Bilbo's Progress

There and back again

Autumn, 1966. The pittance from my holiday job had been almost completely frittered away on embarrassingly mundane vices. The one blessing about being almost permanently broke is that you can't go very far off the rails before the cash runs out. My summer of love never got beyond the occasional half-pint of bitter, slowly sipped.

It must have been a Friday. With the last scrapings of my assets I bought the three volume hardback second edition of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, took it home and read it through in that one, almost sleep-free weekend. For many years thereafter, a Christmas/New Year ritual was the re-reading of the book, albeit not quite so sleeplessly.

A few weeks later, after some enforced clean living, my finances had recovered enough to buy the paperback economy version (8s6d) of The Hobbit. I think I managed about 20 pages plus a cursory inspection of what was to come before I closed it, put it away and never opened it again for nearly fifty years. The Silmarillion, when it came along, after a quick glance never even got out of the bookshop.

However, with age has come wisdom and with wisdom has come patience. I recently read all The Hobbit and came to understand the flaws that repelled the young, impatient me and the fine things that I had overlooked. In what follows I shall try to make amends for my intemperate dismissal of the book all those years ago. It is a flawed masterpiece, but nevertheless a masterpiece.

Let's get a review of the flaws in The Hobbit out of the way first.

The flaws

The intrusive narrator

Those of us who have had the pleasure of reading stories to children know what fun it can be. We can pause the narrative at suitable moments and ask our little victims what they think about what is going on in the story or what they think will happen next. If the book has good illustrations, well, there is a lot to talk about there, too.

As the narrator of The Hobbit, Tolkien, thinking it is a children's book, is misled by this scenario into making a serious error. By assuming that the child is reading this from the page and that no one is reading the story aloud, he, the author, takes over the role of the reading parent. The narrative of The Hobbit is interrupted frequently by asides to the reader. Here is an example of the narrator taking centre stage over the narration for a complete paragraph (p. 32):

Off Bilbo had to go, before he could explain that he could not hoot even once like any kind of owl any more than fly like a bat. But at any rate hobbits can move quietly in woods, absolutely quietly. They take a pride in it, and Bilbo had sniffed more than once at what he called 'all this dwarvish racket', as they went along, though I don't suppose you or I would have noticed anything at all on a windy night, not if the whole cavalcade had passed two feet off. As for Bilbo walking primly towards the red light, I don't suppose even a weasel would have stirred a whisker at it. So, naturally, he got right up to the fire – for fire it was – without disturbing anyone. And this is what he saw.

The encounter with the trolls was the first real action of the story. It seems to have brought out the worst in Tolkien's twee fireside manner. This paragraph has only served to deflect the reader's attention from Bilbo's risky reconnaissance to the narrator's donnish disquisition on hobbit locomotion.

Here is another, particularly gauche example that follows closely on the first (p. 33):

'…'And time's been up our way, when yer'd have said “thank yer Bill” for a nice bit o' fat valley mutton like what this is.' He took a big bite off a sheep’s leg he was toasting, and wiped his lips on his sleeve.

Yes, I am afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each. After hearing all this Bilbo ought to have done something at once. Either he should have gone back quietly and warned his friends that there were three fair-sized trolls at hand in a nasty mood, quite likely to try toasted dwarf, or even pony, for a change; or else he should have done a bit of good quick burgling. A really first-class and legendary burglar would at this point have picked the trolls’ pockets – it is nearly always worth while, if you can manage it –, pinched the very mutton off the spits, purloined the beer, and walked off without their noticing him. Others more practical but with less professional pride would perhaps have stuck a dagger into each of them before they observed it. Then the night could have been spent cheerily.

Once again the narrator steps aways from the narrative, this time for an even more donnish disquisition on the tactics of dealing with trolls. The end effect of this is to make the reader believe that he or she is not reading the narrative of the story, but rather the narrative of the story being read.

