Journal of Tolkien Research

Volume 2 | Issue 1 Article 8

2015

"Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?: The Hidden War

in The Hobbit"
Jane Beal PhD
University of California, Davis, janebeal@gmail.com

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Recommended Citation
Beal, Jane PhD (2015) ""Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?: The Hidden War in The Hobbit"," Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 2: Iss. 1,
Article 8.
Available at: http://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol2/iss1/8

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"Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?: The Hidden War in The Hobbit"
Cover Page Footnote
I sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers of the _Journal of Tolkien Research_, whose insights and
suggestions proved invaluable in helping me to revise this essay for publication, as well the journal editor, Brad
Eden, for welcoming my work. I would also like to thank Marjorie Lamp Mead, Interim Director of the Wade
Center of Wheaton College, who gave me my first copy of John Garth’s book, _Tolkien and the Great War_.

This article is available in Journal of Tolkien Research: http://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol2/iss1/8

 Beal: Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?

Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?:

The Hidden War in The Hobbit

by Jane Beal, PhD

In The Hobbit, Bilbo becomes invisible whenever he slips on his magic ring,
which Gollum lost and Bilbo found under the Misty Mountains. This power
serves Bilbo (and the plot) on the adventure that leads the hobbit and the dwarves
to the Lonely Mountain to confront the dragon Smaug, but it is not simply a
convenient device in the plot: it has much greater meaning. Indeed, The Hobbit
prompts key questions for readers about the power of invisibility: why is Bilbo
invisible? What is the symbolic, moral, and psychological significance of Bilbo’s
invisibility? Upon what experience and knowledge did Tolkien draw when
imagining the implications of invisibility in his story? Study of the text of The
Hobbit and some of its contexts suggests three unique, interrelated explanations
for Bilbo’s invisibility.

A philological investigation of the key word “invisible” shows that it

entered the English language in the Middle English period and that the literature
that made use of the word distinctly associated it with two traditions: one linking
invisibility to the divinity of God and the other linking it to illicit choices of
human beings. Interestingly, in late-medieval English literature, the latter category
was often connected to the use of a magic ring, with the power to make its wearer
invisible, which facilitated questionable moral behavior. Tolkien, a philologist,
was aware of the etymology and uses of the word “invisible” in medieval
literature, and he chose to make use of the second philological tradition in his use
of the word “invisible” in The Hobbit. This specific philological explanation for
Bilbo’s invisibility is connected to Tolkien’s broader Catholic imagination, which
was informed by the Augustinian concept of evil as the absence of good. It
gradually appears that invisibility is a symbolic way of representing evil-as-
absence in Tolkien’s mythology.

Tolkien’s development of the significance of Bilbo’s invisibility rests not

only on philology and theology, but a specific story from classical philosophy and
its reception in later medieval literature: the story of the ring of Gyges. While
scholars have noted the connection between Gyges’ ring and Bilbo’s ring –
namely, the power of invisibility both convey – the shared moral implications
constitute a key connection that deserves to be further explored. In Gyges’ story,
which is found first in Plato’s Republic, hypothesizing the possibility of
invisibility gives Socrates and Glaucon the opportunity to debate how being
unseen by the judgmental eyes of others in society would affect a man’s moral

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 Journal of Tolkien Research, Vol. 2 [2015], Iss. 1, Art. 8

decisions. Just as Gyges’ invisibility gives him the ability to do evil without being
caught or condemned, so too does Bilbo’s invisibility, though his character is only
corrupted gradually (and, by good fortune, not completely).

Underneath the symbolic and moral meaning of Bilbo’s invisibility lies the
psychological significance of it. Because the character of Bilbo Baggins is
uniquely tied to J.R.R. Tolkien’s authorial identity within The Hobbit, this essay
also explores aspects of Tolkien’s life – specifically, his role as a signals officer in
World War I – that may have provided a motivation for making Bilbo invisible.
As a signals officer, Tolkien was present, but not seen, with soldiers on the
battlefield in a way curiously like Bilbo was present, but not seen, with the
dwarves on key moments in their journey. Such invisibility could be empowering,
allowing the invisible person to intervene in situations of conflict for the good of
his allies, but it could also lead to unexpected vulnerability. At a deep level,
invisibility in The Hobbit may be a psychological metaphor for the feeling of
invisibility soldiers sometimes experience when overwhelmed by the “shell
shock” of wartime experience. It is also directly linked to the moral issues
explored in the story of Gyges and the Augustinian concept of evil as the absence
of good. For soldiers, both seen and unseen, are engaged in the morally
questionable activity of planning to kill and then killing their enemies.

At all three levels of significance – symbolic, moral, and psychological –

Tolkien explores a hidden war in The Hobbit: the cosmic conflict between good
and evil, the microcosmic struggle with temptation that takes place in the human
heart, and ultimately (if indirectly), his own experience in World War I.
Understanding this full range of meaning gives the reader an opportunity to
appreciate that invisibility is not a mere plot device, a simple magic trick to
escape complex conflicts that Bilbo encounters in The Hobbit. Instead, invisibility
becomes a means of revealing truth.

Philology and Theology:

The Symbolic Significance of Bilbo’s Invisibility

The word “invisible” came into the English language in the Middle English period
from Late Latin via Old French. In terms of etymology, the Latin in- means “not”
and visibilis, a third declension adjective from the verb video (“I see”), means
both “can be seen, seeing” (active) and “may be seen, visible” (passive).1 So the

1
This etymology can be verified in a variety of Latin dictionaries, including the Latin
Lexicon online: http://latinlexicon.org/definition.php?p1=2063268.

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 Beal: Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?

word in English simply means “not able to be seen.” This etymology, and the
meaning of the word, is relatively straightforward and simple – at first blush.

The Middle English Dictionary (online) gives two, slightly more expanded
definitions, both of which Tolkien would have known: “not perceptible to sight,
invisible by nature” and “temporarily invisible, unseen.”2 Examples of the first
sense use of the word in Middle English literature are given in sentences from the
Wycliffite Bible, Rolle’s Psalter, writings associated with Saint Anne and Saint
Bridget, Chaucer, Lydgate, and others. In these cases, the word “invisible” is
associated with God, with Jesus who represents the invisible God, and with the
spiritual reality that God sees all things, both visible and invisible. Examples of
the second sense of the word in Middle English, however, are strikingly different
in tone and connotation.

Many of the examples are from secular literature, they specifically

mention a stone or a ring that makes the person wearing it invisible (Gower’s
Confessio Amantis, Lydgate’s Troy Book and Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, and
the Alphabet of Tales), and they are associated, not with the goodness of the
invisible God, but with illicit romance (Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women) and
murder (Malory).3 It appears that Tolkien – a philologist, a maker of dictionary
definitions for the OED, and a translator of both Old English and Middle English

2
“Invisible,” Middle English Dictionary (online).
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/medidx?type=byte&byte=87520412&egdisplay=compact&e
gs=87528136.
3
Here is the complete list as cited in the Middle English Dictionary (online):

(a1393) Gower CA (Frf 3) 5.3574: If a man wol ben unsein, Withinne his hond hold
clos the Ston, And he mai invisible gon. (a1393) Gower CA (Frf 3)
5.4028: Sche..made hirselven invisible. c1400 St.Anne(1) (Min-U Z.822.N.81)
2886: He couthe be ay when he walde Invisibele eueray ware. c1425(a1420) Lydg. TB
(Aug A.4) 1.3030: Who-so-euer in his hond hit [an agate ring] holde..he schulde be
invisible. c1430(c1386) Chaucer LGW (Benson-Robinson) 1021: Venus hadde hym
maked invysible. c1450(?c1408) Lydg. RS (Frf 16) 6784: Eliotropia..Maketh a man
Invisible. c1450 Alph.Tales (Add 25719) 428/15: He fand a ryng, be þe whilk he made
hym selfe invisible. c1450 Capgr. Rome (Bod 423) 16: Fro þat hill he went inuysible
to naples. (a1470) Malory Wks.(Win-C) 80/22: There com one invisible and smote
the knyght. a1475(?a1430) Lydg. Pilgr.(Vit C.13) 10284: I haue a certeyn ston
Wherthorgh..I kan me makyn invysible Whan that me lyst. a1500 Ashm.1447
Lapid.(Ashm 1447) 58: Ovtalmus ys a stoune..hytt schall make the ynvysebell.

See http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-
idx?type=byte&oldtype=medhb&byte=87520449&refs=87520740.

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– was aware of these two different uses of the word “invisible” in Middle English:
one associated with good and one associated with the absence of good. In creating
the world of Middle-earth, in which the power and meaning of specific words
could be made manifest through story, he seems to have drawn specifically on the
second set of meanings associated with the word “invisible” in the Middle English
literary tradition with which he was so familiar.

In “Seeing in the Dark, Seeing by the Dark: How Bilbo’s Invisibility

Defined Tolkien’s Vision,” Michael Wodzak (2014) observes that modern optical
theory informs us that images form in our brains when light strikes and is
absorbed by the retina. If, however, a person is invisible, how can light affect the
retina at all? Whether light passes through the body of the invisible person, or is
bent around him, that light has no retina to affect. Therefore, a completely
invisible person ought to be completely blind.4

Wodzak notes that Bilbo, however, can see when invisible, in part because
he is not completely invisible. As Tolkien writes in Chapter 5 of The Hobbit about
the invisibility imparted by the Ring: “only in sunlight could you be seen, and
then only by your shadow, and that was a faint and shaky sort of shadow.”5 In
other words, the invisibility is not total. So neither is the invisible hobbit’s lack of
vision. Bilbo (and other characters who are or become invisible in Middle-earth)
does see, but not very well. Rather they see, as Tolkien describes it in The Lord of
the Rings, “as through a mist”6 (Frodo) or as if “all things about … were not dark,
but vague”7 (Sam). As Strider says of the nine, invisible ring-wraiths, they “do not
see the world of light as we do.”8 To Wodzak’s insightful explanation of

4
Michael Wodzak, “Seeing in the Dark, Seeing by the Dark: How Bilbo’s Invisibility
Defined Tolkien’s Vision,” In The Hobbit and Tolkien's Mythology: Essays on Revisions and
Influences, edited by Eden, Bradford Lee (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2014), 138.
5
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, revised and expanded, ed. Douglas A. Anderson,
(Boston, Mass. and New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 129.

6
Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Boston, Mass. and New York, N.Y.: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1965a), 416.

7
Tolkien, The Return of the King (Boston, Mass. and New York, N.Y.: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1965c), 343. This language has a biblical resonance: “Now we see through a
glass, darkly …” (1 Cor. 13.12).
8
Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Boston, Mass. and New York, N.Y.: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1965a), 202. Qtd. in Wodzak, “Seeing in the Dark,” 140.

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 Beal: Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?

Tolkien’s scientific understanding of optical theory may be added some additional

theological perspectives on invisibility in The Hobbit.

In medieval literature, when someone is invisible, he is not present to the

eyes of those around him. In that sense, he is absent. Especially in literary
instances in which invisibility is being used by a character to hide himself, out of
mixed motives, so that he may accomplish an illicit or unjust deed, invisibility
corresponds to the morally questionable heritage of the invisibility granted by the
ring of Gyges (discussed further below).

Symbolically, invisibility in The Hobbit may represent the Augustinian

conception of evil as the uncreated absence of good or corruption of good. In the
natural world of this earth and of Middle-earth, creatures made by the Creator
were meant to be seen and visible to one another. The annulling or elimination of
visibility to a state of invisibility suggests the erasure or absence of good and the
consequent descent into an evil state.

Tolkien’s Christian worldview, his Catholic imagination, and the specific

influence of Augustinian views of creation and the nature of evil on his
mythology of Middle-earth, have been recognized by scholars.9 T.A. Shippey
(2003) sums up Tolkien’s understanding of evil in The Road to Middle-earth,
where he contrasts Boethian and Manichean views, and asserts:

One of these [the Boethian view] is in essence the Orthodox

Christian line, expounded by St. Augustine and then by Catholic
and Protestant teaching alike … This says that there is no such
thing as evil: ‘evil is nothing,’ is the absence of good, is possibly
even an unappreciated good … Corollaries of this belief are that
evil cannot itself create, that it was not in itself created (but sprang
from a voluntary exercise of free will by Satan, Adam and Eve, to
separate themselves from God), that it will in the long run be
annulled and eliminated, as the Fall of Man was redressed by the

9
See, for example, Thomas W. Smith, “Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination: Mediation and
Tradition,” Religion and Literature 38 (2006), 73-100. A number of other studies have considered
the influence of Tolkien’s Christian faith on his writing. One recent book on the subject is Craig
Bernthan, Tolkien’s Sacramental Vision: Discerning the Holy in Middle-earth (Oxford: Second
Spring Books, 2014). See also Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel according to Tolkien: Visions of the
Kingdom in Middle-earth (Louisville, K.Y.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003) and Peter
Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview behind the Lord of the Rings (San Francisco,
Calif.: Ignatius Press, 2005).

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Incarnation and Death of Christ. Themes like these are strongly

present in The Lord of the Rings.10

As elsewhere in The Lord of the Rings, in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I,
chapter 9, “A Knife in the Dark,” the state of invisibility is symbolic of the theme.
This is vividly clear when a Ringwraith pierces Frodo’s shoulder with a Morgul
blade on Weathertop, and Frodo begins to fade. As Gandalf later informs Frodo in
Book II, Chapter 1, “Many Meetings,” the splinter was buried deep and working
its way inward: “They tried to pierce your heart with a Morgul-knife which
remains in the wound. If they had succeeded, you would have become like they
are, only weaker and under their command. You would have become a wraith
under the dominion of the Dark Lord.”11 Thus, Frodo would have faded and
become invisible, and in his invisible state, he would have done evil according to
the will of Sauron.

In The Hobbit, both the state of invisibility and the desire for it implies a
capacity to do evil. This is first obvious in Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark,” when
Gollum desperately wants the ring that Bilbo has pocketed because, upon entering
the state of invisibility, he believes he will be able to more easily murder Bilbo
and eat him – a plan similar to ones he carried out on many other occasions. In
contrast, Bilbo’s first act when invisible is to escape Gollum’s murderous
intentions, which is hardly an evil act. But the evil influence of the ring is already
evident when Bilbo conceals the ring and its role in his escape when he is reunited
with Gandalf and the dwarves. Bilbo’s desire to continue to possess the ring and
to experience the power of invisibility it grants – without being questioned,
without the ring being taken from him (as he took it from Gollum), and without
giving credit to a magical object when the dwarves are crediting his ingenuity and
courage – makes him into a liar.12

Bilbo’s character, however, is firm and good overall, so the morally

devastating effect of the ring’s evil power is not evident immediately. Instead, the

10
T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth (Boston, Mass. and New York, N.Y.:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 159.
11
Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: FR, 50th Anniversary Edition (Boston, Mass. and New
York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company), 222.

12
As Tolkien’s moral conception of the ring grew while working on The Lord of the
Rings, he found ways to re-write the story of Bilbo’s acquisition of the ring in darker terms. This
is clear in the prologue, part 4 “Of the Finding of the Ring” and in the conversation between
Gandalf and Frodo in chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past,” in The Fellowship of the Ring.

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 Beal: Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?

effect gradually increases over time, even while Bilbo is trying to use the ring to
do good. In order to understand how a person of good moral character is
corrupted by a ring’s power of invisibility, it is necessary to examine the original
source of this motif: the story of the ring of Gyges.

Philosophy and Literature:

The Moral Significance of Bilbo’s Invisibility

In the history of ideas represented in literature, the thematic link between

invisibility and individual moral conflict begins with Plato’s Republic and the ring
of Gyges. In his published letters, Tolkien makes occasional reference to Greek
philosophy,13 but none at all to Plato, his Republic or the tale of Gyges, and the
biographies of Tolkien by Carpenter and Garth do not mention Gyges or
Tolkien’s knowledge of his story, either. Nevertheless, Tolkien was familiar with
Plato’s Republic as a result of his undergraduate studies at Oxford, which, before
he turned his attention to Old English, Middle English, and Old Icelandic, were
originally in Classics and Greek philology.14 Furthermore, the wide spread use of
allusion to the story of Gyges and his ring in Greek, Latin, French, and English
literature makes it inevitable that Tolkien encountered references to the story in
his later reading.15 An examination of the story of the ring of Gyges, and the link
between invisibility and immorality, clearly reveals the connection to Tolkien’s
use of the same kind of thematic link in The Hobbit, in which the war between
good and evil that takes place when heart encounters temptation is very much at
issue.

13
See, for example, Tolkien, “94 Letter to Christopher Tolkien,” in The Letters of J.R.R.
Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1981 and Boston, Mass. and New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995, repr. 2000),
107.
14
Tolkien, “131 Letter to Milton Waldman,” 143-161 and cf. Humphrey Carpenter,
J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (Boston, Mass. and New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1977; rev. and rpt. 2000), chap. 5 an 6.
15
On the reception of the story of Gyges and his ring, evident in allusions in several
extant Greek and Latin literary works, including Cicero, Ptolemaus Chennus, Philostratus, Nonnus
(commenting on Gregory Nanzanius), and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, among others, and in
French and English, including Ioannes Tzetzes, Rabelais, Du Bellay, La Fontaine, Robert Greene,
Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Johnson, Robert Herrick, and so on, see Kirby Flower Smith, “The
Literary Tradition of Gyges and Candaules,” The American Journal of Philology 41 (1920): 1-37.
Kirby characterizes the reception of the tale of Gyges as a “sometimes thin but always persistent
literary tradition of more than a millennium” (7).

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Before considering Gyges, his ring, and its relevance to The Hobbit, it is
helpful to acknowledge some other magic rings that influenced Tolkien’s
conception of Sauron’s ring. From Norse mythology, Odin’s magic ring, called
Draupnir (“the dripper”), would multiply itself by eight every ninth night. Not
coincidentally, Tolkien’s one ring is related to several others in Middle-earth,
which were made with its power, including the nine given to mortal men doomed
to die. Richard Wagner’s opera, The Ring of Nibelung (ca. 1848-74), features a
ring, called Andvarinaut (“Andvari’s gift”), that grants dominion over the world
to the one who possesses it; Wagner’s work is sourced in the Nibelungleid legend,
a twelfth-century, high German epic, which had been re-discovered in 1755, and
in The Volsunga Saga, sources Tolkien knew very well.16 This ring, which has the
power to produce gold, had a bloody history: Loki tricked Andvari into giving it
to him, and in revenge, Andvari cursed it; Loki then gave it to Hreidmar, the king
of the dwarves, but Fafnir murdered the king in order to take the ring from him –
and then turned into a dragon in order to guard it. Siegfried later slew Fafnir, took
the ring, and gave it to Brynhildr, but the ring’s curse continued to wreck havoc. It
appears that Tolkien synthesized various aspects of these different magical rings
when he endowed the one ring of Sauron with its diverse powers. The power of
invisibility, specifically, is sourced in the tale of Gyges17 – and this is the power
of the ring that is particularly emphasized in The Hobbit before the other powers
associated with the ring are further, thematically developed in The Lord of the
Rings.18

16
Tolkien tried to dismiss critical comparisons between his ring epic and Wagner’s, but
Tolkien’s deep love of Northern mythology, and particularly the saga tradition, is well-known: his
Kolbitar / Coalbiters, an Oxford reading group, met to discuss the sagas weekly in the 1920s, and
in his published letters, Tolkien specifically acknowledged that “Sigurd the Volsung” was a direct
source for his tale of Turin and Niniel in The Silmarillion (“Letter to Milton Waldman”) and the
conversation between Sigurd and Fafnir was a direct source for the conversation between Bilbo
and Smaug (“122 Letter to Naomi Mitchison”).

Admittedly, in the context of refuting a misleading preface to Åke Ohlmarks’ Swedish

translation of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien denied that there was any connection between
Sauron’s ring and the ring in the Nibelungleid: “both rings were round, and there the resemblance
ceases” (“220 Letter to Allen and Unwin”). However, it is generally accepted among Tolkien
scholars and enthusiasts that a line of influence exists between the two. The primary similarity is,
of course, that Andivari’s ring and Sauron’s ring both have an evil power of dominion over the
world.
17
The power of invisibility is granted by many magical objects in classical and medieval
literature: the helmet of Hades, magical cloaks, and so on. The association between the power of
invisibility and a magic ring, however, begins in the western literary tradition with Plato.

18
Other magic rings in medieval literature include Aladdin’s, which could summon
djinn; see “The Tale of Aladdin and the Lamp” in any edition of A Thousand and One Arabian

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 Beal: Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?

Although acknowledged as a probable source for Tolkien’s invention of a

ring endowing its wearer with the power of invisibility, 19 the story of Gyges in
Plato’s Republic is not only an early source, but also presents a parallel idea:
namely, that the ability to walk unseen by the judging eyes of others gives the
magic ring wearer a greater degree of freedom to act without fear of
consequences.20 While Gyges uses the greater moral freedom he discovers in the
state of invisibility to do evil, Bilbo Baggins, in contrast, uses it as a moral force
for good – at least at first. Tolkien’s “eucatastrophic” re-writing of themes in the
story of Gyges may be influenced by later, medieval uses of the Gyges story – in,
for example, the Welsh Mabinogion’s tale of Sir Owein (called “The Lady of the
Fountain”) – in which a ring of invisibility has a role in saving life. However, the
real connection between the exemplum of Gyges and the episodic quest of Bilbo
Baggins is not simply the ring’s magic, but the protagonist’s immorality. For
while Bilbo does some good with his ring and the invisibility it grants him, he
also begins to tell lies under its influence and, eventually, to use the ring’s power
of invisibility to avoid people he does not want to deal with.

In Plato’s Republic, Book II, Glaucon, the brother of Plato, is questioning

Socrates’ assertion that men are capable of being just or of carrying out the work
of justice. Glaucon suggests that the supposed evidence of justice seen in the
world is actually comes about because of social pressures and expectations:

Nights. The Ring of Solomon, which could similarly summon djinn, is sourced in medieval Arabic
literature as well. Sir Perceval’s ring, which protected him from blood loss in battle and essentially
rendered him invincible, is described in various medieval Arthurian legends of England and
Europe. Sauron’s ring has a tendency to draw the evil Ringwraiths (like djinn) to the ring-bearer,
but the power it gives its wearer does not render him invincible, as the attack on Frodo on
Weathertop in The Fellowship of the Ring clearly shows.

19
In The Annotated Hobbit, the revised and expanded edition, Douglas Anderson
observes in note 31 that “rings of invisibility are often traced back to the story of Gyges in Book II
of The Republic by Plato” (133). The source is discussed in Eric Katz, “The Rings of Tolkien and
Plato: Lessons in Power, Choice, and Morality,” in Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book
to Rule Them All, ed. Gregory Baasham and Eric Bronson (Chicago, Ill.: Open Court, 2003), 5-20.

20
The tale of Gyges also appears in the Histories of Herodotus, and while it has a similar
plot to the tale in the Republic of Plato, it lacks the element of the ring of invisibility. Herodotus
treats the tale as part of the history of Lydia, with attention to the problems of tyranny and
economy (notably, the invention of minting of coins), while Plato treats it as a case study, a moral
exemplum, which Socrates and Glaucon discuss in the context of debating whether justice is better
than injustice and whether any human being with greater power than his fellows can maintain it.
For comparison of the versions of Herodotus and Plato, with reference to a version by Xanthos,
see Marc Shell, “The Tale of Gyges,” Mississippi Review 17 (1989): 21-84.

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people do what is right because people are watching them. If they weren’t being
watched, people wouldn’t do what is right. He turns to the story of the ring of
Gyges to provide parabolic evidence of what he means. In re-telling the story, he
claims that if people were invisible – if no one could see them and the
consequences of their actions would therefore not come home to roost, as it were
– then they would not act justly. Glaucon first tells his story and then makes his
point:

According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of

the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made
an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock.
Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among
other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at
which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as
appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a
gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and re-ascended.
Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they
might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into
their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was
sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside
his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the
company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer
present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he
turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials
of the ring, and always with the same result-when he turned the
collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared.
Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who
were sent to the court, where as soon as he arrived he seduced the
queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him,
and took the kingdom.

Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put
on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to
be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No
man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he
could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses
and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison
whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men.
Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust;
they would both come at last to the same point.

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And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just,
not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him
individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he
can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their
hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than
justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that
they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power
of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching
what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a
most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one
another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a
fear that they too might suffer injustice.21

Indeed, Glaucon goes beyond saying that people would not simply act unjustly if
they were invisible; they would be idiots not to take advantage of their power to
get what they want!

Later in The Republic, Book X, Socrates answers this argument, denying

that justice results from particular social pressures and expectations. Rather, the
original purity and beauty of the immortal soul is revealed by her love of wisdom,
virtue, and the company she keeps, and, as Socrates says:

… Justice in her own nature has been shown to be best for the soul
in her own nature. Let a man do what is just, whether he have the
ring of Gyges or not, and even if in addition to the ring of Gyges
he put on the helmet of Hades.22

Justice is best for the soul, and the virtuous person is happy because he is
rationally in control of his appetites. Even if a man has the ring of Gyges, together
with the helmet of Hades – either of which would make him invisible, and both of
which would presumably make him doubly or utterly invisible – he should still do

21
Benjamin Jowett, “The Republic by Plato, Book II,” The Internet Classics Archive
(1994-2009): http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html. Benjamin Jowett also edited a Greek
text of Plato’s Republic with Lewis Campbell, first published by Oxford University Press in 1871,
which is now available online. Greek readers are welcome to consult it and compare it to the
English: https://archive.org/details/PlatosRepublicInClassicGreek. There are several other recent
translations of Plato’s Republic now available, but I use Jowett’s translation, with reference to his
Greek edition, because Jowett’s edition was probably Tolkien’s text for the Republic when he was
a student at Exeter College, Oxford University studying classics from 1911 until he changed the
focus of his studies to English language and literature in the summer term of 1913.
22
Jowett, trans., “The Republic by Plato, Book II.”

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what is just. Injustice comes with consequences, including personal unhappiness,

but virtue is its own reward.

Certainly Tolkien’s own Christian world-view aligned with this moral

concept. He incorporates it into his mythology with the wisdom of Job – that is,
with the acknowledgement that many people suffer even when they have not
acted unjustly, but others have. But while the theme is present, and the symbolic
ring, Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins is clearly no Gyges: the plots of their stories are
different.

Gyges descended into the depths of the earth following an earthquake to

find his ring near a dead body; Bilbo descended into the depths of the mountains
of Moria following storm and goblin-capture to find the one ring not far from
Gollum, a creature very much alive – and hungry. Gyges discovered his ring’s
power in the company of shepherds; Bilbo, in the company of dwarves. Gyges
uses his ring to seduce the queen, kill the king, and take power over a country.
Bilbo uses it to escape Gollum and goblins under the Misty Mountains, to aid his
friends and help them escape from danger, to slip into the vastness of Smaug’s
lair and steal back a cup that rightfully belongs to the dwarves, to get away from
his stubborn comrades and try to negotiate peace with Bard, and to hide himself
during the Battle of the Five Armies. At first blush, it seems, in fact, that while
Gyges uses his ring for evil, Bilbo uses it for good.

This plot motif – using a ring of invisibility to save a life, as Bilbo does –
appears in the Arthurian legends of Owein. In the fourteenth-century, Welsh
Mabinogion, in the tale of “The Lady of the Fountain,” a woman named Luned
gives a ring of invisibility to Owein in order to lead him safely away from
captivity and certain death to a place where he can hide until she can introduce
him to her mistress so he may marry her. In the process of rescuing Owein, who
has been imprisoned for killing the knight who guarded the titular Lady’s
fountain, Luned specifically says to him:

What deliverance I can for thee, that will I do. Take this ring and
put it on thy finger, and put this stone in my hand, and close thy
fist over the stone, and so long as thou conceal it, it will conceal
thee too. And when they of the castle get heed, they will come to
fetch thee, to put thee to death because of the man. And when they
see thee not, that will vex them. I shall be on the horse-block
yonder, awaiting thee, and thou shall see me even though I shall
not thee. And come thou and place thy hand upon my shoulder,

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and then I shall know that thou hast come to me. And the way I go
then, come thou with me.23

The ring of invisibility, and its link to an eventual seduction plot of the Lady
whom Luned serves, appears to be sourced, ultimately, in the story of Gyges.24
Yet the medieval writer of the Mabinogion has shifted responsibility for the
machinations in romance from the protagonist to the ruling lady’s servant, and the
use of the ring from giving the protagonist direct access to the ruling lady to
indirect access, which is preceded, in point of fact, by the protagonist’s own
salvation from imminent death. It is this good use of a ring of invisibility to rescue
a captive and save his life that is notable in comparison to Bilbo Baggins’ use of
his own ring of invisibility in The Hobbit.

Yet it is not accurate to say that Bilbo’s use of the ring is entirely good. As
noted above, by the time Bilbo is using it to help steal from Smaug, the story
seems to imply that Bilbo has become prideful about what he has accomplished
while invisible in the past (“Ring-winner and luck-wearer …”).25 In his
foolhardiness, he puts his own life at risk, not realizing the dragon can smell him
even if he can’t see him. A long, riddling conversation with an evil dragon is
never a good idea, yet Bilbo (like Sigurdr) has one. Later in the development of
the story, readers learn that he uses the ring to hide from unpleasant callers and
relatives (such as Lobelia Sackville-Baggins). This idea of hiding from others, of
deliberately choosing not being seen by them, is aligned in the story of Gyges
with the tendency toward action that is not virtuous.

By the time Tolkien was at work on The Lord of the Rings, he was re-
writing Bilbo’s account of the finding of the ring and his use of it to clearly show
that the ring had a corrupting effect on Bilbo’s character. Bilbo lied about the

23
“The Lady of the Fountain,” in The Mabinogion, trans. Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones
(London: J.M. Dent, 1949, rpt. 2003), 137.
24
It is worth noting that in the twelfth-century, Old French, Arthurian romance “The
Knight with the Lion,” the protagonist Yvain receives a ring that functions in a similar way from a
maiden named Lunette. Chrétien de Troyes’ tale of Yvain is a more direct source through which
the Platonic tale of Gyges is transmuted. The elements from the story of Gyges that reappear in
“The Lady of the Fountain” (Owein) and “The Knight with the Lion” (Yvain) have been noted
elsewhere in scholarly studies. See, for example, Eugene Vance, “Chrétien’s Yvain and the
Ideologies of Change and Exchange,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 42-62, who remarks that
“Lunette’s ring has striking resemblances, functionally speaking, to the ring of the tyrant Gyges as
evoked by Herodotus and Plato” (51).

25
Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Anderson, 279.

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ring, he hid the knowledge of it and its powers from others, and he used it to
achieve his own ends and appear heroic in the eyes of others. 26 Gandalf
particularly expresses his concern about Bilbo’s deceptive behavior to Frodo in
second chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Shadow of the Past”:

“Then I heard Bilbo’s strange story of how he “won” it [the ring],

and I could not believe it. When I at last got the truth out of him, I
thought at once that he been trying to put his claim to the ring
beyond doubt. Much like Gollum with his ‘birthday present.’ The
lies were too much alike for my comfort. Clearly the ring has an
unwholesome power that sets to work on its keeper at once. That
was the first real warning I had that all was not well.”27

In the fourth section of his “Prologue” to The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien
commented on Bilbo’s differing stories, the one that he told to others (and set
down in his memoirs) and the one that Gandalf’s insistence provoked him to
reveal:

Gandalf, however, disbelieved Bilbo’s first story, as soon as he

heard it, and he continued to be very curious about the ring.
Eventually he got the true tale out of Bilbo after much questioning,
which for a while strained their friendship, but the wizard seemed
to think the truth important. Though he did not say so to Bilbo, he
also thought it important, and disturbing, to find that the good
hobbit had not told the truth from the first: quite contrary to his
habit.28

This commentary suggests that the basically “good” hobbit, Bilbo, is being
corrupted by the evil influence of the ring, which causes him to lie when he
should tell the truth.

In essence, the chief power of the ring – invisibility – is linked to evil

influence and the corruption of virtuous character in both Plato’s tale of Gyges in
The Republic and Tolkien’s tale of Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. This is a key
26
For much more extensive detail, see John D. Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit
(Boston, Mass. and New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007).
27
Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 50th Anniversary Edition,
48.
28
Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 13.

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 Beal: Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?

idea that goes beyond a simple connection between two rings that grant the power
of invisibility to their wearers. For Tolkien uses the motif to reveal hidden
meaning, the struggle with temptation, the war between good and evil that is
hidden in the heart. This war takes place in the microcosm of man, and, according
to Augustine, the macrocosm of the universe, but also in particular historical and
biographical circumstances. Tolkien’s experience of World War I as a signals
officer is one example, the one that is hidden in The Hobbit and subtly shapes it.
Exploring this connection allows the reader to consider the psychological
significance of Bilbo’s invisibility.

History and Biography:

The Psychological Significance of Bilbo’s Invisibility

Like many soldiers who served in World War I, Tolkien experienced trauma from
the violence he witnessed, the deaths of his friends, and threats to his own life on
the battlefield.29 New threats to his sons’ lives during World War II sharply
reminded him of his own past experiences, which it is clearly evident from the
letters he wrote to his sons and to others in this time period, in which his
memories of World War I are intermixed with his thoughts, feelings, and opinions
of World War II. During World War II, Tolkien served as an air warden on the
domestic front while two of his sons served as soldiers internationally. Michael
Tolkien trained as an anti-aircraft gunner in the British army while Christopher
Tolkien trained as a pilot in the Royal Air Force (RAF) in South Africa. Tolkien
wrote many letters to both of his sons, to encourage them and express his love for
them in their absence. He also wrote to his editor, Stanley Unwin, about them. On
circa March 18, 1945, after learning of the death of a pilot from Christopher’s
group of cadets in his first flight in a Hawker Hurricane, which was a single-seat
fighter aircraft, Tolkien confessed: “My heart is gnawed out with anxiety.”30 He
did not want his children to die in the war, but he was afraid this might happen.

29
For an overview of Tolkien’s experiences in WWI, Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R.
Tolkien: A Biography. John Garth’s admirable study, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold
of Middle-earth (Boston, Mass. and New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), gives
further detail as well as analysis of the impact of Tolkien’s wartime experiences on the
development of his mythology. See also Janet Brannan Croft, War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2004) and Michael Livingston, “The Shell-Shocked Hobbit:
The First World War and Tolkien’s Trauma of the Ring,” Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien,
C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 25 (2006): 77-92. Livingston discusses
the likelihood of Tolkien’s personal experience of “shell shock,” that is, post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) and how it is embodied in the character of Frodo.
30
Tolkien, “98 Letter to Stanley Unwin,” 112.

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Thus, it is not difficult to see the influence of this anxiety on the mood of The
Lord of the Rings. But Tolkien actually began to explore wartime trauma earlier,
in a lighter and less obvious mode, in The Hobbit.

Because of Tolkien’s well-known aversion to biographical criticism, the

extent of the biographical in his mythological writings has been under-explored.
But careful study reveals myriad details in Tolkien’s high fantasy literature that
directly correspond to his ordinary lived experience. Among these details are
those that support the idea that Bilbo Baggins is Tolkien’s psychological
representative in The Hobbit.

In his letters, Tolkien directly commented on some of these details and

correspondences. For example, in a letter of October 25, 1958 to one of his
readers, Debra Webster, Tolkien wrote, “I am, in fact, a hobbit.”31 He elaborated
on how his own practices and tastes correspond to those of Shire-folk:

I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and
unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food
(unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like and even dare to
wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of
mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour
(which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late
and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.32

These claims, taken together with the fact that Bilbo Baggins is represented
within the world of Middle-earth as the author of The Hobbit or There and Back
Again (and of which Tolkien is, obviously, the actual author in this world), beg
the question: did Tolkien view himself, at some level, as the hobbit, Bilbo
Baggins?

Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter (1979) identified a series of

elements from Tolkien’s life that re-appear in Bilbo’s life. These included, among
other points of interest, the fact that Bilbo’s mother, Belladonna Took, resembled
Tolkien’s own mother, Mabel Suffield, in being one of three daughters of a father
who lived to be nearly one hundred; Bilbo’s home, “Bag End,” was what local
people called the farm of Tolkien’s Aunt Jane in Worcestershire; and the larger
country of the Shire, with its mill and river, is remarkably like Warwickshire in

31
Tolkien, “213 Letter to Deborah Webster,” 288.
32
Tolkien, “213 Letter to Deborah Webster,” 288-89.

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 Beal: Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?

the West Midlands and the specific environs of Sarehole where Tolkien spent
formative years.33 Since Carpenter’s analysis, so many more connections between
Tolkien and Bilbo have been discovered that William Christian Klarner (2014)
could claim “Bilbo contained much more of Tolkien himself, the author as a
person, than any other character.”34 Yet at least one series of correspondences has
remained unexplored: the connections between Bilbo’s moments of invisibility
and Tolkien’s service as a signals officer in World War I.

As part of the 11th battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers, Tolkien served as

a signals officer. This involved communicating with English troops on the
battlefield using a variety of modes: semaphore flags, Morse dots and dashes
flashed out with a lamp at night and a heliograph by day, the field telephone,
rockets, carrier pigeons – sometimes even human runners.35 Tolkien’s particular
role meant that he was, in effect, present with the soldiers who were fighting, but
he was not always visible to them. His voice was audible through the telephone
wires, and his messages made clear through flashing lights, even when he was
physically absent. As a signals officer, in fact, he was often invisible to the very
people whose lives he was seeking to protect or save with vital information in
situations of military conflict.

Seeing this can lead to a general awareness of a similarity between

Tolkien’s role in World War I and Bilbo’s role in Thorin’s Company. Almost
every time Bilbo becomes invisible in The Hobbit, he does so in relation to a
situation of danger, usually a direct threat to the dwarves (who may be
comparable to soldiers in wartime), in an attempt to rescue Thorin’s company.
Once invisible, Bilbo follows a pattern: he communicates with the dwarves
themselves, uses his words to encourage them, and leads them to a way out of
danger that dupes the enemy and gives them the victory. This pattern corresponds
to Tolkien’s responsibilities as a signals officer.

The pattern holds true when Bilbo uses the power of invisibility in
Mirkwood in order to free the dwarves from the giant spiders. He destroys the

33
Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 179-80.
34
William Christian Klarner, “A Victorian in Valhalla: Bilbo Baggins as the Link
between England and Middle-earth,” in The Hobbit and Tolkien’s Mythology, ed. Brad Eden
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2014), 152.
35
Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 87-88 and John Garth, Tolkien and the Great
War: The Threshold of Middle-earth, 114-15. Note that the radio had been invented and was in
use during World War I, so it is possible that Tolkien may have used radio communication on the
battlefield as well.

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spiders’ threads and webs – their means of communication as well as entrapment

of their prey – with his flashing sword, which is visible (like lamps and
heliographs) even when he is not.36 The pattern of “communication –
encouragement – escape – victory” holds true shortly after the battle with the
spiders when the dwarves are captured by the Elves of Mirkwood as well.

Bilbo remains invisible for a prolonged period of time during their

imprisonment (thus avoiding it himself), and he communicates with Thorin in his
lonesome prison cell and then with all the other dwarves, sharing Thorin’s orders
that they are not to capitulate to the Elven King’s demands:

So it was that Bilbo was able to take secretly Thorin’s message to

each of the other imprisoned dwarves, telling them that Thorin
their chief was also imprisoned close at hand, but no one was to
reveal their errand to the king, not yet, not before Thorin gave the
word. For Thorin had taken heart again hearing how the hobbit
had rescued his companions from the spiders, and was determined
once more not to ransom himself promises to the king of a share in
the treasure, until all hope of escaping in any other way had
disappeared—until in fact the remarkable Mr. Invisible Baggins
(of whom he began to have a very high opinion indeed) altogether
failed to think of something clever. The other dwarves quite agreed
when they got the message.37

Thus Bilbo communicates, he encourages, and he is on the verge of thinking of

“something clever” by which to free his friends. He does so, of course, by putting
the dwarves in the wine barrels that are shoved into the River Running and sent
back to Laketown.

Fairy tale-wise, the pattern repeats a third time in chapter 12, “Inside
Information,” when Bilbo descends into the Lonely Mountain to confront the
dragon Smaug – not once, but twice. The first time, he slips on his ring, descends
into the dragon’s lair, and obtains a “great two-handled cup.”38 The dwarves are

Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Anderson 212 (italics added). Tolkien’s
36

biographers, Humphrey and Garth, have recalled the mess of wires that could be strung
across the battlefield, a situation that may relate to Tolkien’s Mirkwood spider webs.

37 Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Anderson 227 (italics added).

