Throughout The Hobbit, Bilbo struggles
to subdue his love of comfort, which is the product of his Baggins
heritage, and to tune in to his love of adventure, which comes from
his Took heritage. However, he never really loses touch with the
Baggins in him. As he rests in Beorn’s house, we see a return to
the Bilbo who wishes nothing more than to sit in his old armchair.
If The Hobbit has an overarching message, it is
that even a small, unassuming person such as Bilbo possesses the
inner resources necessary to perform adventurous, heroic deeds and
that the transformation that makes him a hero does not erase his
essential nature.
Bilbo’s heroic deeds are all the more remarkable because
they fail to change him. He possesses a new confidence and a drastically
widened perspective on the world, to the point that he now prefers
the company of elves and wizards to that of other hobbits. Much
of The Hobbit explores the contrast between the
world in ancient epics that Tolkien studied as a scholar and the
modern, English world in which he lived. The novel closes with a
compromise between the two worlds: Bilbo goes on living amid the
comforts of Bag End, but he passes his time reading and writing
about adventure and conversing with characters from his heroic quest.
In a way, this image is a concise symbol of Tolkien himself, living
his comfortable life at Oxford while immersed in the grim violent
imaginative realm of heroic literature, which he both studied and
wrote.
The company’s quest, which seemed tainted by the greed
that motivated it, is redeemed by its wide-ranging and beneficial
effects. Lake Town is rebuilt stronger than before. Humans can once
again live in Dale, no longer fearing the dragon’s fire. The goblins
have been conquered, and, thus, much of the wilderness of the east
has been made safer for travelers. Moreover, Bilbo hears in Rivendell that
the errand that Gandalf performed while he was away from the quest
was to join a great council of wizards, who have succeeded in driving
the Necromancer out of southern Mirkwood. This is another incident
that will have important ramifications in The Lord of the
Rings, as the dark lord merely leaves Mirkwood to return
to his ancient stronghold in the land of Mordor, where he attempts
to conquer the world.
Despite our sense that other, perhaps grander, adventures
are happening at the same time as the events recounted in The
Hobbit, Bilbo nevertheless ends up playing a significant
role in the larger affairs of Middle-Earth. Certainly, without Bilbo’s
intervention at several tough points, Smaug would never have been
killed, the treasure would never have been recovered, and the goblins
would still roam the Misty Mountains. He is without question a hero,
although such a title would hardly suit his tastes. In the book’s
last passage, Gandalf jokingly chides the hobbit about his insignificance,
telling him that he is “only quite a little fellow in a wide world
after all!” In part, the wizard is laughing at himself, because
even he could hardly have foreseen just how important a role Bilbo
would play.
