Bilbo: Everyone's Inner Child?
 

Well every one loves Ray--er-- Frodo, and hobbits have charmed their way into most readers' hearts, and Sam is beloved by many, but it might be said that Bilbo Baggins is the character who is recalled most affectionately. He is, after all, The Hobbit. He also has pride of place among the famous characters of children's literature. Alice, Toad, Pooh, Peter Pan, Bilbo... all from a glorious first flowering of children's literature.

Here on the Downs we have argued endlessly about whether the The Hobbit is simply children's literature but I'm not sure we have given Bilbo a close look. What kind of character is he?

Yes, he is the hero. Yes, he does learn a thing or two about himself on his adventure, and yes he does return home changed but still with all his hobbity tastes and habbits intact. Can we say, however, that Bilbo is truly an adult in TH? Is he an adult as, say, Argorn is in LotR, or Elrond, or Boromir are? Or is Bilbo a curious mixture of the child and the adult? It is safe bet I think to say that he does have some childish traits, for in part such characterisation is what wins over children's admiration. Yet hobbits come of age at 33 and Bilbo is roughly 50 when he answers the knock on his door. He's thirtysomething in human terms.

Yet other than some stodgy habits, does he act like a thirtysomething? Or is he most often given thoughts, character traits, dispositions such as a child might have?

Is he really an adult's inner child, and therein lies his charm? Has he kept, as Peter Pan has, the child alive in him? (Although as an aside I must say that Peter has a dark side to him which I think Bilbo does not have.) Alice is still thoroughly a girl, with some very astute ideas of things and some very strong views of adult behaviour. I don't think we would characterise Alice as adult at all. Her value as a character lies in her being a child.

How are we to characterise Bilbo? Adult? Child? Child's view of adult? Adult's view of child? Is he the adult who is able at a later age to take up that road not taken in his wilder and younger years?

In one way there are two Bilbos, as in LotR he is slightly different, older and perhaps more curmudgeonly. Though this could easily be explained away as the effect of having been a ringbearer for so many years.

I think Bilbo is portrayed in a familiar way in The Hobbit, as a grown up, but as the kind of grown up who appeals directly to children. He is gentle, nervous, and is jolly; Bilbo is a 'safe' adult, the kind of character we also see a little of in the kids' characters and presenters we see on TV on a daily basis. For example, presenters on Blue Peter may seem very childish to our adult eyes, getting enthusiastic about making a living room for Barboe and Action Man out of a cornflakes box and a roll of sticky backed plastic. But to a child, they seem friendly and approachable, and despite being obviously grown ups, they are people they feel they can identify with. And of course these presenters go off and do skydiving and the like, having the adventures for the kids who cannot have them, which Bilbo also does.

In another way Bilbo is also a 'kidult', a horrible marketing term to describe adults who love collecting toys, watching cartoons, playing games etc. He has adventures, and he plays riddle games with odd little creatures he finds deep beneath the mountains.

But Bilbo is not entirely a childish character. Reading about him on another level, he is also a great representation of the traditional middle-class, middle-aged white Englishman. At times, reading Bilbo in this way, he can even come across as slightly satirical. He is suspicious of strangers, he gets in a flap over his manners, and he 'measures out his life in coffee spoons'. I would not be at all surprised had Tolkien written of Bilbo sitting reading The Daily Mail. Then of course he gets dragged off on an adventure and eventually becomes the very kind of character he would have been suspicious of!

If I dare mention the S word, one reason why Bilbo seems perpetually childlike because he is unmarried and in the context of Middle Earth, therefore more or less by definiton, not sexualised. However he doesn't have Frodo's ascetic quality. In one respect he is prematurely an old bachelor, too content with his own self indulgent routines to contemplate change; in another he is a really like a child in his innocent enthusiasm for adventure stories and firework parties.

Tolkien's explanation for his not marrying given via Gandalf is that he needed tobe free for adventure, however even when he has had his adventure, Tolkien rejects the solution of marrying him in order to produce an heir. Pehaps at that stage LOTR was still intended to be more of a true sequel to the Hobbit and in order that children could still relate to him, Bilbo had to be kept away from the true adult role.