With these sometimes annoyingly childish and Pooterish asides to the reader the storyteller inserts himself into the narrative, pushing the action into the background. This shifts the scene of the narrative abruptly – it is, for example, no longer the trolls' campfire feast, but the story teller talking to us directly. Put another way, the reader is not by the fire in the trolls' encampment but by the fire in Professor Tolkien's study.

It is not a perfectly accurate metaphor, but one way to think about this is in terms of the 'fourth wall' concept in theatre and films. The fourth wall is the front side of the stage that opens onto the audience beyond the proscenium arch. The actors in traditional plays are required not to cross the fourth wall by interacting with the audience directly, by voice or look. It is a 'wall' and should be treated as such.

Hamlet can indeed face the audience when delivering his famous soliloquies, but he must not do anything that interacts with the audience or even gives that impression. Similarly in films, actors must avoid 'speaking to the camera'. Some modern plays and films break the fourth wall rule for considered effect and, of course, pantomime wouldn't be pantomime if the characters didn't interact with the audience – 'He's behind you!'.

All the asides we stumble across in The Hobbit just serve to disrupt the narrative. One moment we are in the darkness of Gollum's cavern with its subterranean lake, the next we are listening to an Oxford don sitting in his favourite chair explaining and clarifying a point for us.

Authors who are wise in the arts of narration never do this. That master tale-teller Rudyard Kipling never does this (at least as far as I can remember). All the strangenesses in The Jungle Book or Puck of Pook's Hill, for example, are dealt with within the narrative.

Perhaps I am being a little too hard on Tolkien. In fairness we should note that The Hobbit was written initially as a story for his own children and with no intention of publication. It was passed around among friends and relations for a while before it fell into the hands of a publisher. Thus the relaxed conversational style of the work. The book deserved a strong-minded editor.

Tolkien addressed this flaw himself in a televised interview he gave to the BBC in February 1968. He stated:

I read it to my children. I read to the two elder ones who took a kindly and, on the whole, a favourable interest in it. But they criticised very severely – and first opened my eyes to the whole situation which led to my essay on fairy stories – criticised very severely all of those things which, owing to bad models, I thought was suitable to put into a children's story. They hated asides, anything like, 'so now I've told you enough.' They loathed anything that made it sound as if you were talking to an actual audience.

J.R.R. Tolkien talking about writing The Hobbit, BBC interview 1968.

The statement in bold is exactly the point I was making with my third-wall analogy.

Unfortunately, Tolkien doesn't tell us and the interviewer doesn't ask what those 'bad models' were. If only he had read Kipling! In the essay to which he he refers ('On Fairy-Stories', 1947) he obfuscates his children's direct and forceful objection to asides, turning it into a more generic and philological consideration of the task of the narrator and putting in plenty of what Ernest Hemingway called 'ten-dollar words':

Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the storymaker proves a successful 'sub-creator.' He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable.

J.R.R. Tolkien, 'On Fairy-Stories', 1947.

To which I would add: '…intolerable, so you put the story down and leave it for fifty years.'

Tolkien learned his lesson, it seems. In The Lord of the Rings the author-narrator never inserts himself into the narrative. We might say that that is one of Gandalf's jobs, explaining things.

Tolkien gave an interview late in his life in which he regretted the childishness of The Hobbit and thought about editing it, but of course hindsight is a wonderful thing. He was writing The Hobbit in 1936, almost twenty years before The Lord of the Rings would be published and never suspected that his children's tale would become the precursor to something so magnificent.

Late in life he even made a start on the rewrite, managing, if I remember correctly, about six pages before he put it aside. The childishness of The Hobbit taints almost every page in some way. Removing this would mean a very substantial rewrite – effectively a new book – because when you begin such a job you are inevitably starting out on a long march with a head full of The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. Could Tolkien ever revisit the innocence of 1936?

On a simple practical level, when a book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, which idiot is going to try to improve it? And if we put ourselves in Tolkien's slippers, which elderly gent wants to spend their few remaining years confronting line by line all the infelicities in their 'prentice work? Infelicities that no one else – apart from his two older children – appears to have noticed.

