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[Drífa]

Was Bilbo a thief, and are Hobbits deceitful by nature?

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Drifa: No, I don't think Tolkien intended any evil with the Hobbits. He gave an idyllic idea of the English countryside and put in there little people who lived a quite virtuous life that fell within the boundaries of what they called exceptance. Kids would be naughty, just as human and dwarven children. If you like Hobbits, you find them very admirable I guess.

[Ercassie]

When considering whether Bilbo was a thief, or a 'burglar' as it were, I am reminded of Gandalf's words right back when he is introducing the Hobbit and his Dwarven visitors to the outline of their quest. He says something along the lines of "If I say that Bilbo Baggins is a burglar, then a burglar he is. Or will be when the time comes. There is more to him than you may guess, more even than he knows himself".

And when descriptions of Hobbits as a rule are made in the Prologue chapter of FOTR, they are as a people made out to be elusive, quick of hearing, keen-eyed and nimble in their movements; these would all, if you think about it, be worthwhile traits for a person considering a burglary or theft.

The natural inclination for deceit though, the actual want to burgle or steal, does not appear to be a common trait amongst hobbits. Bilbo later calls himself an 'honest burglar'. That pretty much sums him up in a teacup, to my thinking. He is a person naturally inclined to be very good at theft or deceit. But you would not think it to look at him .. so in that way, deceptive .. perhaps. But not through a personal intent to mislead people.

Hobbits are as good natured as Aiks has inferred. But at the same time, they hold the potential to be particularly effective thieves or deceivers. They are very much disarming by nature, overlooked, often literally, and were they to find themselves in a position where they require to employ these more cunning skills, they would excel at them.

In the case of Bilbo agreeing to become a burglar for the Dwarves, it is curiosity and adventure rather than greed which drive him. And as far as it goes for the theft of the ring, or the arkenstone in fact .. the former is majorly impacted by the influence of the ring itself, whereas the latter was accomplished only with the thought of taking it from Thorin for his own good. There was no naturally occurring vindictive intent in any of Bilbo's actions, in my humble opinion.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Drifa: No, I don't think Tolkien intended any evil with the Hobbits. He gave an idyllic idea of the English countryside and put in there little people who lived a quite virtuous life that fell within the boundaries of what they called exceptance. Kids would be naughty, just as human and dwarven children. If you like Hobbits, you find them very admirable I guess.

I disagree with this and I think that Drifa has picked up on something in the 'art' or 'technique'. Drifa pointed out to me in email how many of the notes Bilbo writes on the property that he distributes after his long-expected party point to Hobbits who borrow books, umbrellas, and silver spoons without returning them. Here is a latent tendency to burglary, or at least a collection of bad habits.

I think this is Tolkien in his very subtle way setting things up for the story to come. Most importantly, it sets up the revelation in the next chapter that Gollum is a Hobbit - which Frodo, like us readers, can hardly believe - Hobbits are a rural idyl without evil, as Aiks says. And she is right that this is what we are presented with, but Tolkien is drawing away the veil to show just enough of another side to make credible what is to come.

‘Gollum? Do you mean that this is the very Gollum-creature that Bilbo met? How loathsome!’
‘I think it is a sad story,’ said the wizard, ‘and it might have happened to others, even to some hobbits that I have known.’
‘I can’t believe that Gollum was connected with hobbits, however distantly,’ said Frodo with some heat. ‘What an abominable notion!'

At the time that the story opens, we discover only at the end, the Sackville-Bagginses are already buying up loads of property. The Shire the Hobbits return to is a ruined idyl; Saruman was at work before they ever left; on return we see the faces of Hobbits who have embraced the new order.

I think you have to go back to The Hobbit and appreciate that Bilbo Baggins is a silly little fellow until he goes on his adventure. The adventure formally makes him a burglar, but really it opens his eyes to the world and to himself. Tolkien somewhere remarks that Sam would have been insufferable without his adventure. The adventure of the four Hobbits is, as Gandalf puts it as he turns aside to visit Bombadil, their education, their training - the adventure has elevated them, raised them up, so that they can now put the affairs of the Shire in order.

So I think that Drifa has picked up in the first chapter Tolkien's very subtle way of establishing that this rural idyl is not so perfect and that the Hobbits are heading in a bad direction.

And as the days of the Shire lengthened they spoke less and less with the Elves, and grew afraid of them, and distrustful of those that had dealings with them; and the Sea became a word of fear among them, and a token of death, and they turned their faces away from the hills in the west.

[Priya]

Hello Drifa

Was Bilbo a thief

I have a feeling Tolkien gave the matter quite a lot of thought. In my opinion the Professor was potentially on precarious ground. Casting the hero of the tale as an outright thief would likely have upset some parent readers and given leery critics a field-day. Bilbo might have been viewed/deemed as a poor or anti-role model leaving Tolkien stranded with a boatload of negative book reviews.

However, if we look carefully at The Hobbit - the terms: thief, theft, thievery are only allegations asserted against Bilbo by nefarious types (with one exception, which I will get to shortly) such as Gollum, Smaug and the Great Goblin. These characters are hardly ones expected to possess an ability to pass fair judgment.

