Oxonmoot 2024

"According to J. R. R. Tolkien’s 'The Hobbit', Bilbo Baggins and thirteen dwarves left Bywater on ‘just before May’; and he returned home on 22nd June of the following year, finding it the scene of an auction. The reason for all this was that he was ‘“Presumed Dead”’. Bilbo’s return had legal and social consequences, being ‘a great deal more than a nine days’ wonder. The legal bother, indeed, lasted for years’.

The talk explores the possibility that Tolkien’s portrayal of Bilbo’s return and its consequences might have been influenced by the Tichborne Affair (1865-98), an event extremely well-known and influential in its time. It began in 1865 when Thomas Castro, a butcher from Wagga Wagga, in the self-governing UK colony of New South Wales, Australia, claimed to be Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, Baronet, the heir to a title and estate of a long-established, landed English family in Hampshire, who had gone missing, presumed dead, in 1854."