Second of three pieces on what the hobbits inherited. The first, The House and the Name, is about Bag End and the people who wanted it. Each stands on its own.
Bilbo Baggins gave away a house without a tremor and could not give away a ring.
That was the subject of the first piece: the same evening, the same hobbit, two objects. What distinguishes the relationship between the two is freedom. He is not attached to Bag End, and he is almost completely in fetters with regard to the Ring. The house passed to Frodo by will. Only the deep friendship with Gandalf was enough to release the Ring from Bilbo’s grasp.
This piece is about the Ring, the darkness it came from, and what else Bilbo unknowingly carried along with it.
It is a good thing to trust yourself to overcome adversity, and to stand on your own if need be. To get along with no one’s help, to avoid being a burden, to handle what comes without calling for rescue: these are qualities a person can be proud of possessing, and a person who lacks them entirely is not well. There is something of this in the Baggins line. A sort of pride that comes with managing one’s own affairs. The Ring’s first temptation is self-sufficiency. It twists and distorts something good, and it does so by tempting the person to not rely on anyone, for self-sufficiency to be compulsive. For Bilbo and Frodo, the Ring does not offer a vice. It offers independence, and then it shows us the dangers of how far independence can go.
THE TUNNEL
Bilbo found the Ring alone in the dark. This is often where temptation finds us.
He had been separated from the dwarves in the goblin tunnels under the Misty Mountains, knocked senseless and left behind, and when he recovered he could see nothing at all. He crawled on through the dark, and along the way his hand happened upon a ring, which he kept. Then he found the lake, and the creature who lived on an island in the middle of it, and they played the riddle game for his life.
What comes next impacts the remainder of the tale. Gollum lost the game and returned to his island in search of the Ring he meant to use to kill his guest. He found it gone, realized that Bilbo had found it, and came after the hobbit in the dark. Bilbo fled, and in his flight the Ring found its way onto his finger. Gollum rounded the corner and did not see him. He ran straight past, wailing, toward the back door of the mountain, because he had guessed where the thief was going, and he sat down in the mouth of the passage to block it.
So Bilbo stood in the dark with a sword at his side with an enemy that could not see him. The way out was through that enemy. He weighed his choices and considered how he could stab the creature and be done. And then Tolkien writes that “a sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart.” He saw, for a moment, what Gollum’s life was. Endless days without light. Cold fish. Stone. And so Bilbo did not strike. He gathered himself and leapt over Gollum’s head and ran for the door.
Two things came out of that tunnel in the pocket and the heart of one hobbit. The first was the Ring. The second was the mercy that came from empathy, which connected him to the other. And this was a rejection of the temptation of the One Ring.
THE TEMPTATION OF SELF-SUFFICIENCY
The Ring makes its wearer disappear.
It’s noteworthy here to pause on the next temptation that Bilbo felt, just after possessing the Ring, when he had escaped from the Misty Mountains. He was tempted to go on alone, and not look for his dwarves. He could sneak away from all danger. But yet he overcame this temptation to turn in on himself, because his bond with his companions turned him back toward them.
But the temptation to use invisibility to avoid difficulty lingered. Bilbo used it to avoid the Sackville-Bagginses when they called. He used it to withdraw from visitors he did not want, and conversations he did not care to have. He used it, on the last night, to end his own birthday speech by vanishing in front of everyone he knew. For sixty years the Ring’s chief service to Bilbo Baggins was to remove him from the company of other people whenever he found their company inconvenient.
Invisibility becomes something the Ring-bearer relies upon.. To be unseen is to be beyond the reach of others. No one can ask anything of him. No one can find him when he would rather not be found. No one can hurt him, and no one can help him, and after a while those two begin to feel like the same protection. The wearer is present in the room and absent from every relationship in it. He watches and is not watched. It is the dream of a person who has decided that the safest way to be among others is not to be available to them. And so the Ring’s hold on the person strengthens, as he comes to rely on it as a means to avoid interpersonal difficulty.
