Bilbo Baggins: Values Greater Than Gold

Tyler Castner

299162

tccr4d@mail.missouri.edu

Popular Literature 2150 (Tolkien)

Bilbo Baggins: Values Greater Than Gold

One day in the early 1930’s, JRR Tolkien was preparing School Certificate papers for Oxford where he was employed as Rawlinson and Bosworth professor of Anglo-Saxon with a fellowship at Pembroke College when suddenly he came across a blank page and was struck with inspiration. On the blank page he scrawled, “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” So begins his literary classic, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, more commonly referred to the short form, The Hobbit. The epic which would spark the later writing of arguably Tolkien’s greatest masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, follows the titular character Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, on his unexpected quest to reclaim the vast riches of dwarves from the terrible dragon, Smaug. The story is told in the episodic quest mold with Bilbo and his dwarf companions going through several mini-adventures in the pursuit of their overarching goal. Tolkien uses a bard-like style in his telling of Bilbo’s tale, consistently referring to it as a story being retold rather than one occurring live. Tolkien also has instances where he will gloss over events similar to how a bard might in his telling of heroic tales. Throughout the course of his life, Tolkien’s work underwent numerous revisions to conform more to the storyline and context of the LOTR universe, producing three editions in his lifetime. Two post-humous versions of the text have also been published with very little done to change Tolkien’s words. It is only fitting that Tolkien’s novel would change so much over time as it fits well with the dynamic metamorphosis of Bilbo during is adventures. Bilbo begins his journey as a respectable, well-to-do hobbit who had no desire for such things as treasure or adventure, but that all changes one day when thirteen rugged dwarves arrive on his doorstep led by Thorin Oakenshield to tell him the...