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Bilbo and the Shire

MirielCelebel
Rivendell


Jul 18 2014, 3:08am

Post #1 of 7 (492 views)
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Bilbo and the Shire Can't Post

This is another excerpt from a greater work I am currently involved with (my Tolkien/Jackson critical analysis for those who are not familiar with my posts). This section examines Bilbo and his culture and how they are portrayed in the films. My main goal in this project has always been to understand that books and films are two different forms of art and should be treated appropriately. Comments, Questions, and Criticism are welcome. Enjoy!

[Disclaimer: This has been copied from a Word document and the references did not directly translate so if you have any inquires about my sources, please do not hesitate to ask.]



It is widely known that Tolkien had an immense affinity for language, philology, and culture. He was very much a pluralist and realized that society cannot function without diversity. He spent a great deal of time creating the languages and races which inhabit Middle-earth. In fact, his stories were simply an afterthought:
All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories. They are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of linguistic taste could have a function. The stories were comparatively late in coming.[1]
Tolkien’s imaginary world was focused around unrelated material he had created long before he ever saw that blank page amid his term papers. The actions of his characters and their surroundings play a large part in understanding them. How they are tested, especially outside their own habitat, and how they overcome challenges in a changing environment says a great deal about who they are as individuals.
The first three pages of the story, up to the point where the readers meet Gandalf, explain a great deal about Bilbo’s personal life. The narrator does not go into great detail about his personality but we are told what hobbits are which was no doubt a great relief to the author who had no clue what they were! Tolkien begins by telling his readers about Bilbo’s family and in a sense, we meet Bilbo’s parents, Belladonna Took and Bungo Baggins. We have already discussed how the internal battle within Bilbo was between the Took and Baggins sides of his family. The narrator tells us that, although the Tooks enjoyed adventures from time to time, they were wealthy enough that it did not matter what sort of trouble in which they may have found themselves. According to legend, or at the very least according to the gossip of the neighbors, someone in the Took family had taken a “fairy wife” (H2). The term “fairy” was used very frequently by Tolkien in his early writings and it was simply a synonym for “elf,” which he uses much more frequently later.[2] The narrator quickly disputes the claim and says it is “absurd”, but nevertheless that side of Bilbo’s family has been associated with an adventurous, less than respectable nature. The Baggins side, however, “never had any adventures or did anything unexpected” and the locals considered them not only respectable, but predictable. We are told that Bilbo “looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father” (H3). Although he looked like the Baggins side of the family, the narrator points out that something Tookish was inside him dying to come out. The lucky readers are privileged to watch both sides become at peace with one another throughout Bilbo’s journey.
Peter Jackson took into account Bilbo’s family history while making The Hobbit trilogy, though not in the way the audience may have expected. Jackson had a challenge before him when it came to Bilbo Baggins because he had already established him in the form of Sir Ian Holm in the original Lord of the Rings films. He had to exhibit a new façade to a familiar and beloved character. In only a few seconds of an extended scene, Jackson succeeds. When Old Bilbo is recounting his story to Frodo in the Prologue of An Unexpected Journey, there is a short flashback to Bilbo as a young child at a party, fighting Gandalf with a wooden sword. For split moment the audience sees Belladonna Took, who seems to be on very pleasant terms with the wizard. The party, which closely resembles the scene at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, exemplifies the lighthearted spirit of the hobbits, and Belladonna certainly appears to be in her element. Old Bilbo is remembering this event as if it happened only the day before and he remember it with fondness; proof that even before the solitary and reclusive Baggins side took over him, he enjoyed adventures. This was Jackson’s way of introducing us to the same information Tolkien conveyed through words with the power of the moving picture.
