Baggins is incipiently vulgar. One of the trolls, who are very vulgar, as Tolkien said (see above), is called Huggins, indeed Bill Huggins, not so far from Bilbo Baggins. Huggins meanwhile – I repeat that Tolkien knew a great deal about names – is a diminutive form of a personal name (Hugh, Hugo), like the common surnames Watkins, Jenkins, Dickens, and so on. Baggins, however, isn’t, though it is a common word in two senses. It is ‘common’ in not being standard, therefore (in post-medieval England, but not earlier) vulgar, low-class, dialectal; and it was in common (i.e. general) use across the whole of Northern England to mean the food a labourer takes with him when he goes off to work, or anything eaten between meals, but especially, says the OED, afternoon tea ‘in a substantial form’. Tolkien certainly knew this, and knew also that the OED had tidied the word up from ‘baggins’ (which is what people really say) to ‘bagging’ (which is hyper-correct), for the word is cited and defined in the New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District to which he had written an appreciative prologue in 1928 – Tolkien was not a Northerner, but he remained all his life grateful and even ‘devoted’ to the University of Leeds (see Letters, p. 305), and appreciative of Northern dialect. The Hobbit indeed ends with a joke derived from the Glossary just mentioned, for in the Huddersfield dialect the word ‘okshen’ meant not ‘auction’ but ‘mess’. Walter Haigh, who compiled the Glossary, records the disapproving sentence, used seemingly by one woman of another, ‘Shu’z nout but e slut; er ees [her house] ez e feer okshen [a right mess]’. And when Bilbo returns home, what he finds is an ‘okshen’ in both senses, mess and auction at once.
To return to Bilbo Baggins, though, he is fond of all meals, as we soon learn, but most especially his tea. The ‘Unexpected Party’ of chapter 1 is definitely a tea-party, and undeniably substantial. This makes another anachronistic point about Bilbo, and about hobbits in general, which is that they are very specifically English. Tolkien was to rub this point in very firmly indeed in the ‘Prologue’ to The Fellowship of the Ring, in which he makes the whole history of the Shire correspond point for point with the history of early England. But it is clear enough from Bilbo’s first encounter with Gandalf. Not to make too much of it, Bilbo is something of a snob: not a terrible one, for he is prepared to offer a pipe to passing strangers, but certainly liable to draw a line between ‘his sort’ and other sorts. At several points he displays the social exclusiveness which has so often annoyed visitors to England. He dismisses the whole idea of ‘adventures’ with ‘I can’t think what anybody sees in them’, and then tries to get rid of Gandalf, whom he has decided is ‘not quite his sort’ by ignoring him. He goes on, with entirely insincere politeness, to try to send Gandalf away by repeating ‘Good morning!’ as a parting not a greeting, to try ‘thank you!’ in the same spirit, twice (it means, when said in clipped English tones, ‘no thank you’), and eventually to invite him to tea – but not now. It is obvious that much of what Bilbo says is socially coded to mean its opposite, as when a few pages later he says to the dwarves, ‘in his politest unpressing tones’, ‘I suppose you will all stay to supper?’ (which means, to those who know the code, ‘you have overstayed your welcome, go away’).
