Tolkien fans: did Frodo have a job before he left the Shire?

[Recursion]

I mean, he lives in Bag End for 17 years between Bilbo's party and his departure from the Shire. How did he eat? Does Bag End grow enough on its own to both feed a hobbit and support a full-time gardener on the sales of the excess? (Also he apparently had some money with him at Bree, so there must have been some revenue stream, but he made it clear Bilbo didn't leave him any money at all.)

[sakabatou]

1. Nothing off hand

I know he worked with Bilbo after his parents died.

[Recursion]

2. For that matter what did Bilbo do?

He apparently gave away most of the money he got on his adventure, donated a mithril coat worth more than the entire Shire to a museum, and sat around writing books that he never tried to sell. Maybe they had enough land that they made income off the farming, but then I'd assume they would have more than one gardener.

[sakabatou]

3. I know Bilbo did some trading

[LiberalEsto]

4. I think he was a consultant

on foreign trade with Elves and Dwarves

[hobbit709]

5. He lived off Bilbo's gold.

[Recursion]

13. Bilbo left him nothing

(Othsr than a corslet worth more than the entire Shire.)

[Aristus]

6. Is this a joke? Bilbo was independently wealthy.

Even before the quest for Erebor.

The very first thing Tolkien says about Bilbo in The Hobbit is that he was "well to do". His father was rich, and his mother was even richer.

Bilbo was the hobbit equivalent of a wealthy English country squire.

He passed his wealth down to Frodo when he left The Shire.

[Kaleva]

7. He worked the red light district of Bag End.

[MosheFeingold]

8. The Baggins were landed gentry

Essentially he was a landlord to tenant farmers. Lord Granthom of the Shire.

[Xithras]

14. The Tooks, really

There's a line in the book that says Bilbo's dad built the hobbit hole for his mother, mostly using her money. She was a Took, and as the book makes clear in several passages, the Took's were wealthy. While the Baggins family apparently wasn't poor before the marriage, it seems pretty clear that any real wealth they enjoyed came via Beladonna Took.

[DemonGoddess]

9. What a few others are saying here

Frodo was landed gentry, as was his uncle, and of course The Old Took, and the Master of Buckland. All of whom are closely related to both Bilbo and Frodo.

[malthaussen]

10. He was a gentleman of leisure.

In fact, he had bags of money from Bilbo's trip to the Lonely Mountain, but the Bagginses were pretty well off even before that.

As for the inheritance from Bilbo, Frodo refers specifically to the treasure obtained from the trolls, which Bilbo gave away because he felt it was tainted money. He is not speaking of the whole Baggins patrimony.

Now, as to the Baggins patrimony, JRR doesn't go into economic detail much. Or at all. There was no superior authority from which the family could be receiving a pension, and JRR makes no mention of mills, mines, or agricultural land owned by the family. I don't think such things interested the good Professor. I'd think the Baggins family were probably rentiers, with sharecroppers and leased lands; Bagshot Row, for example, may have been their property, from which they received rents. It does not appear that the Bagginses had any ownership in mills, breweries, or the like.

-- Mal

[LanternWaste]

11. He was a naive 1%-er... a puppet for the neocon candidate Gandalf

He was a naive 1%-er... a puppet for the neocon candidate Gandalf and the third-way elves and other banksters backing Gandalf who wanted him to do their dirty work. He was also in the pockets of the Dwarven-Industrial complex who recently began fracking inside the Lonely Mountain again. Saruman, the ever-consummate outsider on the inside (or insider on the outside), being wholly misunderstood by the conventional wisdom of Middle Earth tried vainly to influence events, but typical elven fraud and consistent dwarven gold were simply too much for him to fight successfully.

Hey... it's election season and we all write our own narratives.

[First Speaker]

15. Hear, hear...and Sauron was a revolutionary opposed to the oppressive class system...

...the miserable elf-wizard ruling class, and their lackeys who wrote all the histories...a few enlightened folk--like Saruman, Wormtongue, Ted Sandyman--wanted to shake up things, make Middle-Earth an enlightened Neoliberal state...needless to say, they were crushed by the Power Structure in the end.

[CBGLuthier]

12. Well, he did go to Vegas to work with Moe Green. No wait, that was Fredo.

[Enrique]

16. he lived off royalties from "Africa"

no, wait, that was Toto.