Editing Bag End (section)

=== The most desirable residence ===
[[File:Knole, Sevenoaks in Kent - March 2009.jpg|thumb|upright=1.45|Lobelia Sackville-Baggins's desire to acquire ‘Bag End’, Bilbo's home, has been compared to [[Vita Sackville-West]]'s frustrated desire to inherit her family home, [[Knole House]] (pictured).<ref name="Dennison 2015"/>]]

The journalist Matthew Dennison compares [[Lobelia Sackville-Baggins]]'s desire to move into Bag End to the similarly-named aristocrat [[Vita Sackville-West]]'s passionate attachment to her family home, [[Knole House]], which she was unable to inherit. Sackville-West became famous as a novelist and poet, and by the time ''The Lord of the Rings'' was published, as ''[[The Observer]]''{{'}}s gardening columnist. Dennison notes that ''[[Lobelia]]'' is a garden flower, and that readers in the 1950s would immediately have linked the character to the famous gardener.<ref name="Dennison 2015">{{cite web |last=Dennison |first=Matthew |date=18 August 2015 |title=Behind The Mask: Vita Sackville-West |publisher=St. Martin's Press |url=https://www.thehistoryreader.com/modern-history/vita-sackville-west/ |url-status=live |access-date=20 April 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150920103722/https://www.thehistoryreader.com/modern-history/vita-sackville-west/ |archive-date=20 September 2015}}</ref> 

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.<ref name="Shippey 2001 pp5-11"/> He observes that the name Sackville-Baggins, for the [[snobbish]] branch of the Baggins family,<ref name="Shippey 1982 p66">{{Cite book |last=Shippey |first=Tom |author-link=Tom Shippey |title=[[The Road to Middle Earth]] |publisher=Allen & Unwin |year=1982 |isbn=978-0-547-52441-2 |page=66}}</ref> 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.<ref name="Shippey 2001 pp5-11"/>

{| class="wikitable" style="margin: 1em auto;"
|+ [[Tom Shippey]]'s analysis of the relationships<br/>between Baggins and Sackville-Baggins<ref name="Shippey 1982 p66"/><ref name="Shippey 2001 pp5-11"/>
|-
! Feature !! [[Bilbo Baggins]] !! Lobelia Sackville-Baggins
|-
| Manner, attitude || Plain || [[Snob]]bish
|-
| Role in story || [[Burglar]] || [[Bourgeois]]
|-
| Language || English (dialect){{efn|Shippey notes that "Baggins" is close to the spoken words ''bæggin'', ''bægginz'' in the dialect of [[Huddersfield|Huddersfield, Yorkshire]].<ref>Shippey cites {{cite book |last=Haigh |first=W. E. |title=Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District |date=1928 |publisher=Oxford University Press}}, noting that Tolkien had written the Prologue.</ref><ref name="Shippey 1982 p66"/>}} || Frenchified 
|-
| No through road || Bag End || ''[[cul-de-sac]]'' 
|-
| Bag End || Actual owner, resident || Would-be owner, resident
|}