However it does seem that in a sense, the Ring not only stopped Bilbo growing old - it stopped him growing up. If 50 is the hobbit 35 then the quest of Erebor is a genuine midlife crisis -which is never quite resolved. Bilbo goes more or less directly from the end of youth to death.

I think that Bilbo remaining a bachelor doesn't seem so odd put into the context of Hobbit society. He was probably quite eligible before he left for his adventures, but once he returned he would be immediately marked out as odd. The Shire is an insular society, and does not take kindly to strangers; it also seems very gossipy, and all kinds of tall tales about Bilbo would have rapidly grown up. Not even the rumour of all that gold and bling lurking in Bag End would have tempted a Hobbit lass to marry the by now very odd Bilbo.

Excellent point. If you look at the dates of the family trees in the back of LotR, many hobbits did not have any kids until they were around 50; 40-50 seems to be a reasonable age for first kids, and considering the number of kids many hobbits have, the 60's and maybe even early 70's aren't completely illogical ages for later kids. So while people might be expecting Bilbo to sort of get on with it by the time he's 50, this is not what could be called completely unusual.

But the unmarried status, however old Bilbo is and however normal this would be, is definitely something that would appeal to children. Consider Pooh... you don't even see a "Mr. Kanga" running around. "Married" is a very adult status and would probably distance the Hobbit as being a children's or an adventure book. Somehow Bilbo being a married old hobbit running off on an adventure is not quite so appealing. Imagine Mrs. Bilbo running around serving fruit cakes at the unexpected party... ;)

I've been out of commission and just now getting back to these very interesting replies!

So Bilbo is Mr. Rogers, from Mr. Rogers' Neighbourhood ? Or Kermit? Is trust developed by this kind of serenity or 'safeness'? Are the 'original' children's fairy tales populated by such characters?

And so a contemporary Bilbo would be the sort who plays online computer games? :D

Hmm. In Renaissance times, very young children were often married by their families for dynastic purposes. And there's the teen lovers Romeo and Juliet. Is procreation is the true adult role? Although we have moved beyond the idea that procreation is the only suitable or proper adult female role, do we still have this stereotype that only those who reproduce are properly adult? One of the things that always intrigued me about the role of monastic orders for men and women in the Middle Ages is that there was a culturally acceptable place for people who did not marry.

On the other hand, such a view of adulthood also implies that childhood is an asexual state of being. I'm not sure that modern pyschology (Freud aside) would support this idea.

Oh now, Lal, we all know that covetousness is not a hobbit habit! ;)

Anyhow, it is fascinating how this topic has got off on sexual matters. Are there other markers of childhood or adulthood besides this one? :p

While I try to figure out how I want to say my thoughts about the rest of this, I'll start here: I think that "having a job" would be one. Bilbo really has no apparent job - he sits outside smoking his pipe while sitting out on his front step and invites people over for tea, but he has no apparent job. He appears to spend his time fairly idly. He doesn't go to work or worry about money or pay bills - all those sorts of things that can - especially from a child's perspective - be associated with adulthood.

Perhaps the other way around - only those who are properly adult reproduce. What do kids do when they play 'grown-ups'? It's "you're the mommy and you're the daddy and you are the kids." Marriage is not the indicator of adulthood, but it certainly is one, especially from a child's point-of-view. Marriage - and parenthood - would seem to imply a certain level of maturity.

Romance, on the other hand, I think is a little bit different. This is more where Romeo and Juliet would fall - and where all the Disney romance movies - Cinderella, Pocohontas, Sleeping Beauty, etc. - fall. These people get married, but they're not the same kind of adult as the other way. This is where the princess and the prince fall in love and get married - this portrays marriage and romance as an event rather than a status, and it is the status of marriage that implies adulthood more than the event. But even with the more romantic sort, for kids it's still always "when we get older." Rather than saying childhood is an asexual state, I would say that it's a state where gender just isn't as important, or is important in a different way.