None of this is unfamiliar at all to the English reader, and of course it is comic to find Gandalf repeatedly ignoring the social code, and acting, as only someone foreign to it would, as if Bilbo meant what he said by phrases like ‘I beg your pardon’. There is in fact a word which sums Bilbo up, often used of the English middle-class to which he so obviously belongs: ‘bourgeois’. This is not an English word but a French one, and Tolkien does not use it – he regretted, again for professional reasons, the medieval take-over of the English language by Norman French, and always tried to reverse it as far as he could. But he may well have been thinking of just that word, as is indicated by a couple of running private jokes. Later on, in The Lord of the Rings, it will be disclosed that the road Bilbo’s hole is on is called Bag End: very appropriate for someone called Baggins, perhaps, but an odd name for a road. And yet in a sense a very familiar one. As part of the ongoing and French-oriented snobbery of English society in Tolkien’s day (and later), municipal councils were (and still are) in the habit of indicating a street with no outlet as a ‘cul-de-sac’. This is French, of course, for ‘bag end’, though the French actually call such a thing an impasse, while the native English is ‘dead end’. ‘Cul-de-sac’ is a silly phrase, and it is to the Baggins family’s credit that they will not use it. The Tolkien family’s too, for his Aunt Jane Neave’s house was down a lane with no exit, also defiantly called ‘Bag End’ (see Biography, p. 106). It is a very bad mark for the socially aspiring branch of the Baggins family that they have tried to Frenchify themselves and disguise their origins: they call themselves the Sackville-Bagginses, as if they came from a ville (or villa?) in a cul-de-sac(k) (Bag End). They, then, are really bourgeois. Bilbo is just heading that way.
Gandalf means, however, to turn him back, and that is why he makes him a burglar. ‘Burglar’ is another odd word, and English speakers who use it tend to assume that the -ar on the end is the same as -er. Accordingly, just as a worker is someone who works, so a burglar must be someone who burgles. But this derivation is false, and exemplifies two things Tolkien yet again knew a great deal about, ‘back formation’ and ‘folk etymology’. The root of ‘burglar’ is in fact the same as that of ‘bourgeois’, Old English (and probably Old Frankish too) burh, ‘borough, town, fort, stockaded mansion’. A burgulator, as the OED points out, is someone who breaks into mansions, a bourgeois is someone who lives in one. They are connected opposites, like Sackvilles and Bagginses. Gandalf means to move Bilbo from the one side, the snobbish side, to the other.
In doing this Bilbo will not become less English, but more so. We should note, in view of the bad press which ‘Englishness’ has had for most of the twentieth century, that Tolkien was quick to point out some of Bilbo’s native virtues, in terms quite similar to those of George Orwell, another contemporary of Tolkien’s, and another example of English ‘self-fashioning’ (for Orwell’s real name was Blair, which he abandoned because he thought it sounded Scottish, just as Tolkien, aware that his own name was originally German, tended to identify himself with his mother’s Worcestershire family name of Suffield, Letters, p. 218). The narrator comments, once Bilbo has recognized Gandalf and responded with genuine excitement and interest, ‘You will notice already that Mr. Baggins was not as prosy as he liked to believe, also that he was very fond of flowers’. Hobbits, then, like the English middle class to which they clearly belong, may aspire to be bourgeois and boring, but it is not natural to them. Tolkien indeed had nothing against middle-class Englishmen, for he was one himself: and, unlike so many of the English-speaking writers of his time, Lawrence, Forster, Woolf, Joyce, he did not feel in any way alienated, nor have any urge to reinvent himself as working-class, non-English, in internal exile, or any other glamorous pose. It is one reason why he has never found any favour with the determinedly cosmopolitan British intelligentsia (to use another foreign term).
Bilbo is then defined from the start by time, class, and culture. He is English; middle class; and roughly Victorian to Edwardian. Hobbits in general will prove to be all these things even more definitely than Bilbo, except that some of them will be working class (the Gamgees), though none quite reach the upper class, not even the Tooks and Brandybucks. But he and they are also repeatedly marked as anachronisms in the world they inhabit. On the surface at least – the issue is explored all the way through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – they do not fit at all into Middle-earth, the world of dwarves and elves, wizards and dragons, trolls and goblins, Beorn and Smaug and Gollum.
The world of fairy-tale
This world is not, in origin, Tolkien’s invention: though it is perhaps his major achievement to have opened it up for the contemporary imagination. In 1937 (though not now) the world and its personnel were best known from a relatively small body of stories taken from an again relatively small corpus of classic European fairy-tale collections, those of the Grimm brothers in Germany, of Asbjørnsen and Moe in Norway, Perrault in France, or Joseph Jacobs in