I’ve been thinking more about heroes and protagonists, and I thought about Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.

A lot of people use “hero” to mean the person who is at the center of the book, but to me (perhaps the legacy of growing up reading comic books) a “hero” is a hero, someone who acts heroically.

For an example, look at the movie Prometheus. Dr. Shaw is clearly the protagonist — we’re following her throughout the movie, and we’re a encouraged to identify with her (and she’s driving the action), but she’s no hero. She’s a classic monomaniacal obsessive, wanting what she happens to want and believing what she chooses to believe, not caring about anybody else. She’s Captain Ahab, basically. The heroes of the movie, the ones who act heroically, are the captain and the two pilots who sacrifice themselves to save Earth.

Which doesn’t mean that the hero and the protagonist can’t be the same. Jean Valjean is clearly both a hero and a protagonist, for example. But they don’t automatically go together, and some books don’t have a hero at all (I’m not sure whether every book has a protagonist either, but that’s a separate discussion).

So, Bilbo and Frodo.

Bilbo is obviously a protagonist — one of the all-time great protagonists, in fact. I dislike the word “relatable,” but Bilbo is certainly relatable. A hobbit who likes his comfort and his predictable life, but also quietly yearns for some sort of adventure. Who can’t identify with that? (In fact, if you can’t identify with that you should probably read a different book.)

But heroic? I confess it’s been too long since I read the book (have to rectify that situation…), but at the beginning he sets out to help the dwarves reclaim their gold, in exchange for a share of the spoils. Not heroic, on two levels. One is that he’s getting paid, and the other is that getting a bunch of gold back from a dragon is not really on the same level as trying to save Earth (or Middle-Earth) or to  free France.

I think he does some more heroic things later — protecting his friends and the people of Lake-town (I confess I had to look up the name) — so maybe that’s a wash. I’ll get back to you when I’ve read it again..

Frodo, on the other hand, is a classic hero.  He sets out to destroy the Ring and save the world, despite having pretty much no qualities which would make him a logical candidate for this task. Not only does he take this on at the beginning, but he steps up at the council at Elrond’s and takes the responsibility. A hero, definitely.

I’m not sure about Frodo as a protagonist, though. Especially as compared to Bilbo, I always found him rather… two-dimensional. Not as “relatable.”

The protagonist of the book has always seemed to me to be Sam. What a wonderful, three-dimensional character. It’s Sam that I root for. I think Sam and Frodo function similarly to Watson and Holmes — the recognizably human character who brings us to the one who’s a bit beyond what we can imagine for ourselves.

I think that it really devalues the word “hero” if you use it just to mean the person who is at the center of a story. That can make it easy to forget about what a thrill it can be to watch real heroism.

I wrote about that (in terms of my own writing) at the end of this post: https://u-town.com/collins/?p=4510.