After discovering some information about Bilbo’s family tree, it is also vital to understand the environment in which the hobbit resides. The Shire is a very unique place and it has a sacred place in Bilbo’s heart throughout the entire journey to the Lonely Mountain. Tolkien, in a letter to Deborah Webster written in 1958, confesses, “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food.”[3] Incidentally, in many interviews, Peter Jackson also admitted to being a hobbit. He hardly ever wears shoes, unless he has to, and he even said in the fifth production video for An Unexpected Journey that he wished he could retire to his Shire set. Many of the events in the book are from the viewpoint of hobbits; be it Bilbo, Frodo, or Merry and Pippin, and the films capitalize on this. The set of the Shire is just as Tolkien described and since this is where both stories begin, it is essential that we understand what makes the Shire so special and inspirational to both author and director.
Arthur W. Hunt III, a Professor at the University of Tennessee, wrote an article in 2009 titled “Back to the Shire: From English Village to Global Village and Back Again.” The purpose of his writing was to persuade a greater audience that the Shire in Tolkien’s stories represents something greater than a fictitious setting for a fantasy piece of literature. “The Shire represents permanence, a sense of place, and harmony with nature,” he argued.[4] Tolkien uses explicit detail to describe the desolation of waste in the North which causes Bilbo to wish he was back at home, and again in Mordor as Frodo and Sam make their way to Mount Doom. These vivid descriptions sharply contrast the beauty of Bag End and are foreshadowing what will happen to Middle-earth if evil is victorious. Tolkien had a love for simple things and nature, as do the hobbits of the Shire and as did the English people in general before the age of industrialization. America too experienced an age of simplicity when the Puritans arrived and settled in New England. Hunt believes that the “early colonial towns were actually transplants of medieval-like villages.”[5] He goes even further to argue that the subtext of Tolkien’s Middle-earth saga is “obviously about the violation of the earth”[6] and, in fact, the end of the later trilogy proves this assessment correct when Frodo and his friends return to find their home in shambles and are forced to rebuild their lives. The folk of the Shire live in harmony with one another, for the most part, and enjoy the simple things in life such as gardening and smoking. Hunt’s article reinforces Tolkien’s personal desire to return to a life unaffected by a rapidly growing technological society.
Throughout the adventure in The Hobbit, we see glimpses of the Shire in Bilbo’s thoughts conveyed through the narrator. It is what gives him strength in the story. Although Gandalf orchestrated the trip and Thorin is the king of his thirteen companions, it is Bilbo who shows true courage and leadership. He quickly evolves from being a tag-along body to the savior of the group on multiple occasions. We begin to see this in Mirkwood as Bilbo slinks through the Elvenking’s halls stealing food to stay alive, and eventually organizing the escape plan which takes the company to Lake-town via barrels down the river.
We should be able to know what the Shire means to Bilbo throughout his journey. We have been told by the narrator that Bilbo often thought of his hobbit hole and of bacon and quiet. He suffers from homesickness, a feeling familiar to anyone who has spent a significant amount of time away from the place in which they live. In the book, it is when Bilbo’s sees the Hill for the first time in a year and he breaks into poetry, the first heartfelt bit of poetry he utters the entire journey. The first stanza speaks of his adventure and his travels, but the second stanza is exclusively about the place he calls home:

