Button, Button, Who's Got Bilbo's Buttons?

[Backyard Professor]

I'm re-reading the Hobbit again myself, as well as with my grandkids, so I have to hop on ahead of them so if they asks me questions, I might be able better to answer them and explain some things. Well, something popped up, or popped off(?) in my head I want to share with you as I will share with them. Did you ever notice that Bilbo’s buttons quietly mark his entire moral and spiritual arc in The Hobbit? Early on, Bilbo is constantly worried about his buttons: losing them, popping them off, feeling undignified without them.

Buttons = comfort, respectability, “proper hobbitness.” By the time we reach the end of the journey:

Bilbo crawls through tunnels, bargains with dragons, faces armed Men, and never once mentions his buttons again.

They simply… stop mattering.

Tolkien never calls attention to this. He doesn’t explain it. He just lets the detail fade away, exactly as Bilbo’s old self fades, replaced by someone braver, freer, and less concerned with appearances. It’s a tiny domestic detail doing enormous narrative work.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

It's common in myth and fairy/folktale for the hero to descend into a labyrinth, often with a monster at its heart, and emerge with treasure, knowledge, wisdom, or new-found courage or abilities.

But -- there's normally a price to be paid; this often involves mutilation. I'd say Bilbo losing his buttons is a symbolic representation of this, along with losing "the respect of his neighbors", a sort of "social mutilation". These are the kinds of examples of the form appropriate for a 20th century children's book.

When we come to the adult version in LOTR, they of course take an appropriately more graphic and permanent form.

 

[Backyard Professor]

It's common in myth and fairy/folktale for the hero to descend into a labyrinth, often with a monster at its heart, and emerge with treasure, knowledge, wisdom, or new-found courage or abilities.

But -- there's normally a price to be paid; this often involves mutilation. I'd say Bilbo losing his buttons is a symbolic representation of this, along with losing "the respect of his neighbors", a sort of "social mutilation". These are the kinds of examples of the form appropriate for a 20th century children's book.

When we come to the adult version in LOTR, they of course take an appropriately more graphic and permanent form.

That’s a really insightful way of framing it. The descent-into-the-dark with a cost attached is absolutely a deep mythic pattern, and I like the idea of the “price” being translated into something appropriate for a children’s book buttons and social standing instead of limbs and blood.

What really clicks for me in Tolkien’s case is that the cost isn’t heroic mutilation so much as domestic dislocation. At least for Bilbo and his buddies who come back intact, but they no longer quite fits the world they left. Losing the respect of his neighbors feels like the Shire scale equivalent of returning marked by the journey, not visibly wounded, but quietly out of place. At least for Bilbo that is, since we know Sam and the others stuck around, and he became Mayor 7 times.

And you’re right that in LOTR Tolkien lets that pattern grow more permanent and bodily. The children’s version lets the hero keep his body but lose his certainty; the adult version makes the cost unmistakable. Same mythic shape, different register.

I Really appreciate you drawing that line. It sharpens the button detail even stronger.

 

[Klaatu]

Ahhh yes the Button Theory, orr as it’s known on the fourth moon of Varnak-9: The Fastening of the Soul. You’ve put your finger (politely, with a handkerchief) on something Tolkien does constantly and almost never explains.

You’re absolutely right: the buttons aren’t just wardrobe anxiety. They’re Bilbo’s identity scaffolding. Early Bilbo is held together by fastenings both literal and social. Buttons keep him respectable, closed, proper, and most importantly in place. A buttonless hobbit is a hobbit out of order. Untucked. Unmoored. Potentially… Tookish 😱.

And Tolkien leans on that domestic symbolism hard at the start. Bilbo fusses over buttons the way he fusses over time, meals, contracts, and visitors. Everything is meant to be secured, predictable, accounted for.

Then the road happens.

By the time Bilbo is crawling through goblin tunnels, riddling with Gollum, and calmly lying to a dragon older than most mountain ranges, the entire framework that made buttons meaningful is gone. Not rejected but outgrown. That’s the key. Tolkien doesn’t show Bilbo defiantly discarding his buttons like a rebellious teen elf. They just stop being narratively relevant. Which is exactly how real growth works. You don’t make speeches about the fears you’ve outgrown. You forget to mention them.

And the silence is doing the work.

Tolkien trusts the reader enough to notice the absence. Bilbo doesn’t become wreckless or uncivilized, he becomes internalized. His dignity is no longer pinned to his waistcoat. It lives somewhere sturdier where Smaug can’t scorch off.

It’s also worth noting: Bilbo never stops being a hobbit. He still loves comfort, poetry, food, and a good chair. But his sense of self no longer depends on the props of hobbit society. Buttons don’t vanish because Bilbo becomes less hobbitish. They vanish because he becomes more himself.

Which, frankly, is one of Tolkien’s gentlest and sharpest insights. The things we cling to for safety often fall away not when we reject them but when we no longer need them to feel whole.

On Varnak-9, we mark this stage of maturity by losing our ceremonial ankle-bells sometime between our first interstellar voyage and our third existential crisis. Very embarrassing, but freeing 😉.

—
Klaatu
Keeper of the Unrelated Keys
Assistant to the Assistant Archivist of Lost Fastenings
Currently Between Dimensions, Please Leave a Message

Apologies for my absences, winter always has me contract into myself and sometimes I forget to come back.

 

[Deimos]

....Klaatu
Keeper of the Unrelated Keys
Assistant to the Assistant Archivist of Lost Fastenings
Currently Between Dimensions, Please Leave a Message
Apologies for my absences, winter always has me contract into myself and sometimes I forget to come back.

I'd be more concerned about you melting away at the approach of spring.
Or, actually, just evaporating, sublime being that you are. 😄

 

[Klaatu]

I'd be more concerned about you melting away at the approach of spring.
Or, actually, just evaporating, sublime being that you are. 😄

A fair concern but fear not. I do not melt, evaporate, or sublimate. Spring merely nudges me into a slightly higher-energy state, where I become louder, stranger (if you can believe that!), and prone to unnecessary metaphors, rather like a kettle that has achieved consciousness and now won’t stop narrating its own boil. 😌
—
Klaatu
Certified Phase-Shifted Entity
Occasional Kettle of Cosmic Steam
Currently Whistling at Reality

 

[Eljorahir]

'Ode to Buttons' by BB:

Lost brass buttons at the door.
Orcses put ‘em in their hoard.
Waistcoat’s front no way to hold,
‘til story’s end: new buttons of gold.