The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 223-26
After the feast concludes Frodo and the whole company make their way, following Elrond and Arwen, to the Hall of Fire, a place which, except on high days “usually stands empty and quiet” and where people come “who wish for peace, and thought”; and it is there that Elrond brings Frodo and Bilbo together, much to their mutual delight.
Frodo discovers that Bilbo had sat with Sam at his bedside through much of the days in which he had lain, close to death, as the sliver of the Morgul blade, wielded by the Witch-king of Angmar, worked its way slowly towards his heart. And Frodo also learns that Bilbo has not been at the feast. Indeed that Bilbo is now old and is content to be alone with his own thoughts in this quiet place, composing a poem that he will perform before the assembled company before all retire to their rooms and dwelling places.
Little has the capacity to stir Bilbo now; except for one thing.
“Have you got it here?” he asked in a whisper. “I can’t help feeling curious, you know, after all I’ve heard. I should very much like just to peep at it again.”
Bilbo, of course, is speaking of the Ring, and there follows a brief period which, for Frodo, and then for Bilbo as well, is one of the most distressing that he has known. Frodo finds himself looking at “a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands”. The parallel with Gollum is all too clear for those who know the story. This is what the Ring does to those who have possessed it. This is what they are reduced to. Hungry and groping. They become spiritually ravenous and never satisfied. And except in degrees of power there is no distinction between Sauron, Gollum and, for a moment at least, Bilbo too. Each is reduced to the desire to consume all and everyone, “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”
In Bilbo’s case the triumph of his desire for the Ring is but momentary. Perhaps his distance from the Ring over many years and perhaps even the fact that he gave it up freely, albeit with a little help from Gandalf, enables Bilbo to master his craving; but for that moment the absolutely evil potential of the Ring mars the great love that Bilbo and Frodo have for one another and it even reduces the serene gathering of the company in the Hall of Fire in Rivendell, a place where at one moment Frodo wondered if people were ever ill, to an unhappy silence.
That moment passes as Frodo puts the Ring away but the distress that Bilbo feels as he realises, maybe for the very first time, the power that the Ring has over him and the burden that his beloved Frodo has to bear is heartbreaking.
“Don’t adventures ever come to an end?”
And with this thought the whole entirety of Tolkien’s legendarium is brought together. And so too is the entirety of human history of the mythical world of which each one of us is a part. By myth we speak here of the age long need to find meaning in the age long sequence of events that have constituted the history of the cosmos ever since the Big Bang (as far as we know) and, in particular, the need to find meaning in the story of ourselves ever since we first emerged into consciousness in Africa long ago. Or not so long in comparison with the whole. This is the story told in the Music of the Ainur, and we will return to this next week. The story told in Tolkien’s creation myth, a story that the wise know is not about the manufacture of a clock that is then more or less left to its own devices, but one to which the divine is intimately connected at all times and in all places. Bilbo and Frodo are both a part of the one great adventure as are we. Does this adventure ever end? The Music of the Ainur reaches a sublime conclusion, but there is a beyond. There is always a beyond. But what that is is known only to the One.
Wisdom from The Lord of the Rings 
That’s a brilliant comparison of what Bilbo looks like for a moment and what has become of Gollum. It looks like a glimpse of what Bilbo himself could have turned into, had he not given up the Ring and/or had he used it more often. Amazing!
Yes, a hungry, groping creature. Ungoliant came to mind here, and Shelob her offspring. Tolkien’s most terrifying examples of this kind of hunger. Even Morgoth fears this in Ungoliant although he uses her.
So true. This devouring obsession is truly scary in Tolkien’s depiction.
What I have to say might seem a horrible thought but it is one that has often come to me in reflecting on this passage. I have been a care worker and I have got to know many people toward the end of their lives, Bilbo, in the spell of the Ring, seems to Frodo like
“a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands”
If you didn’t know an elderly person, or care anything for them, might you not see them in exactly this way?
Patrick, I have been pondering your comment, off and on, for a few days now and it takes me back to the title that I gave to the photograph of Ian Holm’s, Bilbo Baggins. I found the moment in Peter Jackson’s film when Bilbo is momentarily transformed into a detestable creature utterly cartoonish and therefore unbelievable. But then my choice of a photograph of the ageing hobbit leaves me open to the criticism that what I am portraying is any elderly person, especially as they near the end of their life.
Tolkien’s personal tragedy was of the untimely death of the young, both in the trenches of the Western Front and of his own parents. I have never been a carer in any formal way but in watching the last days of my parents and being at many bedsides as a parish priest is to see the life departing from the face. These experiences have shown me that there is as wide a variety of faces at the end of life as there is of people. I wonder what mine will be like if I live that long.
I would be interested to know your own thoughts on this from your experience. What I think that I would say is that Tolkien’s use of the words, hungry and groping (and Tolkien is always deliberate in his use of language) is primarily moral and spiritual. Perhaps wrinkled is a little more unfortunate as an adjective but he is attempting to portray an inner state through the outer appearance. Maybe it is impossible although it is a theme that runs through his work. The physical decline of Sauron being a prime example.
I don’t really want to add much. However, I have, as I say, got to know many elderly people in the course of domiciliary care (and before that in my mother’s care home), and in a way experienced this transition in reverse, from the strange to the familiar and even loved. It is another dimension of Frodo’s experience, a subtle way of portraying the alienating effect of the Ring, as much on him as on Bilbo.
“Hungry and groping”, I agree, might suggest moral or spiritual qualities (negative ones obviously). But they are also subjective; that is, judgements made by the onlooker, having a strong emotional content; also, as you say, with “wrinkled” portray a very physical impression.
Actually I don’t think the first readers would even have thought of the passage as being primarily about Bilbo’s age. Maybe everyone’s reactions (mine included) have been skewed by the way Jackson chose to handle the scene, and Bilbo generally. Anyway I’m sorry if I upset anyone.
I cannot speak for anyone else but I certainly don’t feel upset. I appreciated the way that you got me to think about this as I hope I showed in my last response. Please do keep on raising things like this.