And consider too that even Hollywood movers and shakers only film the prequel AFTER they have filmed the main event.

Scene setting

A further problem with The Hobbit is that the story takes a long time to get going. The reader has to plug through 32 pages before the first real action takes place, the encounter with the trolls. This scene setting is required because readers need to know something of hobbits, dwarves and wizards. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien solved that problem by putting all this information into a nineteen-page, closely-printed Prologue, leaving him a clear run when the real narrative began.

In those first 32 pages of The Hobbit we have the repetitive buffoonery of the arrival of the dwarves in ones, twos and threes, some community washing up, a bit of community singing, a bit of a project discussion, followed by a tedious first stage of the journey through a not very interesting landscape. Even when we get to some action with the trolls, this is stretched out across the bagging, one by one, of the dwarves as they arrive.

If you come to The Hobbit from The Lord of the Rings, as I did, all this explanatory material is otiose. Your brain has time to suspend suspending disbelief – that is, moving from the Secondary World back to the Primary World, to use Tolkien's terminology – and your mind wanders around wondering where, in the Shire, is the infrastructure that makes brass door knobs and round glass for windows and all the other civilised things that are stuffed into Bilbo's hobbit hole? Who brings Bilbo's post? Who produces all the choice cuts, all the pies and cakes and beer that fill his several larders? Before long your mind – well, my mind – is thinking Marxist thoughts about the means of production in this rural idyll and the exploitation of the working classes by well-heeled capitalists such as… er… Bilbo Baggins.

In other words, if the characters and the location and the plot require so much suspension of disbelief, then you had better get on with the action sharpish. My late wife could not be doing with such nonsense as hobbits and dwarves and wizards, so never managed even a half a page of Tolkien. These first pages certainly taxed my youthful patience.

Language, accent and class

Tolkien was born in 1892. He was a child of the Victorian and the Edwardian ages. We would characterise his family as upper-middle class, but without substantial money. He was three when his father died and was raised by his mother in precarious financial circumstances requiring the support of relatives. She died when he was twelve.

He and his brother were brought up by a Catholic guardian. He won a scholarship to King Edward's School in Birmingham, a highly regarded day school. He began his academic career at Exeter College, Oxford, where he read Classics, then English Language and Literature, graduating in 1915. He saw service in the First World War, and survived to be demobilized in 1920 and return to academia.

Why am I telling you this? Because we have to be aware that Tolkien's mother tongue was the English of the Edwardian and Georgian gentleman. It was the language spoken by educated and cultured English people in the period between the two world wars. It wasn't a completely coherent language, it had numerous idioms, but English speakers 'knew' each other as soon as they opened their mouths.

Listen to the 1968 BBC interview with Tolkien above. Anyone sensitive to the nuances of English can hear the traces of this period in the language of The Hobbit. It is also occasionally to be heard in The Lord of the Rings, but has been swamped by the Augustan tone which Tolkien wisely chose for his monumental epic.

After that age, the coherence of the language spoken by the English tribe disintegrated. After radio came the products of Hollywood and then television with its plays, soaps, comedy sketches. The demotic language invaded every home. British readers of a certain age will remember the wonderful Heineken television commercial, which shows an actress attempting to learn the language of the new street credibility. Then came the internet, rap music, social media and podcasts.

The Hobbit now is a relic of a byegone age. We can't criticise Tolkien for this, because all literature becomes dated, whether it is Beowulf, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson or P.G. Wodehouse.

But whereas The Lord of the Rings can still be read without difficulty, The Hobbit brings us (well, me at least) to a frequent stop. In order to demonstrate my thesis I could hop around the text alighting on words and phrases that are evidence of The Hobbit's roots in an age gone by ('and pretty fair nonsense I daresay you think it') but let's take a short cut. Consider the following passage describing the company's entry into the House of Elrond at Rivendell – could anyone write this today?

‘Well, well!' said a voice. ‘Just look! Bilbo the hobbit on a pony, my dear! Isn’t it delicious!’