Roads go ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,

Yet feet that wandering have gone

Turn at last to home afar

Eyes that fire and sword have seen

And horror in the halls of stone

Look at last on meadows green

And trees and hills they long have known (H302).


This stanza also refers to Bilbo himself, although indirectly. Bilbo’s homecoming is a “complex emotional experience.”[7] After a year of wishing he was home in front of his warm hearth, drinking tea, smoking his pipe, and eating good food, he is now home and unsure how to approach it. The voice with which he uses in his poem is distant and impersonal, almost as if he is singing a song that later generations would sing of his adventures. Although he is looking upon his longed-for home, he is still remembering his travels and the unpleasantness of some of his experiences.
In the films, however, Jackson once again takes a different approach for the simple reason that reading a character’s mind on screen is near impossible to execute properly. There is moment in the Extended Edition of An Unexpected Journey, before the company departs Rivendell, where Elrond informs Bilbo that he is more than welcome to stay if that was his wish. Elrond can sense that the hobbit still feels out of place amongst his companions. This sentiment is echoed in the caves of the Misty Mountains just before everyone is captured by goblins, when Bofur confronts Bilbo about leaving. Bilbo admits that he never felt a part of the company. While the dwarves have been accustomed to being on the road long-term and never staying in one place for very long, Bilbo has a home, a bed, a warm hearth, all waiting for him. Jackson placed this dialogue perfectly because the conversation is between Bilbo and a member of the company who is not blood related to Thorin. Bofur, according to the character development between actor Jimmy Nesbit and Jackson, is an outcast even among the outcasts. His family is well below Thorin on the social ladder and his involvement with the quest exists simply because he has nothing to lose but everything to gain. Bofur, of all the dwarves, understands Bilbo’s feelings.
Martin Freeman is a remarkable actor and he views his portrayal of Bilbo Baggins completely different from how some of the other actors view their characters. Freeman went into these films as not playing only Tolkien’s Bilbo, but also the Bilbo of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens. While the spirit of Tolkien is truly alive in the screenplay, the set, and the music, Freeman admits, “I’ve read the book, of course, but since we started filming I don’t really refer to it, because we aren’t making the book, we are making these films and they contain conflations and expansions and different situations.”[8] This statement could not be closer to the truth. In fact, Freeman is very concerned with character and how his role interacts with the rest of the story. In the book, Bilbo’s role is not small, but the view from the narrator’s perspective, which is what the reader experiences, is rather narrow. In the films, however, the scope is much larger and we are able to see Bilbo’s role in a much more grandiose narrative. Freeman understands that his character must fit into this version of the story.
Tolkien liked to bookend his stories. Comparing the “unexpected” and “long-expected” parties of The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, respectively, Tolkien begins both of his sagas with hobbits and parties. In the same way he ends his hobbits’ adventures with unrestful homecomings. Granted, Bilbo’s return is much less devastating than the sight to which Frodo and his companions returned, but nonetheless, Bilbo finds his home being turned upside down by an auction. His family members and neighbors, after a year of not hearing from him, assumed he was dead and had taken it upon themselves to disperse his personal belongings. We should not be surprised at all, or disappointed for that matter, by the fact that Bilbo’s first and greatest annoyance is not that his things are being removed from his home, but that people entering his house are “not even wiping their feet on the mat” (H303). After all that he has been through and after all that he has witnessed, upon coming home he is still perturbed by small things such as having an unclean hobbit hole. In a way, Bilbo has not changed at all.
On the other hand, Bilbo has changed a great deal. Despite the fact that he was no longer considered “respectable,” and in fact even his own family had distanced themselves and their children from him, we are told that Bilbo did not care: “He was quite content; and the sound of the kettle on his hearth was ever after more musical than it had been even in the quiet days before the Unexpected Party” (H304). Now Bilbo is appreciating his simple life more than ever. He has no regrets and Tolkien proves this by having him document his adventures in the Red Book in order to pass it on to Frodo. This is why Jackson found it crucial to have Old Bilbo and Frodo reprise their roles in order to tell the tale as just that, a story to be retold. In the book, Bilbo hung his sword over the mantelpiece and he displayed the coat of mail given to him by Thorin. We are also told that the hobbit followed the lead of Dain, the new King under the Mountain, in giving presents to his family and wisely spending his treasure for the good of others. In Chapter One, we discovered that both the Took and Baggins side of his family are wealthy so Bilbo grew up wonting for nothing and even now, as the wealthiest hobbit in Bag End, he continues to spend his money thriftily and selflessly.
In the same sense, Martin Freeman also knows that his character changes throughout his journey. As the quest becomes increasingly dangerous, Bilbo finds himself in situations he would never face if he had stayed behind in his safe world of Bag End. “[Bilbo] discovers hidden resources because none of us ever know how we’re going to react under duress or what we’re capable of until it’s happening,” and it is precisely this quality in Bilbo, says Freeman, which makes him such an identifiable character to the audience. In this way, Bilbo is the audience’s ticket into the Middle-earth that Peter Jackson has created.
Bilbo in The Hobbit is extremely important to fans of Tolkien literature, especially the saga of Middle-earth, and to viewers of Jackson’s film adaptations. This is where the audience is introduced to hobbits, and indeed the author himself learned about hobbits through Bilbo’s character. Another central theme of this book, one that appeals specifically to the young audience Tolkien was targeting, is that little people can achieve big things. This idea sets up readers to expect great things from Frodo when they meet him in The Lord of the Rings. It is also not just something which runs in the Took/Baggins family. Throughout the sequel, Sam, Pippin, and Merry also achieve greatness and it is all possible through the original adventure experienced by the legendary Bilbo Baggins.


