Bilbo: Returning Home
The first of a two-part series; an adventurer's return home--and why it matters.
The end of an adventure is rarely as dramatic as the beginning. For Bilbo Baggins, the journey home after dragons, dwarves, elves, orcs, battles, and treasure (oh my!) turned out to be just as meaningful as the quest itself. His return to the Shire offers readers a powerful reflection on change, homecoming, and what it means to truly belong. As Bilbo quickly discovers, coming back from an adventure isn’t as simple as walking through the front door, it’s about reconciling who you’ve become with the world you left behind.
Following the Battle of the Five Armies, he backtracks to square one, finally arriving at green country and crossing over the bridge and the mill and the river, right on up to his mailbox. And something is very off!
“Bless me! What’s going on?” he cried. There was a great commotion, and people of all sorts, respectable and unrespectable, were thick round the door, and many were going in and out-not even wiping their feet on the mat, as Bilbo noticed with annoyance.1
Bilbo returns to his beloved Bag-End not to peace and quiet…but: an auction! A auction of his own belongings!
Bilbo’s cousins the Sackville-Bagginses were, in fact, busy measuring his rooms to see if their own furniture would fit. In short Bilbo was “Presumed Dead,” and not everybody that said so was sorry to find the presumption wrong.2
Poor Bilbo—not materially, of course, but his assumed passing is all but celebrated by his greedy cousins; it was a final “nail in the coffin” for their lifelong goal of claiming Bilbo’s home, and everything in it. And, in this final—strangely unforeseen—conquest, Bilbo does indeed reclaim his possessions, even having to “buy back quite a lot of his own furniture”. Now, his adventure has finally ended and the dust has officially settled…right?
Not quite.
Indeed Bilbo found he had lost more than spoons – he had lost his reputation. It is true that for ever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honour of dwarves, wizards, and all such folk as ever passed that way; but he was no longer quite respectable. He was in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighbourhood to be ‘queer’-except by his nephews and nieces on the Took side, but even they were not encouraged in their friendship by their elders.3
It’s true: Bilbo’s desire to return home, foregoing a life of prolonged exploration and adventure and the company of heroes shows his true character—he was never in the adventure for glory or riches. Home is what he longs for most, and he’s here. But it’s different. “Same” may have been his expectation; “normal” must’ve felt so foreign, yet needed, and he’s back. But being back carries very few of the sentiments of old. He’s “no longer quite respectable”. And, transparently, he feels it in himself, too. It’s not a misplaced judgment by his fellow simple-beyond-measure citizens—Bilbo has changed more than he ever realized he could.
He’s no longer the cautious, comfort-loving hobbit who once fretted about missing meals. Pipeweed used to be the ambition of the day—and it’s still lovely—but things are different. Now, he carries the scars of battle, the memory of lost friends like Thorin—who died in his arms, and the passing of Fili and Kili, and a deeper understanding of the world beyond the Shire. It mirrors a classic storytelling pattern Tolkien loved: the hero’s return, in which the journey outward is matched by a journey inward. Bilbo’s world grows quiet once again, but it is heavy with meaning.
Though he gained wisdom and treasure, and experiences unmatched, he consequently lost a part of his old life. The Hobbit-hole he once loved is now tinged with strangeness, and his relationships with fellow hobbits are altered forever. At the same time, though: “…he did not mind. He was quite content, and the sound of the kettle on his hearth was ever after more musical than it had been, even in quiet days before the Unexpected Party.”4 Bilbo has changed, not for good or for bad, just changed—and his home has changed with him.
While he literally buys back some of his sold possessions, what he’s really reclaiming is his identity. His identity is now a blend of old and new: a hobbit who loves tea and armchairs and smoking his pipe, but who also carries the memory of far-off lands and great deeds, bloody battles and anxious conquests.
We’ve all had that moment: a long-desired return home that doesn’t feel quite as expected. Maturity has changed our lens of nostalgia; the simplicity of days gone past doesn’t exactly fill the cup the way it used to. Life experience gets in the way and home takes a new color.
Bilbo’s experience also foreshadows themes Tolkien explores more deeply in The Lord of the Rings. Just as Frodo later finds that he cannot truly go back to the life he knew before the Ring (we’ll get to that in the second article in this series), Bilbo’s uneasy homecoming suggests that adventure leaves lasting marks. It changes the hero and also the way the hero sees the world. This is part of why Bilbo withdraws into writing his memoir, There and Back Again, and why he leaves for Rivendell years later.
In a podcast interview with
, we talked about this eventual departure and both landed on two truths: Bilbo had to stay in the Shire to raise Frodo, and at the same time, he likely would’ve departed to Rivendell had Frodo not been his to raise. And so, for the time being, Bilbo stays put, tending to his affairs and being the “queer” resident of the Shire. Fortunately, friends are just a knock on the door away, as Gandalf and Balin visit him one autumn evening:“You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!” “Thank goodness!” said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.5
As Bilbo settles into his chair by the fire, we’re reminded that adventures shape us, but home remains the place where we bring those lessons to rest. And so, like Bilbo, we close the book with gratitude—for the journey, for the return, and for the sound of the kettle singing once again. His story doesn’t end when he walks through his front door—it simply enters a quieter chapter…for now.
We’ll dive into Frodo’s return home at the end of The Lord of the Rings in our next article, the second part of this series. Stay tuned!
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. 216.
Ibid., 216.
Ibid., 217.
Ibid.
Ibid., 218.
This is Bilbo's "Soldier, from the war returning" phase...
Thank you for the footnotes! Not enough people site their sources anymore. :)