‘Most astonishing wonderful!’†

Then off they went into another song as ridiculous as the one I have written down in full.
[…]

The elves had brought bright lanterns to the shore, and they sang a merry song as the party went across.

‘Don’t dip your beard in the foam, father! ’ they cried to Thorin, who was bent almost on to his hands and knees. ‘It is long enough without watering it.’

‘Mind Bilbo doesn’t eat all the cakes! ’ they called. ‘He is too fat to get through key-holes yet!’‡

†The modern English speaker expects 'astonishingly wonderful' and might assume that this is a typographical error or that perhaps a comma is missing. There was a time when adverbs without 'ly' (now given the silly name 'flat adverbs') were commonplace and even expected. In the course of the last four centuries or so most of them have been decorated with '-ly'. My suspicion is that Tolkien used the flat form here to give elvish speech a distinct flavour. I also suspect that he is recalling some sloppy idiom, perhaps among the young people of his time, since 'astonishing wonderful' is a tautologous phrase which we could expect even a professor of Anglo-Saxon to avoid. The OED defines 'astonishment' as the 'shock of wonder' and 'wonderful' as 'to excite wonder or astonishment'. The world is full of wonders and this phrase appears to be one of them.
‡With this 'yet' the professor of Anglo-Saxon is slipping in an Old and Middle English usage, now obsolete. Nowadays we would say 'already'. Most of the 'yet's in The Hobbit are used as we expect.
The existence of these two language oddities in one short passage suggests that Tolkien is trying to give a slightly alien sound to his elves. Or perhaps we are just overthinking it all…

A female-free zone

The only female mentioned by name in The Hobbit is Bilbo's mother, Belladonna Took. Feminists would find it interesting that her reputation hints that she is descended from fairies. Well, it could have been witches, I suppose.

In the lake town of Esgaroth, populated by humans, there are women and families, but they are merely faceless and nameless bit parts in the story. Even in Elrond's house in Rivendell, where the travellers spent fourteen days and where you might expect some trace of elven domesticity, we hear of no female elves [though there are a couple in The Lord of the Rings], ditto female dwarves, ditto female goblins – although we learn that Gollum 'squeezed' a 'goblin-imp' so we might expect that there are goblin women.

Everywhere else in the tale, females are absent. This absence is so total that it hints at some deeper psychosis. Armchair psychiatrists may be interested to note that the author lost his father when he was three and his mother when he was eleven. He had one brother. He attended King Edward's [Boys'] School in Birmingham. There followed a very strict Catholic upbringing under the governership of a male cleric and a courtship that had to be suppressed for four years. So deep had the religious brainwashing penetrated into him that Tolkien insisted that his Baptist bride should convert to Catholicism before the wedding. As Ignatius Loyola is supposed to have remarked: 'Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man'.

So, we say it again, there are as good as no females in The Hobbit. Perhaps my late wife's visceral rejection of Tolkien's tales was more than just an aversion hobbits and goblins. Certainly, any modern girl reading the tale or having it read to her before too long will ask the awkward question: where are the girls? What have I got to do in this story?

Beorn

In my opinion, another great flaw in The Hobbit is the episode which introduces the character Beorn. I write 'in my opinion' because countless Tolkien fans take Beorn quite seriously. He is a 'skin-changer', who, we are told, changes from human to bear and back as required, thus making him a good character to have in an age of CGI movies. There are three reasons I count his character as a flaw in the book.

The first is that, while the sane reader can and has to suspend disbelief over many characters and events in The Hobbit, Beorn's staff of horses and sheep that wait at table in his longhouse exceed my capacity for suspension. Others may manage it, I cannot.

As any little boy will tell you, most species of bear are apex predators and get their protein wherever they can. Deriving the vegan innocence of Beorn's lifestyle from bears stretches belief; having animals with no dexterity that must pick up plates with their jaws run his household, animals which for a real bear would represent a fine snack, snaps belief well beyond its elastic limits. I suspect without any evidence (as usual) that Tolkien was riffing on the alleged 'bee' component in the much disputed etymology of the name 'Beowulf', a donnish thought process that created the honey-eating Beorn (='bear').