38
Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Anderson 271. It is worth recalling that the source
for this moment of the theft of the cup can be found in Tolkien’s beloved Old English epic,
Beowulf.

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 Beal: Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?

thrilled with this token of their great treasure. Balin is so encouraged, so

“overjoyed,” that he “picked Bilbo up and carried him out into the open air” while
Bilbo hardly notices “the excitement of the dwarves, or how they praised him and
patted him on the back and put themselves in all their families for generations to
come at his service.”39 Smaug, on the other hand, is vastly displeased.

Bilbo discovers this when he puts on his ring and goes down to see the
dragon again to find out whether he has a weak spot that might allow them to
defeat him and take possession of the whole treasure hoard. In his invisible state,
Bilbo ends up having a lengthy conversation with the enemy, for it turns out they
share a common language. Bilbo becomes over-bold, and indeed, the narrator
comments that “he was in grave danger of coming under the dragon-spell.”40
Even though Smaug cannot see him, he can smell him – and he spouts fire at the
invisible hobbit, who is singed and barely gets away with his life, running back up
the tunnel to the dwarves. Yet in this process, Bilbo does see the hole over the
dragon’s heart, and he later communicates his knowledge to a thrush, who will in
turn take it to Bard, the Bowman, who will successfully use the knowledge of the
enemy’s vulnerability to slay the dragon.41

In the Battle of the Five Armies that follows the dragon’s death, Bilbo is
invisible, looking miserably on what appears to be a great defeat. He takes a stand
among the Elves on Ravenhill “partly because there was more chance of escape
from that point, and partly (with the more Tookish part of his mind) because if he
was going to be in a last desperate stand, he preferred on the whole to defend the
Elvenking.”42 This statement about Bilbo is remarkably consonant with Tolkien’s
mental state in World War I, for Tolkien often felt miserable himself but
metaphorically “took his stand” with Faerie, the Perilous Realm, writing about the
Elves of Middle-earth in his ever-developing mythology despite (or perhaps as a

39
Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Anderson, 271-72.
40
Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Anderson, 281.
41
Even the complexity of this communication, using the intermediary of the thrush, may
connect to Tolkien’s lived experience, for he was trained to use birds in battlefield
communications.

42
Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Anderson, 344. This is quintessentially a
Tolkienian feeling. Compare with Tolkien’s short story, “The Smith of Wootton Major,” Tales
from the Perilous Realm (Boston, Mass. and New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008),
243-81.

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means of escape from the terrifying reality of) the violence of war that surrounded
him.

Shortly after his rousing declaration that the eagles are coming, Bilbo is
knocked unconscious by a stone that crashes into his helm. His sudden inability to
participate in the battle can be compared to Tolkien’s own, occasioned by trench
fever, which resulted in a medical leave and his return to England. However, the
fact that Bilbo is brought down by a blow to the head (rather than a fever, for
example) is certainly meaningful to the story on a thematic level. It is not only
Bilbo’s body, but also his brain that has been wounded by the war and violence
that he has witnessed.

For it seems that Bilbo is, at least to some extent, traumatized by his
experience of war as Tolkien himself may well have been. Bilbo’s traumatic
stress begins early in the novel when he learns of the dragon during the
“unexpected party” when Thorin informs him he may never return from the
adventure:

Poor Bilbo couldn’t bear it any longer. At may never return he

began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon to burst out
like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel. All the
dwarves sprang up, knocking over the table. Gandalf struck a blue
light at the end of his magic stuff and in the firework glare, the
poor little hobbit could be seen kneeling on the hearth-rug, shaking
like a jelly that was melting. Then he fell flat on the floor, and kept
calling out “struck by lightning, struck by lightning!” over and
over again, and that was all they could get out of him for a long
time. So they took him and laid him out of the way on the drawing
room sofa with a drink at his elbow, and they went back to their
dark business.43

This reaction looks remarkably like a symptom of “shell-shock,” the diagnosis

doctors developed for soldiers with certain symptoms during World War I, a
diagnosis that would later be called “post-traumatic stress disorder.”44 PTSD is
characterized by intense fear and terror after witnessing or experiencing life-

43
Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Anderson, 47.
44
In The Hobbit, chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill,” Bilbo’s terrible nightmare in the
cave in the Misty Mountains, from which he awakens with a great shout just before the goblins
capture the dwarves, is another moment that could be likened to a PTSD symptom.

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threatening harm.45 Even if Tolkien did not experience clinical “shell shock”
himself, he certainly would have known other soldiers who did.

In June of 1916, Tolkien was deployed to the France, where he

experienced first-hand what he later called the “animal horror”46 of trench warfare
at the Battle of the Somme. While in France, Tolkien repeatedly witnessed the
devastating effects of war. He saw men wounded and killed before his eyes by
guns, tanks, and explosions; he saw hundreds of men’s bodies and dismembered
body parts lying in the trenches or on the field. Ordered out to the battlefield in
command of British soldiers beginning on July 14, he carried – and was trained to
fire at German soldiers — a Webley .455 Mark VI Revolver. By chance or skill,
he was never physically wounded, but like other men, he lived with the constant
threat of death while he was caught up in the conflict in France. That threat was
never more real than when he learned of the deaths of two of his closest friends
with whom he had formed a literary club, the TCBS (the Tea Club and Borrovian
Society).

Tolkien’s friend R.Q. Gilson was killed at La Boisselle on July 1, the first
day of the offensive. Tolkien’s friend G.B. Smith wrote to tell him of his death,
saying:

I saw in the paper this morning that Rob has been killed. I am safe,
but what does that matter? Do please stick to me, you and
Christopher. I am very tired and most frightfully depressed at this
worst of news. Now one realizes in despair what the TCBS really
was. O my dear John Ronald, what ever are we going to do?47

Tolkien and Smith met up at Acheux on August 19, spent days talking, and shared
a meal together at Bouzincourt where they came under fire but were,
miraculously, uninjured.48 Later, however, Smith was killed. After contracting
“trench fever” and returning to England, Tolkien learned of Smith’s death in

45
The diagnostic criteria for diagnosing PTSD is provided in the DSM IV, available
online: http://www.mental-health-today.com/ptsd/dsm.htm. The criteria have been slightly revised
and updated in the DSM V. See http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/PTSD-
overview/diagnostic_criteria_dsm-5.asp.
46
Garth, The Great War, 290.
47
Qtd. in Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 94-95.
48
Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 95.

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December in a letter from the fourth member of the TCBS, Christopher Wiseman:
“My dear J.R., I have just received news from home about G.B.S., who
succumbed to injuries received from shells bursting on December 3rd. I can’t say
much about it now. I humbly pray God I may be accounted worthy of him.”49
Tolkien was deeply affected by the deaths of his friends and the horror of war.

