Bilbo Baggins is fifty years old when he begins his adventure in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
The story opens on Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday, when he is 111, and then looks back 60 years to the unexpected visit from Gandalf and the dwarves. That calculation places the beginning of the quest at age 50. Bilbo is presented as a respectable, settled hobbit whose comfortable routine is disrupted by the arrival of Thorin Oakenshield’s company.
Bilbo’s age is sometimes confused with his age at the start of The Lord of the Rings, when he is 111. The difference matters because The Hobbit is set decades before Frodo’s journey. Tolkien also uses Bilbo’s birthday to establish the hobbit’s long life span and the unusual effect of the One Ring on his aging.