“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can.”
These famous words written by the beloved author J.R.R. Tolkien appear in the very first chapter of his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. They are sung by the hobbit Bilbo Baggins as he leaves his cozy home of Bag End for a new adventure that he hopes will bring him lasting peace and contentment. Yet when we see the portrait of Bilbo’s home that is drawn by Tolkien in this opening chapter, we may well wonder why he would ever want to leave.
I have described Bag End as cozy: an idyllic home carved into an idyllic hillside in the middle of the idyllic land of The Shire. In the hearth, a fire burns, bringing warmth and light to all who enter. The kitchen and cellar are full of not just any old types of food and drink, but the kinds that remind you of home. Bilbo Baggins knows nothing of fusion cuisine and molecular gastronomy. His vittles and provisions are as down-to-earth and classic as it gets.
Throughout the home, one imagines the souvenirs of Bilbo’s famed expedition to the Lonely Mountain serving as starting points for conversation. There is always a kettle on, ready to provide a cup of tea to anyone who sits down in one of the over-stuffed chairs. The doors and windows are round, even as the passageways, and all of this is tucked into the hill, as you might imagine a rabbit hole or prairie dog colony. Here there is protection from the elements and the love of those who know both your name and your history. This is a safe place—a cozy place. Why on earth did Bilbo ever want to leave?
Everything about Bilbo’s home of Bag End, his village Hobbiton, and his land The Shire evoke images of English country life. This is surely what Tolkien intended. The very word “shire” is an old Anglo-Saxon term that still appears in names such as Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Tolkien’s own Oxfordshire.
I remember the first time I saw the county of Oxfordshire. I had arrived at London Gatwick Airport on a red-eye flight with a group of students from my university for our January study program in Oxford. I had barely enough time to grab a snack at the previously-unknown-to-me Costa Coffee before I was herded onto a bus and we set off to the northwest. I was so weary that I fell asleep in my seat, only to awake to the sight of rolling green hills full of grazing sheep, as if I had stumbled into an episode of All Creatures Great and Small. I had heard about England all my life, but suddenly I was there, and to my amazement, it looked exactly as I had imagined it.
I believe the Shire represents Tokien’s ideal home. It is Oxfordshire without the snobbish academics and modern automobiles, perhaps as it might have looked several hundred years ago during one of the periods when it was not struck by warfare or plague. Bilbo’s home reminds me very much of the kind of old study in which a professor might reside, the walls nearly invisible behind shelves of books, a lone window completely crowded out by volumes of this or that.
As a student, I was occasionally summoned to such rooms to meet professors, and they had a distinct sort of ambience: a smell, really. Certainly, the smell in Tolkien’s would have been of pipe weed and burning wood, along with a fair amount of dust collected over decades. As for Bilbo, he may not technically be a professor, but he seems to love sharing his heaps of knowledge with others and has been working on a book for years that is not yet published, so I conclude there is something of the professor about him.
Outside are the gardens and fields. Yes, much of the discussion about Bag End has to do with its exterior. For all his wealth (real or purported), the only employees Bilbo seems to keep are gardeners. It is in such a field that the great gathering is to take place: Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday party, or as Tolkien puts it, “a party of special magnificence.”
Eleventy-first is such a wonderful word, with the kind of old timey sound that makes it seem terribly authentic even though it is nothing of the sort. We are told that Bilbo is throwing the party for himself and his adopted heir, Frodo, who shares the same birthdate and will be coming of age. He is giving gifts to his guests, as is the typical custom among hobbits. Indeed, practically everything that hobbits do seems to be communal, and the long-expected party of Bilbo is to be the event of the year, or perhaps the century.
The motivations of the guests for coming to this party are varied. Some crave the food, others the gifts, and perhaps others the opportunity to dance. But for Bilbo, the party seems to be about togetherness. It is a gathering of his family: not just the few aunts, uncles, and first cousins who people in our own age might dare to invite to a reunion, but also cousins of cousins of cousins. Tolkien details for us the interlinked nature of the hobbit world, where every family seems to have someone who has married into every other family.
We can conclude that the main party consists of hundreds or even a thousand guests, but the smaller one under the enormous illuminated tree, the one that includes only Bilbo’s closest relatives and friends—even this one includes 144 people! Who among us could say we have an inner circle that large? And yet Bilbo Baggins does.
There were many Bagginses and Boffins, and also many Tooks and Brandybucks; there were various Grubbs (relations of Bilbo Baggins’ grandmother), and various Chubbs (connexions of his Took grandfather); and a selection of Burrowses, Bolgers, Bracegirdles, Brockhouses, Goodbodies, Hornblowers and Proudfoots.[1]
Thus reads Tolkien’s summation of Bilbo’s most intimate family relations. It is a glorious rundown of the most endearing, positively English surnames imaginable. Were it not a surname, a boffin would surely be some kind of magical creature. A bolger would be some sort of tradesman in a medieval town.
