What Bilbo Baggins would have put on his Hobbit Day wishlist
September 22 is Hobbit Day, the shared birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. The American Tolkien Society proclaimed it back in 1978 as the centerpiece of Tolkien Week, and the date stuck even though the math doesn't quite hold up: convert the fictional Shire Calendar to our own and the real birthday lands earlier, somewhere between September 12 and 14. Anyway - not the point of this post.
There's a problem with making Bilbo a wishlist. Hobbits give away presents on their own birthday instead of receiving them, a custom that leaves every hobbit-hole stuffed with unwanted regifted junk the Shire calls mathoms. Bilbo is the one well-known exception: at his farewell party he kept every gift he'd ever been given and ordered new ones for his guests instead, which is exactly the kind of hoarding habit that fills a hobbit-hole with mathoms in the first place. So for this one day, we're putting him on the receiving end.
Every item has to connect to something he actually smoked, carried, or kept in his hobbit-hole. Here's the wishlist I think Bilbo would have put together:
Missouri Meerschaum Shire Cobbit Corn Cob PipeFrom the maker's actual Cobbit Collection$37.95
The churchwarden pipe isn't a stretch at all, since Missouri Meerschaum, the oldest corncob pipe maker in the country, already sells a Cobbit Collection of churchwarden-style pipes named the Shire, the Elf, the Dwarf, and the Wizard. Bilbo is introduced in the very first lines of The Hobbit sitting outside his round green door smoking, and the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings devotes an entire section, Concerning Pipe-weed, to the Shire's homegrown strains like Old Toby and Longbottom Leaf, a plant Tolkien insisted was just ordinary tobacco, nothing more exotic. Gandalf apparently learned to smoke the stuff from hobbits himself and was known for blowing elaborate smoke rings.
The walking stick covers the journey itself. Hobbits went barefoot and light on luggage, but nobody sets off from a comfortable hole toward a mountain full of a dragon empty-handed. This one is twisted hickory with a traditional handle, made in the USA - plain and sturdy, exactly the kind of thing a homebody-turned-adventurer would lean on the whole way there and back again.
The journal is for the second half of Bilbo's life, the quiet part after the adventure. He spent his last years in Rivendell finishing his memoir, which he titled There and Back Again, and handed the manuscript to Frodo when it was done. A hobbit who kept every gift he was ever given would need somewhere to keep writing them all down.
The mushroom kit is for the pantry rather than the plot, but food is practically a plot point for hobbits. The opening chapter of The Hobbit spends more time on Bilbo's larder than on Gandalf's business, and an unexpected party of thirteen dwarves manages to work its way through most of it before anyone mentions a dragon.
The handkerchief makes up for an old oversight. Bilbo ran out of Bag End so fast at the start of his adventure that he left without one, and Dwalin told him flatly he'd have to manage without pocket-handkerchiefs, and a good many other things. Tolkien brings it up again and again as the journey wears on, so a proper Irish linen one, hemstitched and ready for a monogram, is about fifty years overdue.
In conclusion
There's a whole pantry of other options I didn't have room for. Blankets, teacups, a second breakfast tray. If there's a fictional character (or a real one) you'd like to see get the wishlist treatment next, send them my way.
Ready to make your own wishlist?