Tolkien shows us the other dimension of invisibility with a horrifying truth on Weathertop. Frodo puts the Ring on in fear, and the Black Riders, who had been mere shadows cloaked in black, become suddenly clear to him, and he to them. That is the exchange the Ring makes. It hides the wearer from the people who love him and reveals him to the thing that wants to consume him. The person who withdraws from those who care for him does not become safe. He becomes visible in a different direction.
The cost is one Gandalf names for Frodo: any mortal who holds a Great Ring is granted more years but not more life, until at last “every minute is a weariness,” and the more he uses it to vanish, “he fades.” A person who removes himself from relationship thins rather than shatters, becoming less present, less able to be reached, less himself, while the people who love him watch from outside a wall they cannot pass through.
This is the temptation of self-sufficiency. The wish to need no one is the wish to be invisible. It feels like strength from inside, and from outside it looks like a person slowly disappearing.
THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT
On a hobbit’s birthday, the hobbit gives.
Sméagol was of hobbit-kind. Gandalf says so plainly, and this is relevant because it means that Sméagol grew up inside that same custom and knew what a birthday was for. And it was his birthday on the day that he and his friend Déagol went fishing, and Déagol was pulled into the water by a great fish, and came up with a gold ring in his hand. And Sméagol, watching the light on it, said that it ought to be his, because it was his birthday. Déagol said he had already given him a present, and more than he could afford. Sméagol put his hands around his friend’s throat.
I have written elsewhere about what was already in Sméagol before the Ring came near him, about the deep wounds from his family history that made him covetous, but I will not repeat the argument here.
What I want is only the custom, and what he did with it. A hobbit’s birthday is the day he gives. Sméagol’s birthday became the day he took, and when taking was refused, the day he killed. And he names it his birthday present, to rid himself of the shame of taking, at any cost, rather than giving.
The Ring did not invent that inversion. It found a person who had already turned the custom inside out and gave him a reason to do whatever was necessary to have what he wanted. Sméagol didn’t see Déagol at all. He lost the person, and only saw the thing.
The Ring offered him, in its first hour, the same thing it offered Bilbo for sixty years: a way to be unseen. Sméagol used it to spy, to steal, to learn secrets, and to avoid being caught. His family discovered him anyway and drove him out, and he vanished beneath the mountains where no one would see him again. He received what the Ring promised: he disappeared.
Envy mingled with desire was what lay beneath the murder. And envy cannot bear that the good thing belongs to someone else, because the good thing coming as a gift would mean being in relationship with the giver, and relationship is the one thing the envious person has decided not to risk. Sméagol wanted the Ring and did not want Déagol. This is unadulterated self-sufficiency. His self-sufficiency led to being alone. The Ring is what is left to anyone who wants the present and not the person.
THE DWARVES
So what stands against this? If the Ring’s first work is to remove a person from the company of others, what undoes that work is other people, and specifically other people who will not be removed. Dwarves are notoriously unmovable, and they’re also fast friends.
Bilbo’s company was thirteen dwarves who spent much of the journey unconvinced he should be there. At the outset, Glóin looked him over and said the hobbit seemed “more like a grocer than a burglar.” We can forgive them for thinking so, Bilbo’s Took side had yet to emerge, and the self-sufficient Baggins made for a very comfortable appearance.
Over the course of the year Bilbo proved himself again and again, with the spiders, with the barrels, alone in the dragon’s hall, and the dwarves warmed to him slowly and grudgingly, the way people do. Though they had been faithful to him along the way, they continued to grumble and doubt him at various points until they finally came to trust his capabilities.
But the trust of Thorin Oakenshield mattered above all else. The dwarf spent the last part of the book grasping, in view of his own self-importance and dignity, and he did it in a key that we hear repeatedly in Tolkien’s work. The gold was his, it was owed to his House, he would not part with a single coin to the people camped at his gate. He and Bilbo quarreled bitterly over it. Then Thorin was carried off the battlefield dying, and he sent for the hobbit.
“There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” Then he died, and Bilbo withdrew to weep for him alone.
The internal shift in Thorin carried great weight. A king who had spent the book unable to open his heart except to name what was rightfully his, and using his last breath to name the goodness in a person whose value he had greatly overlooked. This was a theme consistent in Bilbo’s life, not unlike what was true in Gollum’s before him. Bilbo had been the odd one in the Shire, the Baggins with the Took in him, and then the grocer among warriors. And then he came to receive validation of the highest order, from the King under the Mountain, who rejected his entire approach to life in favor of what Bilbo had offered his company: love and friendship. The recognition arrived late, and as a gift. Those of us who work in Catholic psychology call this a corrective emotional experience. A person receives from another exactly the regard his history had taught him not to expect, and something in him that had been braced for its absence is allowed to rest.
THE COMPANY
What pulled Frodo from the temptation of self-sufficiency came earlier in his journey, at a time before he had a chance to need it.
His plan was to go alone when he left the Shire. He would steal away quietly, tell no one, and spare his friends the danger. It was a noble plan, and it was the Ring’s plan, and those are not two different things. Go alone. Tell no one. Disappear. Frodo had planned his own vanishing with great care, and yet his friends had planned around it even still.
At Crickhollow, on the night he meant to leave them, Merry told him they had known for months. They had been watching him, and Sam had been reporting to them. And then Merry spoke the antithesis of what the Ring was drawing Frodo toward. “You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin, to the bitter end. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo.”
They would not let him be invisible. Frodo was drawn toward the evil that the Ring offered before he had really worn it, and three people who loved him refused it on his behalf.
He was tempted to leave his friends at the Barrow-downs, to slip on the Ring and leave them to the wights. And yet something in him would not betray his friends, especially after they offered their company in such a deeply rooted act of love. Gandalf spoke of the moment, “That was touch and go: perhaps the most dangerous moment of all.” Frodo felt the same temptation as Bilbo did when he thought of leaving the dwarves behind in Goblin Town. This tension of remaining faithful continued throughout.
Frodo tried to leave his friends again at the end of the first book. On the riverbank at Parth Galen, with the Company scattered, he decided once more to go on alone and made for the boats. Sam guessed his intent, and though he could not swim, he plunged into the river after a boat he could not see, sank, and had to be dragged out by Frodo. “I’m coming too, or neither of us isn’t going,” Sam told him, dripping, and Tolkien writes that “Frodo actually laughed.” He had been outmaneuvered by a gardener.
This is the pattern, and the story of the hobbits is replete with it. Again and again, when the Ring says be unseen, it is love that overcomes the temptation. The Ring pulls toward the dark and the choice of friendship triumphs. Sam goes with Frodo into Shelob’s lair, and when the spider takes his master, Sam fights her alone. And then he carries Frodo up the slopes of Mount Doom. The hobbits keep the other person in view when everyone else in Middle-earth has begun to see weapons, kingdoms, and heirlooms, and that is why the Ring, which broke Isildur and a captain of Gondor, did not break the hobbits until the very end, and even then it did not have the last word.
The inheritance that isolates is challenged only by those who remain faithful. This was the wisdom Gandalf offered at the Council: “I think, Elrond, that in this matter it would be well to trust rather to their friendship than to great wisdom.”
The Baggins temptation was to rely on oneself. What Bilbo and Frodo were given was regard they had done nothing to secure, from people who had decided in advance not to let them disappear.
There is one more thing to say about the tunnel in which Bilbo first encountered Gollum. Bilbo stood in the dark with a sword and an advantage and an enemy in his path, and he did not use them. Mercy stayed his hand. Where that mercy came from, and what became of it when it was passed to Frodo and then, at the last, to a creature in the fire, is the subject of the final piece.
Concluded in “The Open Hand,” on the one inheritance from Bag End that grew in the giving.