All of this seems old, but not in a decrepit sort of way. No, it awakens a kind of nostalgia in the reader. We recognize the signs of home about this place. Perhaps it reminds us of locations that feel most home-like to us. Personally, I think not only of the rolling hills of England, which to me are practically sacred ground, but the coffee shops I have been known to frequent, the house in which I was raised, and certain sites that were important in the early days of my courtship with my husband. These are the places on earth that appeal to my heart—places to which I always long to return. Good friends can provoke similar emotions within us. If we had a relatively happy childhood, then that likely pushes us to nostalgia more powerfully than anything else.
What Tolkien is doing in establishing this feeling of home is convincing us that there is something in Middle-earth that is worth a good fight. This must be established if we are to feel the emotional pull of the primary conflict. As story of The Lord of the Rings unfolds, we will no longer see the idyllic Shire. We will come across other places, some of which will be utterly beautiful in a way the Shire can never touch. Yet we will never feel quite as at home in them as we do here at the beginning—in the Shire, in Bag End.
Yet all is not well.
Yes, that is the necessary thing we must grasp. As idyllic as this world is, there is something not quite right: indeed, three somethings not quite right. The first hits us straight out of the gate, in the opening description of Mr. Bilbo Baggins.
Time wore on, but it seemed to have little effect on Mr. Baggins. At ninety he was much the same as at fifty. At ninety-nine they began to call him well-preserved; but unchanged would have been nearer the mark. There were some that shook their heads and thought this was too much of a good thing; it seemed unfair that anyone should possess (apparently) perpetual youth as well as (reputedly) inexhaustible wealth. ‘It will have to be paid for,’ they said. ‘It isn’t natural, and trouble will come of it!’[2]
Here we see that for all its lovable quaintness, there is an all-too-familiar downside to the tight-knit community of Hobbiton: they are gossips. Not only are they gossips, but they are judgmental ones. They have clichés and jealousies. They look down on those who break with tradition or seek something outside the community. And here Mr. Bilbo Baggins has up and gone on an adventure to the ends of the earth, coming back with strange treasure, strange friends, and strange stories. More than anything, his ability to laugh in the face of mortality seems to stick in their craw. “It will have to be paid for. It isn’t natural, and trouble will come of it!”
Like Bilbo, I grew up in a tight-knit community. Practically my entire existence revolved around my church and school, which were in the same building. I spent nearly as much time in that building as I did in my own home. Indeed, some weeks I spent more time there. At my tiny school, I was with some of the same students from Kindergarten until High School graduation. Nearly all our family friends were part of the church. My identity was completely wrapped up in my family, my church, and my school.
Then, like Bilbo, I left. I went away to college, and from that point on my identity began to shift. I had my own adventures and made my own friends. I came back with strange objects and strange stories. No one described me as “odd” or “unnatural”—at least, not within earshot. Perhaps some of them thought I had grown uppity or had my head filled with strange notions. Fortunately, Muskegon was not quite like Hobbiton in this regard, but it is true that even when I came back to live at home between college and my first real job, I felt a definite sense of longing for the larger world which I had previously inhabited. I was restless. I couldn’t remain there for long.
You see, although I love many things about my home, there were times growing up when I did not feel entirely at home there. Something about me always felt “other,” even though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. My interests seemed to be different from other members of the family, or even other kids at school. I struggled to form friendships, both because I was seen as socially inferior in certain ways, and because I did not feel a strong enough connection with my peers to expend the effort it would take to earn their approval. I did not pursue social gatherings as others did. I stuck my nose in a book and waited. Someday, I hoped, I would find other people like myself.
This is something I cannot stress enough: I was not rejecting my home. Indeed, I loved my home and still love it. I would have dearly loved to have had a perfect life there, with no desire for outside fulfillment. It just wasn’t the way I was wired. I was a wünderkind with wanderlust, and as lovely as Muskegon can be, it does not contain everything the world has to offer. It was a small pond, and while I was not a particularly big fish, I was perhaps something of a salmon. I was meant to migrate.
Bilbo Baggins is this way as well. You can see quite clearly the love he has for his home. Yet he is an odd duck, and no mistake. The price to be paid for living in a community like Hobbiton is strict adherence to social mores, and Bilbo does not do so, nor do some of the other members of his family. We are told that the parents of his cousin and heir, Frodo Baggins, died in a boating accident upon the Brandywine River. As the old Gaffer says of those who live in Buckland, “they’re a queer breed, seemingly. They fool about with boats on that big river—and that isn’t natural.” Yes, if you do something out of the ordinary in the Shire, you are not just exercising a different preference. You are downright unnatural.
This is the first thing that alerts us to the fact that Bilbo’s home is under threat: he’s in danger of being cut out of it socially. The second threat concerns Bag End itself. The cozy hobbit hole is the subject of an ongoing dispute. As Bilbo has no children of his own, his relatives the Sackville-Bagginses are to inherit everything when he dies. For this reason, they are quite unhappy about his unnatural longevity, and they grew downright angry when he adopted his younger cousin, Frodo, as his heir. Throughout the chapter, we see Otho and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins popping up now and again to sneer and steal. (Bilbo cheekily bequeaths his silver to Lobelia when he departs, knowing she has already swiped some of the pieces.) The need to pass down Bag End to Frodo without any further meddling by these irksome relatives is one of Bilbo’s primary motivations in the chapter.