Tolkien reserved the term ‘burglar’ as a title for Bilbo right at the beginning of the tale. And I have a feeling that he wanted to diminish the impact of ‘stealing’ on the child reader by using somewhat ‘softer language’. He deliberately allied the title of “Burglar” to “Expert Treasure-hunter” to give a sense of it being sort of acceptable; perhaps to the point of even being a recognized trade among hobbits.

Even though a burglar is a ‘type of thief’ per our dictionary definition (basically one that steals from a house) he deliberately chose ‘burglar’ because there really is no other available term that can describe the task at hand he had in mind for Bilbo. That was contractually for him to take from the owner’s own residence, the owner’s own belongings. How possibly can any reasonable person call Bilbo a ‘thief’ under such an arrangement?

Nonetheless, at the end of the tale when Thorin charged Bilbo with theft and in no uncertain terms directly called him a “thief”, he was technically correct. Because Bilbo willfully kept the Arkenstone from its true and rightful owner (Thorin) and gave it away without permission. So Bilbo was a “good thief” - but a ‘thief’ nonetheless!

Also to note:

Bilbo found the Ring. Returning it to Gollum was an impossibility as it would have resulted in his death. Thus ‘thief’ would be an unfair assessment on our part.

If Bilbo hadn’t pilfered food from the Elvenking’s halls he would have starved. In any case, again at worst we can label him as a “good thief” as the King was more than recompensed of his losses through the gift of the silver/pearl necklace.


As to:

are Hobbits deceitful by nature?

In Letter #319 Tolkien stated that Hobbits were just “a diminutive branch of the human race”. And who have us - at sometime in our lives, have not told a lie nor felt the urge to thieve?

I acknowledge the examples of petty theft which Chrysophylax Dives has provided - but the study pool is small. Having no established police force and by inference no court system - it would appear that there existed no endemic issue of ‘theft’ among hobbits in general. And ‘thieving’, we should note, is usually the commonest of criminal acts committed among humans within a settlement.

I am with Aiks on this one.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Here is an excerpt on Tolkien what he (underlined) tells what a Hobbit was....

What is a hobbit? I (Tolkien) suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They are inclined to be at in the stomach; they dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow); wear no shoes, because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it). Now you know enough to go on with. - From the Hobbit, chapter I (Unexpected Party)

That never gave me the impression this little folk is deceitful by nature. Tolkien gave surely their general picture deep thought.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Once again, I find myself posting something that is not mine, but the Dwarf's. I hope the Dwarf does not mind. But this is from Drifa. Obviously, it speaks for the Tolkien Gateway rather than Tolkien. And yet...

Go to Tolkien Gateway, and enter 'Thief'.

Commenting on this for myself, I think that there is a subtle play with Hobbit bad habits in the first chapter of LotR that is setting us up for Gollum. And it is not only in the labels on the property in Bag-end. The Miller and his son in the two pubs are also pointers to what happens when you turn your faces from the Sea, and revealing the Shire as a much more precarious idyll than it appears at first sight.

But this is all sutble. And then we have the utter confusion enacted by the revision of the original riddle-game in The Hobbit, which Tolkien did not even know would become canon until 1952, when LotR was finished!! Mark my words, this artistic vandalism not only ruined The Hobbit but spread out ripples of confusion, such as this Tolkien Gateway redirection.

In other words, Drifa, I think that there is (a) some careful artistry on Tolkien's part showing how Hobbits can go bad and (b) the ramifications of a literary mess that puts the mark of Cain on poor Bilbo Baggins (who is a burglar and not a thief).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

One can go biographical, tracing Tolkien's imagination in relation to his literary ruminations. In my opinion, this gives us the original parameters. Sometime in the late 1920s Tolkien wrote his spontaneous sentence about a Hobbit who lived in a hole in the ground. This became the first sentence of the story. But before Tolkien wrote a second sentence he had worked out a story, and an unexpected party in the Hobbit hole was to send this Hobbit over the other side of the Wild to step into a marginal but most curious character in the Old English Beowulf - the man, declared nameless, who steals a cup from a dragon by thief's craft.

Þaér on innan gíong
nið[ð]a náthwylc, (forþ né)h gefe(al)g
haéðnum horde, hond (wǽge nam),
(síd,) since fáh; né hé þæt syððan (bemáð),
Þ(éah) ð(e hé) slaépende besyre(d wur)de
þéofes cræfte.

Beowulf, lines 2214-2219. Text: Klaeber 83; my emphasis.
Tolkien’s translation (Beowulf T&C 77; emphasis added):

Therein went some
nameless man, creeping in nigh
to the pagan treasure; his hand seized
a goblet deep, bright with gems. This the dragon did not after in silence bear,
albeit he had been cheated in his sleep
by thief’s cunning.

I suggest that Tolkien prior to writing this story had spent some time considering the relationship between the craft (or cunning) of a thief and the nameless status of this thief. The two have an intrinsic connection.

[Drífa]

What is the definition of a burglar?
A person who illegally enters buildings and steals things.

What is the definition oh a thief?
A person who steals another person's property, especially by stealth and without using force or violence.

He may have started out as a burglar, but he became a thief, an honest one but a thief nonetheless, before reaching the mountain.

"Ere, 'oo are you?"

Thanks for the responses. I will try to address you and the other part of my question on the weekend.