Auction

The Auction is the unexpected and deeply ironic homecoming that awaits Bilbo Baggins at the end of his adventure. When he and Gandalf arrive at Bag-End on June the Twenty-second, they find a large notice in black and red hung on the gate, announcing that Messrs Grubb, Grubb, and Burrowes are selling by auction the effects of the late Bilbo Baggins Esquire, of Bag-End, Underhill, Hobbiton. The sale is to commence at ten o'clock sharp, and by the time Bilbo appears, nearly lunchtime, most of his possessions have already been sold for various prices from next to nothing to old songs. His cousins the Sackville-Bagginses are in fact busy measuring his rooms to see if their own furniture will fit. The return of Mr. Bilbo Baggins creates quite a disturbance, both under the Hill and over the Hill, and across the Water; it is a great deal more than a nine days' wonder. The legal bother lasts for years, and it is quite a long time before Mr. Baggins is in fact admitted to be alive again. The people who got specially good bargains at the Sale take a deal of convincing, and in the end to save time Bilbo has to buy back quite a lot of his own furniture. Many of his silver spoons mysteriously disappear and are never accounted for; personally he suspects the Sackville-Bagginses. On their side they never admit that the returned Baggins is genuine, and they are not on friendly terms with Bilbo ever after, for they really had wanted to live in his nice hobbit-hole so very much.

The Auction as a Comic Reversal of the Hero's Return

The Auction functions as a comic and deflating inversion of the triumphant return that a traditional heroic quest would promise. Instead of a hero welcomed home with honor, Bilbo finds his identity legally erased and his household goods scattered. The very people who had dismissed him as a respectable nonentity are now the ones who have profited from his presumed death. The legal bother that lasts for years underscores the absurdity of the situation: the community that had no use for adventures is now deeply invested in the fiction of Bilbo's death, because it has given them bargains. Bilbo's need to buy back his own furniture, and the mysterious disappearance of his silver spoons (which he personally suspects the Sackville-Bagginses of taking), turn the homecoming into a farcical negotiation with his own past. The Sackville-Bagginses, who never admit that the returned Baggins is genuine, become the permanent antagonists of his domestic life, their enmity a direct consequence of the Auction.

Loss of Respectability and the Transformation of Identity

The Auction is the mechanism through which Bilbo loses his reputation, a loss that is both a punishment and a liberation. He is no longer quite respectable; he is in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighbourhood to be 'queer'—except by his nephews and nieces on the Took side, but even they are not encouraged in their friendship by their elders. This loss of respectability is the social price of his adventure, the final proof that he has become something other than a conventional Baggins. Yet the narrative notes, with a touch of wry approval, that Bilbo does not mind. He is quite content; the sound of the kettle on his hearth is ever after more musical than it had been even in the quiet days before the Unexpected Party. His sword he hangs over the mantelpiece, his coat of mail is arranged on a stand in the hall (until he lends it to a Museum), and his gold and silver is largely spent in presents, both useful and extravagant—which to a certain extent accounts for the affection of his nephews and his nieces. His magic ring he keeps a great secret, for he chiefly uses it when unpleasant callers come. He takes to writing poetry and visiting the elves; and though many shake their heads and touch their foreheads and say "Poor old Baggins!" and though few believe any of his tales, he remains very happy to the end of his days, and those are extraordinarily long. The Auction, then, does not destroy Bilbo; it completes his transformation from a respectable hobbit into an elf-friend, a storyteller, and a permanent eccentric, a figure who has crossed the threshold of the Wild and returned to a home that can no longer contain him.