Name: Bilbo BagginsRace: Hobbit
Age: about 50
Background: Bilbo’s parents were Bungo Baggins and Belladonna Took.
Mr. Bilbo Baggins is the main character of The Hobbit – in fact, he is the hobbit of the book’s title. At the beginning of the story, Mr. Baggins is 50 years old, fat in the stomach, and content to putter around his hobbit hole, eat many meals a day, and smoke his pipe. All this changes the day that Gandalf the wizard walks by and Bilbo wishes him a good morning. Soon afterwards, Bilbo finds his home overrun by thirteen dwarves who hire him to be their burglar. Before he knows it, he is riding on a pony heading east for The Lonely Mountain where a dragon guards a hoard of dwarvish gold, and having more adventures than he could have ever imagined.
One of Bilbo’s first adventures involves three trolls who are determined to eat the dwarves and the hobbit. The dwarves, cold and wet from the pouring rain, see a light and send Bilbo off to investigate, hopefully to find fire and food. Unfortunately, the trolls quickly capture Bilbo and all thirteen dwarves and spend a long time deciding how to cook them. If Gandalf had not returned unexpectedly, and if trolls did not turn to stone when exposed to sunlight, there would have been no story to read.
One of the most famous scenes from The Hobbit, and one which is of vital importance to Tolkien’s later trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, is Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum as he wanders in the tunnels underneath the Misty Mountains after escaping goblins. In the dark, Bilbo finds a ring of metal, and without thinking, puts it in his pocket. When Gollum approaches him and challenges him to a riddle competition (if Gollum wins, he gets to eat Bilbo; if Bilbo wins, Gollum has to show him the way out from under the mountain), Bilbo tries desperately to think of riddles that will stump the strange, whispering creature. Finally, with his mind a blank, Bilbo sticks his hands in his pocket and feels the ring that he had forgotten about. Without thinking, he says aloud, “What have I got in my pocket?” Gollum thinks it is a riddle and is furious. He demands three chances but is unable to guess. Being a traitorous creature, he plans to murder Bilbo anyway, and Bilbo must run for his life. Quite by accident, he discovers that the ring makes him invisible, and so he is able to escape from Gollum. Bilbo uses the ring many times on his journey, and he becomes an actual first-class burglar.
Bilbo meets many fascinating people and creatures during his travels, including Elrond and the elves of Rivendell, the eagles of the Misty Mountains, Beorn the skin-changer (who sometimes appears as a huge black-bearded man, and sometimes as a great black bear), the giant spiders of Mirkwood, and finally the dragon, Smaug, who for many years has been guarding a mountain of gold that he stole from the dwarves. By the end of the story, Bilbo is hardly recognizable – no longer is he the timid, fussy hobbit we met in chapter one. Instead, he is resourceful, clever and bold – a true hero.
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