[1] ‘Letters,’ pg. 214
[2]Olsen, pg. 22.
[3]‘Letters,’ pg.288.
[4]Hunt, pg. 217.
[5]Hunt, pg. 212.
[6]Hunt, pg. 214.
[7]Olsen, pg. 300.
[8] Sibley, pg. 20.


"The Road goes ever on..."

Writing Bliss


Bracegirdle
Valinor


Jul 18 2014, 3:35am

Post #2 of 7 (308 views)
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Long, and as time is precious [In reply to] Can't Post

I was going to skip it. But started reading and was immediately hooked!

Excellent essay! Fun reading! Well done! Smile

Cuio i Pheriain anann! Aglar'ni Pheriannath!


Otaku-sempai
Immortal


Jul 18 2014, 3:39pm

Post #3 of 7 (324 views)
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Suggestion for ease of reading [In reply to] Can't Post

One or both of the following:
- indent paragraphs
- space between paragraphs.

There's no real need to space between lines within the same verse of a poem or song. Nice essay though.

'There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.' - Gandalf the Grey, The Fellowship of the Ring


MirielCelebel
Rivendell


Jul 18 2014, 7:54pm

Post #4 of 7 (265 views)
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Thank you both for your comments [In reply to] Can't Post

I had spaces and indentations even after I pasted from Word, but then after I posted the text went all wonky. It even took out my quotation marks from the Tolkien quote at the beginning. Grr!! I do apologize for the inconvenience.

"The Road goes ever on..."

Writing Bliss


Bracegirdle
Valinor


Jul 19 2014, 1:06am

Post #5 of 7 (244 views)
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Ah, the wonders of technology [In reply to] Can't Post

I’ve always thought that the English language should not only have “words” but some type of attractiveness for pleasure and ease of reading.. (Have you ever noticed that the first four pages of An Unexpected Journey have 12 dashes and 10 parentheses?)

But, yes, usually all we can accomplish is to attempt to break our thoughts into sections with indentations or spaces as Otaku-sempai suggested.

I also have a problem transferring “Word” to a posting. My indentations disappear like yours. (This paragraph is an example as it has an indentation which will disappear.) Now if I post a longer piece I use the “preview post” button to see what it looks like, and usually end up using a space between paragraphs. So I think the problem is “Word” because if I copy and paste from Word the indentations disappear, and with a more complicated essay (such as yours) other strange things do happen.

Cheers and good luck with your project.
BG

Cuio i Pheriain anann! Aglar'ni Pheriannath!


Otaku-sempai
Immortal


Jul 19 2014, 11:54am

Post #6 of 7 (236 views)
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I understand. [In reply to] Can't Post

I've had similar things happen with items that I've cut and pasted into a message.

'There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.' - Gandalf the Grey, The Fellowship of the Ring


CuriousG
Half-elven


Jul 19 2014, 4:50pm

Post #7 of 7 (283 views)
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Word vs. TORN [In reply to] Can't Post

There's some hidden formatting in Word that's not always compatible with TORN. One thing I do is compose in Word, then cut and paste to Notepad, which strips out everything, then cut and paste in TORN. You have to put back in your bolds, etc, but at least you don't get any nasty surprises with lines going wonky. Just a suggestion.

 
 

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