“The video you requested is not available.”
Well, thank Eru for that. It was Leonard Nimoy’s repulsively upbeat rendition of “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.”
Thanks! I expected it to be that, but I wasn’t sure.
He was a writer of popular, albeit highly implausible travelogues.
We’ve been Nim-rolled.
I thought he got rich from inventing a marital aid, but maybe I’m thinking of Daggins of Dag End.
An English Gentleman is not a Gentleman if he has to “do something for a living”. One of the necessary qualites is not fortune, but idleness. An impoverished Gentleman will earn his living by marrying into money.
Bilbo Baggins was an English Gentleman transplanted to the world of Hobbits.
There’s your sequel right there. Cha-ching!
Except that Bilbo wasn’t married. So either he wasn’t impoverished or he wasn’t a Gentleman.
Sorry, I should have been more explicit in my post. Bilbo Baggins wasn’t impoverished. He inherited his wealth. For a living, he collected the interest from his investments, and the rents from his tenants.
Of course, afterwards, he brought back a nice little bag of gold from his adventure, as you mentioned in the OP.
If he had been impoverished, his options would have been:
invest his money better
encourage his tenants to make the farms produce more and therefore get more money in rents (in a supervisory fashion of course, a Gentleman wouldn’t actually dirty his hands)
marry a wealthy woman
You mean he wouldn’t beat the serfs, he’d pay Sam to do that? 
I think beating the serfs is more Russian style than English.
English Gentleman landlord: turn out that peasant and send him and his family to the workhouse!
Russian Nobleman landlord: Flog that man and fling his body on the dungheap!
Middle Earth Gentleman: Kill those peasants and then raise them back up as zombies.
WTF???
I don’t recall any Tolkien zombies.
Cite!
That was a generalization, Sir.
My seconds shall call upon you in the morning.
And some of them, are Hobbits.
No, no, wait, dammit! Elves! Some of them are elves!
as always.
Different book - I believe you’re referring to Mr. Bugger of Bag Eye, in the Stye. Of course, he made his living in the dwarf protection rackets.
“A little Scrabble, a little pederasty.”
They didn’t call them zombies (the local term apparently was dwimerlaik). But they had things that had died but were still moving around. The barrow-wights for example. That’s close enough to a zombie for me. I think the Nazgul were also at least halfway to being zombies as well. And I recall that Saruman was making some kind of artificial life-forms in the movie. I’m sketchy on the details but I’m betting it involved dead bodies at some stage in the process.
He “made” the orcs in cocoons of goo in the films as I recall.
But we didn’t see what that “goo” was made out of, did we?
Like I said, I’m betting there were dead bodies added in somewhere. When it comes to black magic, dead bodies are like high fructose corn syrup.