thumb|upright=1.65|Bag End, Hobbiton, the comfortable underground dwelling of [[Bilbo Baggins|Bilbo and later Frodo Baggins, constructed for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film series.]]
thumb|[[Tolkien's artwork|Tolkien's painting The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water, watercolour, 1938 showing its ideal position near the top of the Hill at Hobbiton, with less-favoured Hobbit-holes lower down.
The protagonists of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, lived at Bag End, a luxurious smial or Hobbit-burrow, dug into The Hill on the north side of the town of Hobbiton in the Shire's Westfarthing. Tolkien made drawings of Bag End and Hobbiton. His watercolour The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the Water shows the exterior and the surrounding countryside.
Another of Tolkien's drawings, The Hall at Bag-End, Residence of B. Baggins Esquire, depicts the interior, complete with 20th century fittings such as a wall clock and barometer. Another clock is mentioned in chapter 2 of The Hobbit. The barometer is mentioned in Tolkien's drafts of The Hobbit.
Peter Jackson
thumb|upright=1.25|Jackson's version of the Hill at Hobbiton on the Water. The image may be compared with Tolkien's watercolour painting The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water (above).
Peter Jackson had an elaborate Hobbiton film set built on the Alexander sheep farm at Matamata in New Zealand for his The Lord of the Rings film series. It included a water-mill, the Green Dragon Inn, and several Hobbit-holes as well as Bag End in a small hill, with garden. Jackson said of the set, "It felt as if you could open the circular green door of Bag End and find Bilbo Baggins inside."
Chad Chisholm and colleagues, reviewing Jackson's 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey for Mallorn, write that Jackson humorously has the "rough and ready" Dwarves "bursting into Bilbo's neat little home and cleaning out his pantry", providing "a sort of constant comic relief to the dangers in the dark".
Analysis
Real-world origins
thumb|upright=1.25|Turf-covered houses at [[Keldur, Iceland]]
"Bag End" was the real name of the Tudor home, dated to 1413, of Tolkien's aunt Jane Neave in the village of Dormston, Worcestershire.
The scholar of literature and film Steven Woodward<!--Bishop's University--> and the architectural historian Kostis Kourelis suggest that Tolkien may have based his Hobbit-holes on Iceland's turf houses, such as those at Keldur.
Character from architecture
Tolkien stated "I am in fact a Hobbit", and scholars agree that he was in many ways like his Hobbits, enjoying good food, gardening, smoking a pipe, and living in a familiar and comfortable home. Honegger argues that places have a critical role in The Lord of the Rings, and the function of the safe Hobbit-hole is to establish the character of the "hol-bytlan (hole-dwellers), in the first place stationary beings who have a deep-rooted aversion against travelling outside the Shire." For them, Honegger writes, "Travelling abroad belongs to the same class as adventures", quoting Bilbo's remark in The Hobbit: "Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!"
thumb|upright=1.25|left|A cosy interior: the Swedish artist [[Carl Larsson portrayed his Arts and Crafts-inspired home in 1901 in this painting. Johanna Brooke suggests that Bag End could have been in such a style.
Brooke notes Tolkien's statement that "only the richest and poorest" stating that with its mention of rabbit warrens, this "aptly suits Bag End". Honegger writes<!--p. 59--> that Fonstad's work has contributed substantially to giving Middle-earth an "independent existence". The journeys of Bilbo and Frodo have been interpreted as just such confined roads, as they both start and end in Bag End. According to Don D. Elgin, Tolkien's A Walking Song, which appears repeatedly in differing forms in The Lord of the Rings as the quest progresses, is "a song about the roads that go ever on until they return to at last to the familiar things they have always known." As such, it forms one end of the main story arcs in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and since the Hobbits return there, it also forms an end point in the story circle in each case.
Shippey argues that the Bagginses and the Sackville-Bagginses are "connected opposites", since the opposite of a bourgeois is a burglar, a person who breaks into bourgeois houses, and in The Hobbit Bilbo is asked to become a burglar, to break into the lair of Smaug the dragon. is a philological joke, as Sac[k]-ville can be translated as the French form of the humble "Bag Town", another attempt to reinforce the family's bourgeois status by "Frenchify[ing]" their surname.
Honegger points out a quite different contrast, between Bag End as depicted in Tolkien's drawing The Hall at Bag End, "the homely yet narrowly limited space of a hobbit-hole with the similarly neat and defined landscape of the Shire in the background," with his The Forest of Lothlórien in Spring, which shows "no particular place, but an airy glade in a forest filled with sunlight, evoking a feeling of sheltered openness." David LaFontaine writes in The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide that Bilbo is a "confirmed bachelor" who is never "linked romantically" with any woman, and who lives alone in the "luxurious, lovely environment", Bag End, "illustrating the hobbit's artistic sensibility".
Parody
The 1969 parody novel Bored of the Rings, written by the National Lampoon founders Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney, mocks Frodo's homecoming to Bag End from his dangerous quest with the words "he walked directly to his cozy fire and slumped in the chair. He began to muse upon the years of delicious boredom that lay ahead. Perhaps he would take up Scrabble".
See also
- Earthship