I mean before the events of The Hobbit. I assume afterwards he lived off the treasure he got from that.
But he was fifty when he met Gandalf and the dwarves so what had he been doing for an income up to then? Was he a farmer? A land owner who lived off rents? Did he have inherited family money?
He worked at the Safeway, baggin’ groceries.
Your last question got it I think. He had family money. His dad wasn’t poor, but his mom, Belladonna Took, had the bucks. I remember a line from the book, where it says Bilbo’s father built his wife that wonderful hobbit hole, and it was mostly with her money.
Bilbo was a “gentleman”. He had family money, probably derived from renting property. While not seen in the book, he probably had some hobbits employed to maintain the property, collect the rents, etc.
I think it’s said somewhere that Hamfast Gamgee worked for Bilbo as a gardener before Sam and Frodo.
Samwise Gamgee - and probably other Gamgees before him - did at least some of the gardening around Bag End. Well, okay… It really only says that on the one instance, Sam was close enough to the window to ‘accidentally’ overhear the conversation between Gandalf and Frodo (not Bilbo), and that Sam’s excuse was that he was trimming the bushes or some such. It says somewhere else that Sam was integral to the young hobbits’ ‘spy ring’ keeping track of Frodo. But the whole state of affairs implies a bit about the social standing of both Sam and Frodo, and by extension, the elder Bilbo.
And Chronos is correct, I’m sure.
If the series is about anything it’s about the English class system. And how wonderful it was. In ways it wasn’t anymore. Tolkien wasn’t a classicist because it paid well. He was a believer.
I’d go further than that. Tolkein loved a past that had never really existed. I think he was, like many people, actually nostalgic for his childhood but got it confused with the setting of that childhood. Tolkein probably did have the happiest period of his life in Sarehole in 1898. But that’s because he was a six year old not because Sarehole was a particularly wonderful place in 1898.
I always got the sense, (without any direct textual evidence, admittedly,) that the Gaffer was a tenant of Bilbo’s - that, in fact, the Bagginses owned all of Bagshot Row. But mostly the inheritance.
Are you confusing classicist with classist, here? Because otherwise I don’t know what you mean. Tolkien’s subject was English, not Classics.
Regardless of what he may have believed about the class system, Tolkien spent most of his childhood in genteel poverty. His father was a bank employee, and had he lived the family would have been reasonably well off but not rich. When his father died, it became harder to get by. Because his mother converted to Catholicism, both his father’s and his mother’s family didn’t get along with his mother and didn’t want to help them financially. Then his mother died and a Catholic priest became his guardian for the rest of his childhood. Tolkien and his brother barely scraped by.
Baggins were landed gentry, old money. tenants did the agricultural work.
The class system in Britain is correlated with wealth but means large amounts more, which is how the concept of genteel poverty came about. When I said he didn’t get into his field because it paid well I thought that it was obvious that I was separating money from class.
His field was the past. All of his writings indicated long and loving study of earlier England - language, history, myths, writings - and I’m pretty sure you can find plenty of examples of him hating the new world around him. He deified a way of life and thinking that was visibly dying around him in wartime England. Why it is surprising that it came out in his fiction?
It was quite clearly stated that Bilbo was a Burglar.
He was appointed the party’s burglar by the dwarves. That wasn’t his prior profession.
Er, yeah, but that would be an expense for Bilbo, not a source of income.
Anyway, what BrotherCadfael said (and probably what Baker and MrDibble said, too).
This reference piece may have the answer.
Yes, of course. I was just mentioning it as support for the notion that he’d hire people to maintain the property. The money to hire said folks presumably came from inheritance and/or land ownership, as others have said.
Noooooooooo!
bilbooooooooooooooo!!!