The second reason that I regard Beorn as a flaw in the book is that he brings nothing to the tale beyond this strange lifestyle and his ferocity in battle. Once the tale gets properly underway, most of the episodes in it have some deeper significance that justifies their part in the whole – we shall look at this feature presently. But the Beorn episode offers nothing but its oddity. It could be removed and no reader would notice. Even the presence of a ferocious man-bear ripping goblins apart in the final battle does not justify the ludicrous account of his domestic arrrangements. Admittedly, his ponies get the company to the edge of Mirkwood and his victuals fuel them on their trek through the evil forest, so that after the battle with the goblins and the wargs some recovery point for the company is certainly needed. But did it have to be a shapeshifting vegan man-bear?

The third reason that I regard the Beorn episode as a flaw is that, yet again, Tolkien utilises the device of bringing in the dwarves one, two or three at a time. We had this at Bilbo's house, we had this with the trolls and now here it is with Beorn, allegedly to keep the vegan man-bear's interest in Gandalf's story alive. It gets Tolkien seven pages where a paragraph would have done. Enough already!

Bilbo's progress

On the journey back to Hobbiton, after the conclusion of the adventure, Bilbo and Gandalf catch sight of Bilbo's home in the distance. Bilbo breaks into verse.

Gandalf looked at him. 'My dear Bilbo!' he said. 'Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.'

The great genius of The Hobbit, aside from the other good things in it, is the gradual transformation of Bilbo. The Bilbo Baggins we meet on the first page of The Hobbit will hardly entrance us. He is a 'well-to-do' hobbit, not, it seems, through any particular effort on his part, but through inheritance. He is stuck in his ways, odiously self-satisfied, his life and his opinions are utterly predictable and his horizon barely stretches beyond his front door. He clings to bourgeois respectability. Everything around him must be just so – even his doorknob is perfectly centred and perfectly polished.

Gandalf and the dwarf visitors are disrupters who bounce him into participating in an adventure to recover the dwarves' treasure that was lost to them when Smaug the dragon drove them out of their deep caverns in the Lonely Mountain. At the start he is definitely the junior partner in the undertaking: unwilling, grumbling, always dreaming of going back home.

This is the starting point of Bilbo's transformation. It will not just be a physical journey that covers long distances and exposes him to undreamed of trials and tribulations, hunger, thirst, weariness and repeated brushes with death. It will also be a moral journey in which Bilbo undergoes a remarkable transformation. In each episode Bilbo's status as a leader and hero increases.

Conversely, the dwarves incrementally lose status: when they started out the adventure was theirs and Bilbo was a useful appendage to bring the group above 'unlucky thirteen'. As the journey progresses, they become more and more incompetent figures of fun.

With the trolls. Rescuing the dwarves

The tedious first part of the journey ends in a an encounter with a group of three trolls. In a pattern that will be repeated several times in the rest of the tale, when danger appears it is the little hobbit that is sent ahead to investigate while the warrior dwarves hang back.

In Bilbo's absence, the dwarves blunder incautiously one by one into the trolls' camp and end up ignominously stuffed headfirst into stinking sacks. Bilbo is also grabbed, but manages to free himself. Finally, Gandalf arrives and tricks the combative trolls into fighting each other, allowing the company to escape. It offers us our first view of Bilbo's quick wits and resourcefulness, which contrasts with the stolid and comical stupidity of the dwarves.

However, the real highpoint of the episode occurs when the company tracks down the trolls' cave, a particular defining moment for Bilbo in which he acquires an ancient elven dagger. Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings will remember occasions when this dagger will also stand Frodo in good stead. Bilbo's sword has put him on the first rung of the warrior class, being the first step towards his hero status. It is interesting that in Rivendell, when Elrond is deciphering the inscriptions on the swords of Thorin and Gandalf, no mention is made of Bilbo's dagger cum sword.