These first two threats to Bilbo’s home are removed when he bids farewell to his birthday guests, slips on his magic ring, and disappears. He returns to Bag End and gathers his things, preparing to depart forever. It is at this point that something rather small but nonetheless odd occurs. “Into the envelope he slipped his golden ring, and its fine chain, and then sealed it, and addressed it to Frodo. At first he put it on the mantelpiece, but suddenly he removed it and stuck it in his pocket.”[3]
This is our first hint that the gold ring Bilbo has previously used only to disappear might be working on his mind in some way: he is unable to part with this thing as he does so easily with the rest of his possessions. He also feels a need to be secretive about it. When Gandalf enters the room and Bilbo repeats his promise to leave everything to Frodo, the tone of their conversation changes.
‘Everything?’ said Gandalf. ‘The ring as well? You agreed to that, you remember.’
‘Well, er, yes, I suppose so,’ stammered Bilbo.
‘Where is it?’
‘In an envelope, if you must know,’ said Bilbo impatiently. ‘There on the mantelpiece. Well, no! Here it is in my pocket!’ He hesitated. ‘Isn’t that odd now?’ he said softly to himself. ‘Yet after all, why not? Why shouldn’t it stay there?’[4]
We see quickly how the ring produces different kinds of characteristics in Bilbo: things we would not have thought in line with his generally affable nature. He becomes possessive, obsessive, guilty, and confrontational. It is as if the light has given way to darkness for a moment. “It is mine, I tell you. My own. My precious. Yes, my precious.”[5]
Bilbo speaks of the magical ring as nothing else. Here is a level of devotion that will cause him to momentarily confront the powerful Gandalf, even placing his hand on the hilt of his sword. I have noted that Bilbo’s home was worth a fight, but here we see something else for which he is prepared to come to blows: something that feels much darker. The wizard appears to transform in front of the hobbit’s eyes, so that “he seemed to grow tall and menacing; his shadow filled the little room.”[6] This breaks the spell of Bilbo’s greed and he leaves the ring behind, but by this point, one can sense that the hobbit’s departure will not be enough to restore order to the Shire. Something is wrong—very wrong, and it has to do with the ring.
In the final scenes of the chapter, Frodo becomes the new owner of Bag End and the primary focus of the narrative. Gandalf explains that Bilbo has left the ring as well as the rest of his possessions. He bids Frodo to “keep it safe, and keep it secret!”[7] While there is little that the wizard can (or will) tell Frodo about his suspicions, it is clear that something about the ring has set Gandalf on edge, even as it does us. The final paragraph gives us a sense that this ring will come back to bite them all. “Frodo saw him to the door. He gave a final wave of his hand, and walked off at a surprising pace; but Frodo thought the old wizard looked unusually bent, almost as if he was carrying a great weight.”[8]
That is the story of the long-expected party: a perfect home, and yet one not so perfect. A place of safety that seems oddly under threat. How very like our own homes this is! The places that carry the greatest sense of nostalgia also force upon us a weight of pain.
The home in which I grew up is not what it once was. I cannot truly return to much of my childhood. The building in which I went to church and school in my youth was long ago bulldozed to make way for something else. The church itself was splintered over the course of a decade, and my family no longer belongs to it. When I occasionally make it back to Muskegon, I do not see my childhood friends there. They have either moved away or I have lost touch with them. Indeed, many of the people who stayed were those with whom I felt less of a connection from the beginning.
All that truly remains for me to visit is my family. At this point in my life, I see my aunts, uncles, and cousins only once or twice a year, so the family to which I am close is only my parents, my sister, and my brother-in-law. These are relationships worth a fight. This is the home worth preserving: not the buildings. Yet all is not well even in this home. A shadow hangs over us, even as it does over Bilbo and Frodo, and even as it does over every family in one way or another. This is the reality of our world.
Those who have known true goodness stand prepared to
sacrifice. They will go to war against the forces of darkness because they know
what it is to experience love. They feel in their heart a longing for the good.
Even if they have never known perfection, even if their home has always been
somewhat sullied, they have seen flashes of the light, and so they will fight
ever on and on, wherever the road may lead.
A FEW NOTES ABOUT SOURCES:
- The articles in this series freely include references to material in other books by J.R.R. Tolkien that are part of the same narrative, particularly The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. Citations will only be provided in the case of direct quotations.
- Any citations that include merely a number are from J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings, Single volume movie tie-in edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994). - All biblical quotations are taken from The New American Standard Bible (1995 edition), copyright The Lockman Foundation.
[1] Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings, Single volume movie tie-in edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 28.
[2] 22
[3] 31
[4] 32
[5] 33
[6] 33
[7] 40
[8] 40