CRAFTING CHARACTERS: DESTINY - OR WHAT DOES BILBO BAGGINS WANT?

from Rankin and Bass’s The Hobbit

Please find the first part of our Wants discussion here.

1

There is, of course, another subtle way to give your characters a Want or at least a Want-adjacent aspect and that is to give them a Destiny (or, if you wish, a Fate or Legacy) — a special distinction arising out of the worldbuilding that both organizes the character and often grants them supranormal agency.  Buffy, Anakin Skywalker, Neo from the Matrix, King Arthur in Excalibur, Sarah Conner in The Terminator, Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings, all the soulmates in romance narratives — the Destiny trope is as old as it is ubiquitous, and as ubiquitous as it is effective. 

Effective because:

— a destiny will shape the character and the narrative with amazing economy. 

— a destiny will make the protagonist character unique — which is what we always want from our characters— and invest them with special status. 

— a destiny will impose a Want on the character, even if the character struggles with or denies that Want. 

Destinies are well-worn shortcuts, answer a lot of character questions with minimal effort, and are a fantastic way to give a character that seems to have no real Wants all the defining and propulsive energies of a Want.  

2

Two famous examples are well-worth examining. 

First is Bilbo Baggins from Tolkien’s The Hobbit.  Bilbo is a fascinating character for many reasons: most obvious is that he appears at first glance to lack all the prerequisite traits and features of an adventure hero.  Bilbo is neither poor nor an orphan nor put upon nor searching for his place the way his nephew Frodo Baggins — or Neo — are at the start of their adventures.  Bilbo, in fact, seems contentedly tucked into his quotidian life when Gandalf appears at his door, and ain’t about the adventure life at all.  As he tells Gandalf, he has “...no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”  

That dinner line ain’t just a throw-away.  Bilbo, with his hole-home and pipe and baking and double-dinners, is the essence of cottage-core domesticity.  Extraordinary, really, when one considers that if there’s one thing that adventure is specifically organized to abhor it is domesticity¹. 

We’ll have more to say about Tolkien's choice of a non-adventurer as the hero of this adventure, but for the moment please notice how Tolkien chose to build Bilbo’s character and connect him to the adventure.  Tolkien did not give Bilbo a character-defining Want at the start of his adventure (besides the usual day-to-day ones²) and didn’t give Bilbo a plot-motivating Want, either (didn’t make Bilbo poor or an orphan or despised), didn’t drag Bilbo into the adventure through an act of Hitchcockian fate majeure, all of which would have been the standard models: what he gave Bilbo instead was a Destiny.

Turns out Bilbo is a descendant through his mother of the Took family line — who are not your typical Hobbits.  “It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbitlike about them, and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer.” 

A Took legacy, a Took destiny that Gandalf is clearly aware of when he selects Bilbo to join the expedition that will help the Dwarves reclaim their lost kingdom from that “most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm called Smaug.” 

“As (the Dwarves) sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up -- probably somebody lighting a wood-fire --and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-End, Under-Hill, again.

He got up trembling.”

And it is that Took destiny, more than any Want, that shapes Bilbo and propels his adventure.  It is that Took destiny that connects Bilbo in a deep personal way to the adventure.  

3

Characters don’t need a Want as long as they have a destiny.  Destiny will Want for them. 

4

If Conflict is something that comes from the storyworld to impact the character, then Destiny is something that comes from the storyworld — but that resides within the character. 

5

Bilbo’s Destiny is humble and perfectly Hobbit-like in its lack of ostentation, but our next example of Destiny scales up the complexity significantly.

I’m speaking, of course, of Harry Potter, a protagonist who seems to have no strong Wants whatsoever. 

But more on Harry in our next post.

Afterword

As I intimated above, Tolkien chose Bilbo as the hero of his adventure not simply because of the humorous / ironic counterpoint that a homey character like Bilbo provides.  Tolkien was a WWI veteran and knew from personal experience that one doesn’t need to be John Wick to be capable of heroism; knew that plenty of Hobbit-like folks who wanted only to return to their homes and pipes and families ended up performing superhuman acts of courage in the face of war’s endless horrors (I’m not talking about the killing acts, either). 

Tolkien also knew that in an adventure where a paroxysm of greed and a war of vengeance and racial grievance play central roles, Bilbo’s non-hegemonic decency and common-sense would be the very values that would be most desperately needed. 

It was this same decency that would rise up in Bilbo when he faced off with Gollum underneath the Misty Mountains.   

"Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo's heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped."³

A defining act of compassion that years later would end up deciding the fate of Middle-Earth. 

Whether it’s The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, decency and compassion, more than skill at arms or superpowers, were for Tolkien the true marks of a hero, and the ones that war-torn worlds like ours or Middle-Earth needed most. 

And it was Bilbo’s decency and compassion, more than the Ring or his Tookish blood, that he would end up passing down to Frodo as Destiny, a Destiny that Frodo would struggle mightily with, and ultimately integrate.

1. This is why, at the end of Raimi’s Spiderman, Peter Parker tells Mary Jane he can’t be with her. It’s not just because he’s worried about her safety—that’s the alibi.  The real reason can be found within the genre’s political unconscious: the hegemonic adventure, after all, is explicitly organized to reject domesticity. In that light Peter Parker “knows” that to embrace Gwen would be to end his superhero adventure, and Spidey be like fuck that!  Which is why the hegemonic Superhero will play at being a boyfriend but almost never becomes a real partner (unless it’s to set up the slaughter of said partner). Domesticity is to the adventure (and its hero) what daylight is to the vampire. 

2. Once the adventure kicks off and the hardships kick in Bilbo will repeatedly version of the following: “Bother burgling and everything to do with it! I wish I was at home in my nice hole by the fire, with the kettle just beginning to sing!" But that Want never seriously challenges his Tookishness.

3. In hegemonic adventures the hero’s heroic because he murders; in Tolkien’s non-hegemonic adventure the hero escapes the horrible darkness not by killing, but by showing compassion and then running.