The meeting with Gollum

While attempting to cross the Misty Mountains Bilbo and the dwarves are captured by goblins. Thanks to Gandalf they manage to escape but Bilbo falls and becomes separated from the rest of the company. It is there that he realises the quality and ancestry of his own little sword that was overlooked in Rivendell. It is in the underground passageways that he stumbles and finds the great ring of power (or, as Gandalf would suggest in The Lord of the Rings, the ring finds him).

He then encounters Gollum, one of the Tolkien's greatest character creations. Bilbo's sword is put to good use keeping Gollum at a distance. They indulge in a riddling game (a favourite Old English poetic pastime, by the way). Eventually, Bilbo puts the ring on his finger and is surprised to find that he has become invisible. Gollum, thinking he is pursuing Bilbo, runs through the maze of passages, inadvertently leading him to the passage which exits the mountain. Bilbo demonstrated his quick-thinking intelligence by guessing that this is what Gollum would do.

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo's heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped.

Gollum will not follow Bilbo for fear of being captured by the goblins. This is an important moment of Christian virtue; Gollum is about the most repulsive and murderous creature one can imagine, yet Bilbo chooses to let him live. This is also a theme that will carry over into The Lord of the Rings, where on a number of occasions pity is taken on Gollum.

Bilbo is soon reunited with his companions, whom Gandalf has led to freedom. Unlike them, Bilbo – admittedly with the superpower of invisibility – managed to rescue himself, thus taking him one more rung higher on the hero scale.

Every hero needs his superpower: Odysseus has his careful cunning, which helps him to survive in a world of tricky divinities; Beowulf has his physical strength and needs no iron sword to kill the monster Grendel – he rips Grendel's arm off at the shoulder; Gandalf has his wizardry and the divine mission that can bring him back from the dead; Bilbo, pint-sized hobbit, has his powers of silent movement, his reason and now, above all, his invisibility when needed.

The spiders of Mirkwood. Rescuing the dwarves, again

Fleeing from the goblins, the company is attacked by goblin scouts and the great wolves of the forest. They are rescued from a fiery death by the great eagles. Eventually continuing their journey they end up in the house of Beorn, where they can rest and gather their strength for the next stage, which takes them up to the entrance to the dreaded Mirkwood, full of nameless perils. In the forest Bilbo is almost captured in the thread of an enormous spider, but manages to free himself just in time using his elvish sword.

There was the usual dim grey light of the forest-day about him when he came to his senses. The spider lay dead beside him, and his sword-blade was stained black. Somehow the killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else, made a great difference to Mr. Baggins. He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his sword on the grass and put it back into its sheath.

'I will give you a name,' he said to it, 'and I shall call you Sting.'

He was now a step higher on the hero ladder. From this moment on he becomes the de facto leader of the company, no longer the appendage. He rescues his companions who have all been caught by the other spiders. He gives his sword, nameless in Rivendell, the heroic name 'Sting', a gesture that every Nordic warrior would understand perfectly – the naming of weapons is an important feature in Old English epic verse.

The wood-elves. Rescuing the dwarves, again

Thorin is taken prisoner by the wood-elves and because of the emnity long ago between them and the dwarves (over an allegedly unpaid debt) he reveals nothing about the company's mission to recover the dwarves treasure hoard from the dragon. The wood-elves lock him up until he is prepared to talk. Shortly afterwards the remaining dwarves are captured, though Bilbo, once more invisible, remains free. He follows the captives into the wood-elves' stronghold.

Bilbo, with a daring reverse Trojan-horse strategy worthy of Odysseus himself, frees his dwarf companions from their imprisonment. Here we can note the scorecard: dwarf plodders – three imprisonments (trolls, spiders, wood-elves), freed once by Gandalf, twice by Bilbo. When finally released from their barrels, they make a sorry picture.

The company ends up in the Lake Town of Esgaroth, where the dwarves are hailed as fulfilments of ancient prophecies. This reinflates their mood, whereas Bilbo remains almost unnoticed.

