Dymocks on a Saturday arvo, or hearing Tolkien discussed at a community book club over brekkie in Adelaide, that tension is what keeps the novel alive. The Hobbit is not a story about slaying dragons. It is a story about a hobbit learning to say, and to do, things that his family would never have said or done. That learning is the heart of the book, and it is why the burglar, and not the dragon, is the thing we remember.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading