To get any farther with my post here, you’ll have to go on reading it even when I tell you that I’m about to make a point by referring to the movie Lord of the Rings and not to the books. This has been sticking with me.
Gandalf urges Bilbo: “All your long years, we’ve been friends.” He needs Bilbo to give up a ring that has become too special to Bilbo. It’s not good for him. “Trust me, as you once did,” Gandalf tells him.
And so Bilbo making a great effort holds out his hand and turns it over and he drops the fate of the world on his hobbit hole floor.
Gandalf again, in Moria, with others some of whom knew Bilbo—some maybe not—remarks casually about Bilbo’s gift of mithril from Thorin. “I never told him, but its worth was greater than the value of the Shire.” Gandalf didn’t tell Bilbo that—Bilbo, his friend. He tells others, some of whom Gandalf perhaps hardly knew. He tells these others that he didn’t tell Bilbo. It doesn’t bother him to do so. He throws it out as an interesting factoid for the road.
Bilbo meanwhile, at Rivendell, is at peace. He is not aware of any of this. Perhaps occasionally a stifled pang of yearning comes over him and he wishes he could briefly hold that old ring of his once again.
But he will never know that he had the fate of the world in an envelope over there on the mantelpiece, or rather in his pocket.
He’ll never know the value of the gift Thorin gave him. It was strong, and pretty. Quite a nice gift. Worth more than his house and the houses of everyone he knew—but he didn’t know.
There are different kinds of friends.
There may be an amount of time which it was reasonable for me to spend thinking about this, and I may have spent more than that amount.
Maybe some of my problem is that I’ve been looking to be a Jonathan to someone’s David when in fact to someone’s Gandalf I was a Bilbo.
Originally written May 2025
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