Bilbo Baggins

Lineage

Bilbo was born on 22 September T.A. 2890 (S.R. 1290), the only child of Bungo Baggins and Belladonna Took. The Bagginses of Hobbiton were a family of solid means and settled habits, so respectable that nobody expected anything of them; Bungo had built the great hole of Bag End under the Hill, partly with his wife's money, and Bilbo inherited it. On his mother's side he was a grandson of Gerontius, the Old Took, who had died the year Bilbo was born, and so he carried the Fallohide strain of the Tooks and their reputation for going off and having adventures. For fifty years the Took side lay dormant. Bilbo lived comfortably alone, kept a well-stocked larder, wore waistcoats with brass buttons, and was thought by his neighbours to be exactly as dull as a Baggins should be.

An unexpected journey

In April T.A. 2941 Gandalf, who had known Bilbo as a boy and remembered the fireworks he had set off for the Old Took, came to Hobbiton in search of someone to make up a fourteenth member for Thorin Oakenshield's expedition to Erebor. Thirteen Dwarves arrived at Bag End the following evening, ate Bilbo's food, sang of the gold under the Mountain, and stirred the Tookish part of him awake. He signed on as their burglar and set off without so much as a pocket-handkerchief.

The road east taught him his trade the hard way. In the Trollshaws his first attempt at burglary got the whole company caught by three trolls, and only Gandalf's trick kept them out of the pot; from the trolls' hoard Bilbo took the small Elvish blade he later named Sting. At Rivendell Elrond read the moon-letters on Thorin's map. In the High Pass the company was captured by goblins and dragged down into Goblin-town, and in the confusion of their escape Bilbo was knocked senseless and left behind in the dark.

Riddles in the dark

Crawling through the tunnels beneath the Misty Mountains, Bilbo put his hand on a small cold ring and pocketed it without thinking. He came to the shore of an underground lake and there met Gollum, who had lost the ring that very day and did not yet know it. The two played a game of riddles for Bilbo's life, and Bilbo won it with the ungrammatical question of what he had in his pocket. When Gollum went to fetch his ring to kill and eat his guest, Bilbo fled, slipped the ring on by accident, and found that it made him invisible. He followed Gollum to the back door of the goblin tunnels, and at the last moment, with the creature crouched in the passage in front of him, he had the chance to kill it and did not. Pity, and a sudden understanding of Gollum's misery, stayed his hand; he leapt over Gollum instead and ran out into daylight. Gandalf would later say that this single act of mercy decided the fate of the world.

To the Lonely Mountain

With the ring Bilbo became a burglar in earnest. He rejoined the Dwarves, escaped Wargs and goblins by the help of the Eagles, rested at the hall of Beorn, and in Mirkwood saved the company twice: once from the great spiders, killing several with Sting and giving the sword its name, and once from the dungeons of Thranduil, whence he packed the Dwarves into barrels and rode them down the Forest River to Lake-town. At the Mountain he found the keyhole of the secret door, went alone down the tunnel into the dragon's hall, stole a golden cup, and in a second visit talked with Smaug himself, learning in the exchange of the bare patch on the dragon's jewelled breast. The old thrush carried that knowledge to Bard, who killed Smaug over Lake-town.

Bilbo's last and most contentious act of burglary was to take the Arkenstone, the heirloom Thorin valued above all the hoard, and give it secretly to Bard and Thranduil as a bargaining piece to avert war between Dwarves, Men and Elves. Thorin cursed him for it. Then Bolg's army of Orcs and Wargs came down upon them all, and in the Battle of Five Armies Bilbo, wearing the ring, was knocked out by a stone and missed most of the fighting. He was found in time to be reconciled with the dying Thorin, who took back his harsh words and wished that more folk valued food and cheer and song above gold.

There and back again

Bilbo went home by way of Beorn's hall and Rivendell with two small chests of treasure and the mithril coat Thorin had given him, and arrived at Hobbiton on 22 June 2942 in the middle of the auction of his effects, having been declared dead. He recovered most of his belongings, though the spoons that went to Lobelia Sackville-Baggins were never seen again, and he settled down to a long, private and slightly scandalous old age. He wrote up his adventures, kept company with Dwarves and with Gandalf, visited Elves, and did not grow old. When his cousin Drogo and Drogo's wife Primula drowned in the Brandywine in 2980, he took an interest in their orphan son Frodo, who shared his birthday, and in 2989 he adopted the boy and brought him to live at Bag End, to the lasting fury of the Sackville-Bagginses.

The Farewell Party

On 22 September 3001 Bilbo turned one hundred and eleven and Frodo thirty-three, and Bilbo gave the greatest party the Shire had ever seen, with Gandalf's fireworks, a dinner for a hundred and forty-four, and a speech. At the end of the speech he put on the ring and vanished from the table. In the hole afterwards he found that leaving the ring to Frodo, as he had planned, was the hardest thing he had ever tried to do; it took all Gandalf's authority to get him to put it down on the mantelpiece and go. He walked out of Hobbiton that night with three Dwarves, the first person in the Ring's history to give it up of his own will.

Rivendell

Bilbo went east, saw Dale and the Mountain once more, and then settled at Rivendell, where he spent the last twenty years of the Age writing poetry, translating from the Elvish, and working on his book. In October 3018 Frodo arrived there wounded and found him older and slower. At the Council of Elrond Bilbo offered, half seriously, to take the Ring to Mordor himself, and was gently refused; he gave Frodo Sting and the mithril coat instead. One moment at Rivendell showed what the Ring had done even to him: asked for a last look at it, he reached out with a sudden hungry face, and Frodo for an instant saw a grasping creature in his uncle's place.

The last journey

Frodo returned in September 3019 to find Bilbo more shrunken and forgetful still, the years the Ring had held back now catching up. On 22 September 3021, his hundred-and-thirty-first birthday, the day he passed the Old Took's record, Bilbo rode out of Rivendell with Elrond and Galadriel, met Frodo and Sam in the Woody End, and went on to the Grey Havens. There, as a Ring-bearer, he was permitted to sail into the West with Frodo, Gandalf and the last of the Eldar on 29 September. His book, with Frodo's continuation, became the Red Book of Westmarch.

Sailed into the West from the Grey Havens on 29 September T.A. 3021, aged 131, with Frodo, Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel.