Last 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. The second, Self-Sufficiency in the Dark, is about the Ring and the friends who would not let its bearers disappear. Each stands on its own.
Two things came out of the tunnel under the Misty Mountains in the keeping of one hobbit.
The first was a ring, and the second piece in this series followed it: what it does to a person, how it works on the wish to need no one, and what it takes to undo that work. The second thing was harder to see, because it was something Bilbo Baggins did not do. He stood in the dark, invisible, with a sword in his hand and an enemy in his path, and he did not strike.
This piece is about that. We now journey in the dark one more time to look at the other hand.
THE HAND THAT DID NOT STRIKE
We return to the scene, because something in the details is revealing. Bilbo now wears the Ring. Gollum cannot see him. The threat is sitting in the mouth of the only passage out, and Bilbo wears Sting at his side, tempted to slay the creature that crouches, poised to kill him, placed between himself and freedom. The hobbit has every advantage. Tolkien pauses to let him consider it, and then gives us the turn in a single sentence: “a sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart.”
Bilbo saw Gollum’s life. Days without light, one after another, without number and without hope of anything better. Whispering in the dark. For a moment he entered into Gollum’s world. He did not see a monster blocking a door. He saw a creature who had been living alone in agony longer than anyone could remember, gnawing at himself, and the sight of it stayed Bilbo’s hand.
There is an inversion here. The Ring had made its wearer unseen, and it is revealed to him what that does to a person over time: he withdraws from others, and others become less real, until he can no longer see them as persons at all. That is the road Sméagol traveled. And at the exact moment Bilbo became invisible for the first time, he saw the horror that would befall himself should he strike. The Ring hid him. It did not blind him. Something in Bilbo was already turned toward the other, and the Ring found it there and could not immediately turn it.
Pity, in the sense Tolkien means, is the capacity to see another person’s wretchedness as belonging to a person, and to see something of it within oneself. Not to an obstacle, not to a threat, not to a thing in the way. To someone. Once that seeing happens, the hand tempted to strike has a harder time closing on the hilt, because it is no longer striking at something. It is striking at someone. And so may strike oneself. Bilbo leapt over Gollum’s head and ran, and he carried the Ring out of the mountain in his pocket and the compassion in his heart, and for sixty years he did not realize what the second one had done for him. What’s more, what he had done for all of Middle-earth.
THE PITY OF BILBO
Gandalf clarifies this for Frodo in the study at Bag End, on the morning they discussed the history of the Ring.
Upon hearing the story, Frodo’s first reaction is quite understandable. What a pity, he says, that Bilbo did not stab the vile creature when he had the chance. And Gandalf invites him to a deeper understanding of the word. “Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need.” Then he ties together their lives, naming the inheritances from the tunnel in a single sentence. Bilbo, he says, took so little hurt from the evil of the Ring and escaped in the end because he began his ownership of it that way. With pity.
The two things Bilbo carried from the dark were not unrelated. The second protected him from the first. He had held the Ring for sixty years, longer than Isildur, far longer than Boromir would have needed to be destroyed by it, and he came out of it thin and stretched yet still himself. The hand that had opened over Gollum in the tunnel was never able to close all the way over the Ring afterward. The pity was there from the first. All that the Ring did to him after that was weighed against the reality that he had already refused, once, to treat another creature as a thing.
Then Gandalf prophesies what the whole tale will spend a thousand pages fulfilling. “The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many, yours not least.”
It is safer for a part of Frodo to view Gollum solely as a villain. He does not feel any pity at first. Gollum deserves death. And Gandalf challenges and matures this part of the hobbit. “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
This is the way of true inheritance. Gandalf is handing Frodo something, in words, in Bag End, and Frodo cannot yet receive it. He hears it but refuses it. That is the shape of formation. It is often unseen. The inheritance is gifted to a person before he can hold it, by someone who loves him, and it waits for him until he is in a position to find out whether it is true. Through experience. Bilbo did not tell Frodo about the pity. Gandalf did, and then the road did the rest.
FRODO CARRIES IT
The road took its time. The Ring drives its bearer to close his hand, and Frodo carried it for months before the moment came. Then, in the stony hills of the Emyn Muil, he and Sam caught the creature who had been following them. Sam’s distrust and readiness for violence reflected what Frodo himself might have felt. Gollum was a threat that had stalked them for weeks. He would betray them.
Then Frodo seemed to hear Gandalf’s voice again, and he understood. He lowered his sword and revealed what he had inherited. “For now that I see him, I do pity him.”
Now that I see him. It is the same experience that Bilbo has in the tunnel, word for word. The pity manifests through seeing the other. A part of Frodo had been able to hate Gollum as long as he was a shape in the dark behind them. The moment the creature was in front of him, he became a hobbit, a person, wretched and cringing and real, and the hate lost its power. What had been given to him at Bag End, and refused there, was now fully received. He came to understand the wisdom, and the pity, by looking.
The pity did not remain on that hillside. In Ithilien, at the Forbidden Pool, Faramir’s archers had their arrows trained on Gollum, and Faramir turned to Frodo to ask whether they should shoot. “No!” Frodo answered. “I beg you not to.” He knew, “somehow, quite clearly,” that Gandalf would not have wished it. He went down to the water himself and called the creature by his true name, Sméagol, and before Faramir he declared, “I do take Sméagol under my protection.” Frodo had never seen his uncle’s hand open over Gollum in the tunnel. The pity reached him through a friend’s words in the study at Bag End, and it became his own on the road, when he chose it. Much of what we inherit arrives this way. We are seldom present when the gift is first given; it is handed on by those who love us, and it is ours once we choose it.
THE CRACK OF DOOM
Then Frodo reached the fire within which the Ring was forged, and his strength failed him.
He stood at the edge and did not cast the Ring in. Instead he spoke, Tolkien writes, “with a voice clearer and more powerful than Sam had ever heard him use”: “I have come. But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!” Then he put it on, and Sam could no longer see him.
The Ring’s first temptation had come full circle. Frodo had resisted it across the breadth of Middle-earth, and at the end his will gave way. His courage, his endurance, and his stubborn love of the Shire had carried him to the overlook of the chasm, but could carry him no farther. He stood there grasping and unseen; this is what the Ring had been pulling him toward all along.
Then Gollum fell upon him: the creature Bilbo had spared in the tunnel, Frodo had spared in the hills, and Frodo had pleaded for at the Forbidden Pool. He bit the Ring from Frodo’s hand, finger and all, and in his joy, dancing at the edge of the chasm, he fell into the depths of fire with the possession of his precious in hand.
The Ring was destroyed, not through Frodo’s victory. It was destroyed through the creature two hobbits had chosen not to kill. Frodo understood this at once, on the mountainside, with his hand still bleeding: “But for him, Sam, I could not have destroyed the Ring. The Quest would have been in vain, even at the bitter end. So let us forgive him!”
Bag End could be sold, and the Ring could only be gripped tighter. The pity was the inheritance that grew in the handing over. Bilbo extended it in the tunnel, and it sustained him for sixty years in which the Ring could not fully claim him. Frodo extended it in the hills, and it returned as the deliverance of Middle-earth, at the very moment his own strength was spent.
Tolkien named this kind of moment eucatastrophe, the good catastrophe: the sudden joyous turn toward deliverance when deliverance seemed impossible, arriving as gift rather than as reward. Frodo did not earn the destruction of the Ring. He had spent everything, and it was not enough, and then the mercy he had shown long before returned to finish what he could not.
The pity of Bilbo ruling the fates of many was fulfilled at the moment of failure, not of strength.
THE HOUSE COMES BACK
Then the four hobbits returned to the Shire, and to Bag End.
The Shire had been taken over in their absence. Lotho Sackville-Baggins, Lobelia’s son, had made himself Chief up at Bag End, and harder men had come in behind him. By the time the travelers came up the road, there were ruffians at the gates and hobbits in prison, and Bag End lay in ruin. Lobelia herself was in the Lockholes. She had met a band of the ruffians coming up the lane with a cart, shouted “I’ll give you Sharkey, you dirty thieving ruffians!” and gone for their leader, a man nearly twice her size, with her umbrella. She was a hundred years old or more, and they dragged her off to a cell.
Frodo heard all of this, and his thoughts turned to Lotho. The Sackville-Baggins who had taken his house, filled the Shire with ruffians, and let Bag End fall to ruin was a “miserable fool, but I am sorry for him.” He told Pippin he did not understand things: “Lotho never meant things to come to this pass,” and “We ought to try and rescue him.” Before the fighting began, he ordered that “there is to be no slaying of hobbits, not even if they have gone over to the other side.” The pity Bilbo carried out of the tunnel had reached the family that coveted Bag End, and the hobbit who once showed Lobelia the door now hoped to bring her son out alive.
The story now speaks of her differently. “Poor thing,” the narrator says, “she looked very old and thin when they rescued her from a dark and narrow cell.” When she appeared, the hobbits cheered her so warmly that “she was quite touched, and drove away in tears. She had never in her life been popular before.” The same narrator who once noted that small valuables had “somehow” fallen into her umbrella now calls her poor thing.
A woman who had never been popular, and who had spent her life grasping at what she believed was owed to her, came out of a cell to the cheers of her neighbors. She was given, unasked, the warmth she had spent a lifetime trying to seize, and she drove away in tears. This is what a corrective emotional experience is.
Then she learned that her son had been murdered. The woman who had wanted Bag End for seventy-seven years, and held it for one, gave it back to Frodo freely and returned to her Bracegirdle kin at Hardbottle. When she died the following spring, “Frodo was surprised and much moved: she had left all that remained of her money and of Lotho’s for him to use in helping hobbits made homeless by the troubles.” As Tolkien puts it, “So that feud was ended.”
This is the fourth stance toward the inheritance of Bag End: the covetous hand, opened at last. In Lobelia it took a lifetime, a welcome, and a loss.
Sam received the house in two stages. After Frodo moved back into Bag End, Sam came to him one day in real distress. He wished to marry Rose Cotton, yet he could not bear to leave Frodo, and he felt, as he put it, “torn in two.” Frodo told him to marry Rose and bring her to Bag End, where there was room enough for them all. So Sam came into the house while the giver was still living in it.
The second stage came when Frodo departed for the Havens. He left Sam the Red Book to finish and Bag End to keep, and told him he would be Mayor and “the most famous gardener in history.” Sam had never asked for the house. The one thing he ever asked, on the riverbank at Parth Galen, was to come along. The hobbit who never reached for Bag End is the one who received it, the way a true inheritance often arrives: first as a place at the table, and then, when the one who set the table is gone, as the whole house.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Sam was a gardener who worked the earth and loved it, and what he inherited at the end of the story was a house dug into a hill. He inherited the earth in the plainest sense the words allow.
Bilbo titled his own account of his adventure There and Back Again, and the place he returned to was Bag End. Whether or not Tolkien heard the echo between those names, the road home in this story has the same shape as the road out, and the book ends where its first chapter began.
The Lord of the Rings closes on Sam, after the king, the Havens, and the fire. He comes up the lane to Bag End in the evening, to the house where the road stops and someone lives, and finds a light in the window and his family waiting. Settled in his own chair, he speaks the last words of the book.
“Well, I’m back.”
Four hands passed over that house: Bilbo’s, which opened without strain; Lobelia’s, which closed on what she believed she was owed and opened only late; Frodo’s, which let the house go for a road he could not return from; and Sam’s, which never reached for it at all and was given it. The house stayed the same, and each hand was revealed by it.
TRUE INHERITANCE
Bag End was a house, and a house can be measured, coveted, sold, and given back. The Sackville-Bagginses spent most of their lives treating inheritance that way, as something material to be grasped, and the story never shows the house bringing them any joy once they held it. What the hobbits handed to one another that truly lasted came by way of relationship. Bilbo’s pity reached Frodo through Gandalf, in a conversation between friends at Bag End. Sam received the house only after he had spent the whole road carrying the person who owned it. Psychospiritual inheritance moves through persons. It is handed on in friendship and in correction, in the steady regard of people who will not let us disappear, and it takes root in us as we receive it.
There is one more inheritance in each of their tales: humility before God. The Hobbit ends with Bilbo at home in Bag End, hearing that the old prophecies have come true. Gandalf asks whether he really supposes his adventures and escapes were “managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit,” and then tells him, with real affection, “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!” Bilbo answers with a laugh. “Thank goodness!” The hobbit who had once been tempted to need no one receives, at the end of his story, the relief of not being its center.
Frodo’s tale ends the same way, but by a harder road. He is not the great hero who defeats evil. At the edge of the fire his strength failed entirely, and the Ring was destroyed regardless. This was done through the actions of the creature two hobbits had spared. Gandalf had said as much long before, in the study at Bag End: “Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it.” Meant implies providence. On the mountain, Frodo remembered Gandalf’s words: “Even Gollum may have something yet to do.” What undoes evil in Middle-earth is the providence of God, who takes the pity of a hobbit, offered freely and without calculation, and makes it the instrument of salvation.
This is the true inheritance both hobbits carried home. Bilbo laughed to learn that the story was larger than he was. Frodo, who carried the Ring to the fire and failed, was given its destruction, an ending he could never have secured for himself. Each received the ending as a gift rather than possessing it as property, the way a son receives what his father gives. The land, the house, and the title were only ever symbols. The substance is whose we are.