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Hamfast Gamgee
Dor-Lomin
Sun, 7:14pm
Post #1 of 4
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Looking at some of the threads here I was wondering a bit about Drogo Baggins. And what the gaffer said about him. He initially says that Drogo was a gentle hobbit with not much to say about him. But in the next breath says he was drowned. Which is a bit unusual. Then the gaffer says that Drogo went boating which is even more unusual. And we know that he married a Brandybuck and moved to Buckland. Even more unusual. Sounds the me like Drogo Baggins was not a gentle hobbit with not much to say about him but rather an exeptional character! Which of course is maybe not what the people of Hobbiton like!
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squire
Gondolin
Sun, 9:54pm
Post #2 of 4
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A gentle hobbit - kind and soft-spoken - or a gentlehobbit - one of the gentry class?
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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So Tolkien has coined the term gentlehobbit, analogous to gentleman, in its now outdated sense of meaning only that minority of men (and, we now know, hobbits) who were of the landed gentry, both in the wealthy upper class and having a family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.
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Mon, 8:13pm
Post #3 of 4
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Decent and Respectable Drogo Baggins
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I agree with squire that "gentlehobbit" is about social class.
I notice that Drogo is described by Gaffer as "decent" and "respectable" but Bilbo is instead "very nice". This noticeable difference in sentiment allows for Drogo to have unspecified but potentially significant character flaws that could have been the cause for Gaffer much preferring Bilbo to Drogo. On the other hand, these character flaws need not necessarily be anything more major than, say, Drogo lacking Bilbo's charisma and social wit and coming across as kind of dull.
I do think Drogo had a hidden adventurous side to him. He agreed to step on a boat, after all. I think the drowning itself also was very unusual. The most mundane option is that Drogo and Primula went boating while drunk (implying a tendency for excessive alcohol use), but other options are also possible, of which I've written in an earlier post.
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noWizardme
Gondolin
7:18pm
Post #4 of 4
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When Adam delved and Eve span...
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When Adam delved and Eve span,
That won't rhyme with -hobbit, dang!*
But I agree with you, squire (as so often!) - it's gentlehobbit (no space or hyphen) indicating the Bagginses social standing.
I noticed today that Tolkien comes full circle back to this word, in The Scouring Of The Shire, when the Gaffer has a complaint to make, and interrupts Farmer Cotton's exposition abotu how things have been going:
Into the middle of this talk came Sam, bursting in with his gaffer. Old Gamgee did not look much older, but he was a little deafer.
‘Good evening, Mr. Baggins!’ he said. ‘Glad indeed I am to see you safe back. But I’ve a bone to pick with you, in a manner o’ speaking, if I may make so bold. You didn’t never ought to have a’ sold Bag End, as I always said. That’s what started all the mischief. And while you’ve been trapessing in foreign parts, chasing Black Men up mountains from what my Sam says, though what for he don’t make clear, they’ve been and dug up Bagshot Row and ruined my taters!’
‘I am very sorry, Mr. Gamgee,’ said Frodo. ‘But now I’ve come back, I’ll do my best to make amends.’
‘Well, you can’t say fairer than that,’ said the Gaffer. ‘Mr. Frodo Baggins is a real gentlehobbit, I always have said, whatever you may think of some others of the name, begging your pardon.
Tolkien playing it for laughs, of course - the Shire hobbits being invincibly parochial. But I think there's an intentional contrast between Frodo (a real gentlehobbit, knowing his responsibilities to those lower down the social hierarchy) and Lotho (funny ideas about owning everything himself and ordering other folks around).
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*The original;
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who then was the gentleman?
John Ball, 14th Century
Can't think of much that rhymes wth 'hobbit', 'John Wayne Bobbitt' being hardly appropriate, as well as someone not often re-membered these days
~~~~~~
"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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