Into the dragon's den

When they finally reach the Lonely Mountain, it is left to Bilbo to discover the exact location of the secret doorway and he, too, is the one who remembers the instruction on the map describing how to open the door and the key needed to unlock it.

The dwarves make it clear that Bilbo, being the 'burglar' for hire, should be the one to go down and face the dragon; they will stay by the outside door and await events. In this deed Bilbo takes another step up the hero ladder: just as the hero Beowulf was abandoned by all but one of his companions to face his dragon almost alone, the dwarves keep their distance and let Bilbo find the dragon. Bilbo's hero credentials are burnished when he returns with a golden cup he steals from the sleeping dragon's hoard.

Mind games with the dragon

In one more step on the hero ladder, Bilbo has become the undisputed leader of the company; the dwarves turn to him for suggestions and plans. Bilbo returns to the dragon and enters into a conversation with it, a conversation in which the dragon sows seeds of doubt in Bilbo's mind, particularly about the motives of his dwarf companions. He escapes from the dragon with singed hair and his mind full of doubts about the dwarves and the present adventure. His introspection and capacity for self-analysis mark him out as a hero in the Odyssean mould. Bilbo saves the dwarves yet again by insisting that they take cover from the dragon's revenge attack.

Caressing the treasure. The Arkenstone

The dwarves are still greedily under the spell of the treasure. Bilbo tires of this obsessive talk. He saves them all once again by insisting they shut the outer door moments before Smaug attacks it. After a long wait, Bilbo encourages the dwarves to accompany him down to the dragon's chamber once more, where they discover that the dragon is not present. The company inspects the hoard and is bewitched by the enchantment of treasure:

Each now gripped a lighted torch; and as they gazed, first on one side and then on another, they forgot fear and even caution. They spoke aloud, and cried out to one another, as they lifted old treasures from the mound or from the wall and held them in the light caressing and fingering them.

[…]

But most of the dwarves were more practical; they gathered gems and stuffed their pockets, and let what they could not carry fall back through their fingers with a sigh.

Bilbo finds the Arkenstone, coveted by the dwarves but particularly Thorin, but hides it in his pocket. The motive for his doing this is not clear, but Bilbo seems to intuit that the possession of the object of Thorin's greatest desire might be useful. This is another example of Bilbo's heroic Odyssean trait – thinking ahead. The half-crazed greed the dwarves exhibited over the dragon's hoard seems to have sowed even more doubt in Bilbo's mind.

It is here that Thorin puts on Bilbo the exquisite mithril coat of mail, which, like the elven sword, will also stand Frodo in good stead in The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo is now armed and dressed as a warrior, taking one more step up the heroic ladder.

Bard, the other hero

Let us leave Bilbo in the dwarves' halls for a moment and note the emergence of another hero, Bard, the saviour of Esgaroth and the slayer of the dragon. He stood his ground when his companions deserted him, as Beowulf's companions had deserted him before his battle with the great firedrake. Beowulf was left with one loyal comrade; Bard also was not alone, for he had the old thrush which told him about the dragon's vulnerable spot, information that the bird had gained from Bilbo's reconnaissance. Thus the two heroes, Bilbo and Bard, are interdependent at this moment.

The root of all evil

Once the company comes into the proximity of the dragon's treasure, Bilbo's petit bourgeois nature is increasingly repelled by the mindless greed displayed by the dwarves. He watches as people he had thought sensible fall under the spell of Smaug's treasure hoard. He observes the mania that befalls Thorin at the very thought of the Arkenstone – his 'preciousss' as it were. The analogy is not trivial, since in The Lord of the Rings we shall see Gollum, driven by a similar obsessive lust, destroyed in its pursuit.

He himself, his inner nature, is immune to such enchantments. Impressed though he is by the warlike trappings given to him from the dragon's hoard ('I feel magnificent'), he remains grounded ('but I expect I look rather absurd'). He refuses to accept the fourteenth share of the booty that is his due, but is content with two small chests of gold and silver; the Arkenstone goes to the dying Thorin; Bilbo initially rejects even the hoard of treasure that had been recovered from the trolls, until Gandalf persuades him to take half at least.

