Bilbo Baggins's Journey To The Syncretic Middle-Earth

Syncretic Middle-Earth Bilbo Baggins’ adventure to the Lonely Mountain opens the doors to J. R. R. Tolkien’s vast Middle-Earth. Tolkien describes his intricate world with such exquisite detail from the mythic creatures occupying his heroes’ every turn, to the deep woods where their adventures seem to go awry. While Tolkien’s characters are greeted from region to region by glamourous figures that cross through dense woods and winding rivers to guide them on their way, he excludes concrete religious deities as a factoring role among the adventures he has created. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are syncretic endeavors in which Tolkien synthesizes different religious traditions into a unifying spirituality rather than infusing his world

Tolkien himself states that The Shire represents the ideal British culture, and he identifies with the hobbits because of their timid nature (Grotta). While the Shire does not belong to the Otherworld surrounding it, it does still have a spiritual nature about it. This is because hobbits have a striking resemblance to the Celts half-men (Burns). When Gandalf introduces the dwarves to Bilbo and the Shire he begins not only the journey of which Frodo will finish, but he opens Middle-Earth to a mixing of races based on the same mix of religious traditions and images Britain evolved

Although the elves are described as ancient creatures, Tom seems to have one-upped them—he is the only race of character that is unaffected by the Ring and its power (Tolkien 150). When Frodo and the other hobbits meet Tom by chance in their mix up with Old Man Willow, the time spent with the Bombadil’s is important to Tolkien’s syncretic endeavors (Tolkien 135). As Tom “drew back the yellow curtains…the hobbits saw that these had covered the windows, at either end of the room, one looking east and the other looking west” (Tolkien 145). In fact the realm Tom resides in exists between the two forces at work in Middle-Earth, good and evil. Tolkien states that while Tom’s home may seem to be this magical land existing parallel to the rest of Middle-Earth, “we are not in ‘fairy-land’, but in real river lands in autumn. Goldberry represents the actual seasonal changes in such lands” (Treschow 178). Tom’s wife, Goldberry, is a physical image and representation of the change that is coming to the hobbits as they venture on towards Mordor, just as the seasons will change for her. But while these changes are happening Tom remains the same, and thus he represents the religious traditions that remain through syncretism in Britain. Therefore Tom unifies Middle-Earth as it is now to a time that no