The Hobbit - Chapter 01 - An Unexpected Party

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

One concerned the choice of 'Baggins', which has always struck me as similar to the word 'baggin' - meaning a workman's lunch. Apparently in the OED 'baggin' is listed as 'bagging'; Shippey ppointed out that Tolkien knew that this was an incorrect spelling according to the people who actually used the word, as it's a dialect word from the north. Tolkien was a member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society (which I did not know!) and so knew that the correct term was 'baggin' and used it as the name for a food-loving Hobbit.

I'm surprised that this is all the information they give for the names. The names are actually much more rich than this, although I was unaware of the lunch thing, which is fascinating:

A bilbo means both an iron bar that was used to fasten a prisoner's legs together, or a sword (from the Spanish city of "Bilboa" which was known in the renaissance and before for its steelworks).

"Baggins" is a compoud of 'bag in', which echoes the name of the hobbit's home, Bag End, which is the literal English transation of cul de sac ('end of a bag'): French for a dead end. Another interesting work is the Greek kalypsomenoi (from which the witch Calypso gets her name in the Odyssey) which means "To have one's head in a bag" to describe someone who is blind to his duty or ignoring his responsibilities.

"Took" is both the past tense of the verb to take (so contains the possibility of theiving? Bilbo must learn to take the treasure??), but also has older meanings -- it is also a sword or a triumphant/defiant blast on a trumpet made by way of challenge or before setting out on a venture.

So put all this together...

Our protagonist has two last names -- Baggins and Took -- that provide him with the two sides of his identity that will be in conflict with one another throughout his journey: the Baggins half that years to return to the comfortable dead end that is his home (end of a bag, bag-in); and the Took that wants to become a thief, wear a sword, and trumpet his greatness.

These two different possibilities are not set in direct opposition to one another though, because his first name is the combination of both: bilbo = imprisoning shackles, bilbo = sword. It's almost as though Bilbo has to learn to move beyond thinking of himself as being divided by his last names and toward realising a new a complex identity as contained by his first name.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Professor Tolkien was no slouch of a philologist!

[davem]

The oddest thing is that he wrote TH for his children, none of whom would have got any of that. He never expected anyone else to read TH, so all that stuff must have been written as a private entertainment.

So, I suppose we could say that he wrote TH as much for himself as for his children. It seems like what he actually wrote was two Hobbits in one.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

I think it may be more than simply a private entertainment. Throughout all his writings you find these kinds or names and linguistic play, and I'm not sure we can say with any confidence that the adult reader of LotR is going to get them all -- if any of them. There are so many, and they are so clearly the result of such effort and learning, that I can only conclude that they play some significant role in the creation of the story. For Tolkien, I think, the word always comes first -- in particular the name. For him to write the story of Bilbo Baggins (not just relate the plot of adventure, but to tell Bilbo's story, the story of his growth and development) he required a name that would reflect that story, or contain it. It might even be simply a question of aesthetics: the name of his character had to 'fit' the nature of that character for Tolkien.

[davem]

Found something interesting in the new History of The Hobbit re the famous painting by Tolkien of Hobbiton across the Water. Up to now I'd taken it to be a simple landscape picture of Hobbiton. Rateliff points out that in the original draft the Dwarves arranged to meet Bilbo not at the Green Dragon, but at the Great Mill (inspired by Sarehole Mill) - hence the reason for the picture having Bag End in the background & the Mill in the foreground. So the picture is actually depicting Bilbo's route from his hole to the place he met the Dwarves.