Character Analysis Thread

[Kitanna]

Bilbo is quite the corrupted, yet uncorrupted character.

His possession of the Ring for six decades left him accusing Gandalf of trying to take it and in Rivendell a strange shadow passes over him as he contemplates getting it back from Frodo. From the very beginning he lied about it and his "winning" it from Gollum. Yet he manages to overcome its hold by giving it up as Gandalf requested.

Even though he knows it's evil he still longs for it in a childlike manner. And in that childlike manner I say he's uncorrupted. Because children can be easily swayed by what they want, they even resort to throwing fits, but they're never moved to a state of true violence. Bilbo's accusations and his lying from the beginning make me think of him as a small child hoarding some secret treasure he's not supposed to have. As for children (at least when my siblings and I were growing up) our treasures corrupts us, makes us act out, but after a time we were taught or came to realize we shouldn't keep it.

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

Bilbo does appear to have a habit of picking up things that later prove troublesome (the Ring, the Arkenstone). It has always struck me as odd, however, that the Ring -- which is an object of malice and evil with a sort of will of its own -- was something he picked up casually, in the dark, simply because his hand happened to fall on it, and in so doing, it put the Ring in what turned out to be the best place to lead to its eventual destruction. He chose to take the Arkenstone, not just because he happened upon it in the dark, and for him personally, the repercussions were more immediately bad. Just goes to show that Gandalf was right when he said that Bilbo took so little harm from the Ring because he began his ownership of it with pity. Not so the Arkenstone, and in that case, he lost friends in the battle that followed.

I tend to think that Bilbo is very much the embodiment of the Hobbit tendency to be "brave in a pinch." He's really a poet and scholar, and if he yearned for adventure, I think it was mostly because he wanted to know what it was like, to have such an experience so that he could feel he understood the heroes he heard about in story and song. When needed, he displays considerable courage, but doesn't really step up and volunteer for the job very often. I can't help but think that at the Council of Elrond, he volunteered to take the Ring to Mordor with a rather certain knowledge that he would not be allowed to do so because of his age. It doesn't diminish the value of his offer, because he's the kind of person who would stick to his word, but it could well explain why some of the others at the council smiled when he volunteered.