The death of Smaug means that his treasure hoard is now there for the taking. All the parties to his destruction – Thorin's dwarves, the dwarves from the north, the people of Esgaroth/Dale and the wood-elves – want the share they deem to be due to them, the most stubborn of them being the implacable Thorin.

They are on the verge of war, when an army of goblins arrive, not only coveting the treasure but also wishing to avenge the death of the Great Goblin, whom the company killed during their escape from the goblin stronghold in the Misty Mountains. The parties unite against the goblin foe, their common enemy, hating it more than they hate each other.

Following the success of the great and costly battle to defeat the goblin horde and the death of the intractable Thorin, who, in dying, overcomes his mania for treasure, the parties come to their senses, the treasure is divided up equitably and a golden age of prosperity breaks out in what was once the desolation of Smaug.

To cap it all, we hear almost at the very end of the book that the capitalist, mercantilist Master of Esgaroth died ignominiously of starvation after fleeing with the gold that had been given to him for the Lake People. A heavily symbolic end, that was, as the end of Thorin had been. On his deathbed Thorin accepted that all treasure had now no value for him; the Master died having found out that you cannot eat gold.

There and back again

His task as burglar accomplished, Bilbo sheds his heroic status and returns to his hobbit life. This strikes me as a highly unusual and innovative plot twist that Tolkien has given us. In the tales of the ancients and particularly in the Nordic sagas, once a hero, always a hero; the equally heroic end comes one way or another.

Apart from taking up writing chronicles and poetry, Bilbo melts back into hobbit life as best he can – it was truly a journey 'there and back again':

Indeed Bilbo found he had lost more than spoons – he had lost his reputation. It is true that for ever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honour of dwarves, wizards, and all such folk as ever passed that way; but he was no longer quite respectable. He was in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighbourhood to be 'queer' – except by his nephews and nieces on the Took side, but even they were not encouraged in their friendship by their elders.

I am sorry to say he did not mind.† He was quite content; and the sound of the kettle on his hearth was ever after more musical than it had been even in the quiet days before the Unexpected Party. His sword he hung over the mantelpiece. His coat of mail was arranged on a stand in the hall (until he lent it to a Museum). His gold and silver was largely spent in presents, both useful and extravagant – which to a certain extent accounts for the affection of his nephews and his nieces. His magic ring he kept a great secret, for he chiefly used it when unpleasant callers came.

He took to writing poetry and visiting the elves; and though many shook their heads and touched their foreheads and said 'Poor old Baggins!' and though few believed any of his tales, he remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long.‡

† I find the sentence 'I am sorry to say he did not mind' very odd, unless we take it as a rather misguided example of Tolkien's characteristic irony. What we would expect is surely 'I am not sorry to say he did not mind' or even better, 'I am happy to say…' or even better than that let's stay in the 'Secondary World' where we belong and just write: 'He did not mind [in the least]'.
‡ This strikes me as an Old Testament turn of phrase (e.g. Job 42: '12 So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning … 16 After this lived Job an hundred and forty years … 17 So Job died, being old and full of days'). It is true, but written before his role in The Lord of the Rings, in which he, with the other ringbearer Frodo, passes out of the world at the Grey Havens.

Divine guidance

Tolkien was a profoundly religious person, a lifelong devout Catholic, but you will find no obvious traces of Catholic belief and dogma in The Hobbit, nor in The Lord of the Rings for that matter.

In The Lord of the Rings there are largely subliminal hints at a greater power that stands behind it all, hints that Gandalf's mission and his reanimation after his battle with the Balrog has a divine origin. At the end of the epic the Shire is left as a blessèd land of peace in harmony with Nature.

There is almost no sense of the Divine Mind at work in The Hobbit, until, that is, we reach the very last page:

'Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!' said Bilbo.

'Of course!' said Gandalf. 'And why should not they prove true? Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?'

Update 22.07.2025

Added the audio for Tolkien's observations on his use of 'bad models'.