Not Where He Eats, but Where He Is Eaten: Bilbo's Bread and Butter Simile
Rent from DeepDyve- Not Where He Eats, but Where He Is Eaten:Bilbo's Bread and Butter Simile
Two prominent traits of Hobbits converge in Bilbo's likening of himself at the Ring-enhanced age of eleventy-one to "butter that has been scraped over too much bread" (FR, I, i, 41). The first is of course the Hobbits' well-known love of food. The other is their habit of jesting about serious matters. As Merry says to Aragorn in "The Houses of Healing": "But it is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place" (RK, V, viii, 146).
What makes this fascinating is that in "The Shadow of the Past," the very chapter after Bilbo makes his comparison, we find Gandalf comparing the action of the Ring and of Sauron himself to eating and devouring no less than four times (FR, I, ii, 56, 64, 65, 66). We find the same in Faramir's description of what had happened to the nine men given Rings of Power by Sauron: "he had devoured them" (TT, IV, vi, 301); and elsewhere he calls Sauron "a destroyer who would devour all" (TT, IV, v, 280). Gollum sees things in much the same way: "Don't take the Precious to Him! He'll eat us all, if He gets it, eat all the world" (TT, IV, iii, 245). It's not often that Gandalf, Faramir, and Gollum agree.
Given all this, Bilbo's choice to compare himself to food is even more psychologically revealing than at first it seems, as if at some not quite conscious level he felt he was being devoured. Yet there is more to this. For not only was Gollum "driven by a devouring desire" and "mortally hungry" once "the Ring was no longer devouring him" (RK, VI, iii, 221; FR, I, ii, 66), but Frodo briefly saw Bilbo as a Gollum-like creature "with a hungry face" when he reached out to touch the Ring (FR, II, i, 244). Whatever Bilbo saw in Frodo's face then, he could not bear, but he understands now, as he did not before. Still, just like a Hobbit he swiftly turns from this awkward moment to "light words": "I wonder if it's any good trying to finish my book?"
Tolkien thus deftly suggests the character of Sauron, the Ring, and its effects on the ringbearers. Bilbo's light words were here the right words. [End Page 141]
Tom Hillman taught Greek, Latin, and Ancient History, and has published on Rome in the Late Republic and the use of Plutarch's Lives as a source. He also posts frequently on Tolkien, among others, at alasnotme.blogspot.com.
