squire
Gondolin
Sun, 9:54pm
Post #2 of 2
(115 views)
Shortcut
|
|
A gentle hobbit - kind and soft-spoken - or a gentlehobbit - one of the gentry class?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
The Gaffer describes both Bilbo and Drogo in close succession during this excellent gossip session.
'A very nice well-spoken gentlehobbit is Mr. Bilbo, as I've always said,'...
'A decent respectable hobbit was Mr. Drogo Baggins; there was never much to tell of him, till he was drownded.'
So Tolkien has coined the term gentlehobbit, analogous to gentleman, in its now outdated sense of meaning only that minority of men (and, we now know, hobbits) who were of the landed gentry, both in the wealthy upper class and having a family heritage (thus, gens = Latin for clan, extended family sharing a name). Bilbo, we know from the previous book that this passage directly draws on, was a scion of the very wealthy and privileged Baggins family, at the very top of the Shire's social structure.
Drogo is of the same gentle family, as the Gaffer tells us (he is Bilbo's second cousin), but the Gaffer does not repeat the term gentlehobbit because it would be redundant in the storytelling. Instead he says "decent respectable" which certainly goes with what we've learned so far about the Baggins family in the earlier book. Does that imply 'gentle' in the sense of being soft-spoken, kind, and sensitive to others? Perhaps.
That said, what we see repeated in Drogo's history is what Bilbo's father Bungo did: he married a woman from a notably different clan of hobbits, one with more adventurous, risky, or controversial members. Bilbo's father married a Took, as we were told in The Hobbit, and that set up the entertaining conflict in Bilbo's character that drives the ironic adventure of that story.
Now we have Drogo marrying a Brandybuck, an equally rich but eccentric hobbit family (as the pub-listeners tell us during this episode). An attentive reader might notice, then, that this sequel to The Hobbit was making this new character Frodo into a second version of Bilbo: with an apparently boring, respectable, and predictable Baggins father, and a mother from the 'queer', 'tricky', or 'dark' Brandybucks.
Drogo's and Primula's drowning seem to be a device to both 1) make Frodo an orphan and get him into Bilbo's care, without being Bilbo's son, and 2) reinforce the message that the boat-loving Brandybucks are odd in the eyes of Hobbiton's pub-goers.
So is Drogo an exceptional character? Only, I would say, in the sense that Bungo Baggins was: he married a wife who was the antithesis of the Baggins family temperament.
squire online:
Unfortunately my longtime internet service provider abandoned its hosting operations last year. I no longer have any online materials to share with the TORn community.
 = Forum has no new posts. Forum needs no new posts.
|