Various scholars have observed how Tolkien’s war memories found

expression in his mythology of Middle-earth.50 In fact, Tolkien first began to
write down his ideas for this mythology under the influence of his friends in the
TCBS in 1914 when he was both in school at Oxford and in training with the
Army in preparation for deployment. But it seems that his mythology gave him
something to do, something to think about, a world to escape into during his time
on the battlefield.51 He was actually working on his imaginary languages while he
was at Army officer training lectures. This behavior suggests that he was using
mythology and linguistic invention as a coping mechanism to deal with the terror
and the trauma literally taking place all around him. As T.A. Shippey (2003) has
remarked:

… there would be no surprise in seeing Tolkien, the Lancashine

Fusilier, survivor of the Somme, as deeply and early marked by
fear of death, starting to write his fables of the Undying Lands and
the potentially deathless elves in reaction or compensation …
There is no doubt that Tolkien often dwelt on the langoth, the
heartache endured by those who felt, or hoped, that there was an
Undying Land at the other end of the Lost Road.52
When the extent of Tolkien’s wartime experience of violence and trauma is
reviewed, Bilbo’s invisibility becomes much more than a convenient metaphor for
Tolkien’s experiences as a signals officer. Clearly, Both Bilbo and Tolkien are

49
Qtd. in Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 96.

See John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War; Croft, War and the Works of J.R.R.
50

Tolkien; and Livingston, “The Shell-Shocked Hobbit.” See also Raymond Michael Vince, “War,
Heroism, and Narrative: Hemingway, Tolkien, and Le Carré: Storytellers to the Modern
World” (University of South Florida, Ph.D diss., 2005).
51
Tolkien highly values Escape, as he describes it, in his essay, “On Fairy-Stories.”

52
T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth: Revised and Expanded Edition (Boston,
Mass. and New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 370-71.

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 Beal: Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?

present, by means of their voices, although they are unseen or absent in their
bodies.

On a much more complex psychological level, however, Bilbo’s

invisibility conveys the deeper reality Tolkien or any soldier might have
experienced: feeling unseen, unrecognized in personhood or humanity by both
friends and enemies alike, in the midst of the violence of war that warps
everyone’s ability to perceive what is real, true, and good. Invisibility even
implies the fear of becoming a disembodied ghost or spirit after death, given that
the threat of death was omnipresent in war.53 So Tolkien’s depiction of Bilbo’s
moments of invisibility in The Hobbit reflects his responsibilities as a signals
officer and reveals either his own traumatic experiences of loss or the experiences
of other soldiers (and probably both). At various levels, but to a considerable
extent, World War I is “hidden” in The Hobbit.

Conclusions

Why is Bilbo Baggins invisible? This study suggests that Tolkien’s

knowledge of philology, theology, philosophy, literature, history, and his own life
experience all contribute to the development of the symbolic, moral, and
psychological significance of invisibility in The Hobbit. Tolkien’s role as a
signals officer in World War I meant that he was often, in effect, invisible to those
he was serving and seeking to save on the battlefield; like Bilbo when he was
invisible, he could be heard, but not seen. Tolkien’s knowledge of medieval
literature, and the tradition associated with the story of the ring of Gyges in
Plato’s Republic, suggests that when people’s actions are not visible and open to
the moral scrutiny of others, they may become self-serving and cease to be
virtuous. Tolkien’s theology – his Catholic imagination – is informed by his
philology (not surprisingly!), so that being invisible (or being “not able to be
seen”) becomes a way of metaphorically representing evil as the absence of good
in the world.

The contexts for Bilbo’s invisibility are connected to a hidden war in The
Hobbit: World War I, the war between good and evil that takes place in heart
when it faces temptation, and the war that takes place on a much grander scale
between good and evil in the created world and the cosmos. Tolkien lived through
World War I, read through temptations of the heart depicted in medieval
literature, and held to Christian teaching about the battle between good and evil
raging across the whole universe. Naturally, but subtly, and nevertheless
53
Here it is useful to recall once more Frodo’s experience of being stabbed by the
Ringwraith’s Morgul knife on Weathertop (discussed above).

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purposefully, he wove these elements into his mythology so that he might

influence his readers for good.

While Bilbo is still holding onto the ring at the end of The Hobbit, lying
about how he obtained it and using it to avoid “unpleasant callers” by whom he
does not wish to be seen, he will not always do so. The ring’s evil, like most evil
in the world, affects Bilbo without his full awareness or consent, but affect him it
does, and deeply. Unlike many ring-bearers before him, however, Bilbo will give
up the ring of his own accord. So gradually, he will become free of its corrupting
influence. His will thus will become truly free, and Frodo, representing the next
generation, will undertake the heavy responsibility of seeking to destroy the ring
and its evil, and the ring will be destroyed despite the fact that Frodo gives into
the ring’s temptation in the fires of Mount Doom.

In his essay on Tolkien’s Catholic imagination, Thomas W. Smith (2006)

speculates that the infusion of Tolkien’s world-view in his mythological works is
not a matter of explicitly teaching Christian doctrine, but rather a matter of
providing readers with a way of seeing:

Belief is not only a matter of assenting to particular doctrines. That

is a dimension of religious belief, but it is not the most important
one. People assent to particular doctrines because they see reality
through a specific lens. They believe in these realities because they
believe something about reality. In this vein, Tolkien says, “I have
not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything
like ‘religion,’ to cults, or practices, in the imaginary world. For
the religious element is absorbed into the story and symbolism” (L
172). That is, he refuses to place any particular religious practices
or doctrines into his stories because they would only obscure the
vision as a whole. So when we ask, “What is Tolkien's Catholic
imagination?’ we are asking, ‘How do Catholic artists like Tolkien
see the world and how is that vision incarnate in their art?’ As
Flannery O'Connor wrote, a Catholic work of fiction is ‘one in
which the truth as Christians know it has been used as a light to see
the world by’ (Fitzgerald 173).54

So, while the temporarily invisible characters in Tolkien’s stories cannot be seen
by their fellow characters within the confines of Middle-earth, for readers, the
problems of invisibility – moral, symbolic, and psychological – are illuminated by
54
Thomas W. Smith, “Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination,” 74.

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 Beal: Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?

the story. In this sense, invisibility actually makes truth visible. Invisibility
consequently becomes a prelude to redemption.

Jane Beal, PhD is a literary scholar. She is the author of John Trevisa and the
English Polychronicon (ACMRS and Brepols, 2013) and The Signifying Power of
Pearl: Medieval Literary and Cultural Contexts for the Transformation of Genre
(Routledge, forthcoming), editor of Illuminating Moses: A History of Reception
from Exodus to the Renaissance (Brill, 2014) and Illuminating Jesus in the Middle
Ages (Brill, in progress), and co-editor of Translating the Past: Essays on
Medieval Literature in Honor of Marijane Osborn (ACMRS, 2012) and
Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (MLA, forthcoming). She also
writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. She has served as a professor at
Wheaton College and Colorado Christian University, teaching literature, creative
writing, and composition and rhetoric. She currently teaches at the University of
California, Davis, where she is working on a book about love and redemption in
the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien. To learn more, please visit
http://sanctuarypoet.net.

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