'Lord of the Rings' Fans Reveal Theories About Bilbo Baggins

From Redditor u/ClickerMonkey:

Hobbits don't have a thirst for power like man does. That would make Bilbo less attached to the Ring.

From Redditor u/Decoder68W:

A Gentleman Farmer. He presumably owns the hill and surrounding lands, including acres of farmland, which he rents out to farmers and folk like the Gamgees. His own personal plot is Bag End and the garden, but he is a landlord to multiple other families besides the Gamgees. He wouldn't have much costs, since he inherited the properties and there aren't any property taxes. The people who actually farm on his land pay him rent, usually at the end of the season.

The Sackville-Bagginses wanted all of it, but the home of Bag End itself is the crown jewel. Implied to be the nicest home around.

From Redditor u/SeaFortress:

Gandalf originally suspected Bilbo's ring of being one of the Great Rings, but, after the last meeting of the White Council, the evidence and info Saruman gave them made Gandalf think there was no way that it could be one of the Great ones, and so he assumed it must be a lesser one. Hence his doubt sleeping uneasily.

Read the full theory here.

From Redditor u/felix_florentine:

The tone of the Lord of the Rings trilogy evidently more gritty than that of The Hobbit. The Hobbit is a lot more action-oriented, and the CGI used gives those movies a more fantastical styling. This kind of bothered me, I really liked that dark feeling the first set of movies had.

So I rationalized that the different tones must be because of the writer of the story. Bilbo is more whimsical and tends to exaggerate, so his movie follows that personality. On the other hand, Frodo was met with more injury and damage, so his part of the tale reflects that.

From Redditor u/Emb3rSil:

After watching the film with a couple friends, the inaccuracies and embellishments to the original story stuck out to me. My theory is that the movie The Hobbit is not in fact a movie version of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, but rather a movie version of Peter Jackson's Bilbo Baggins' There And Back Again, which would be, naturally, quite embellished by Bilbo- even if it was drawing from grains of truth.

Minor thing, but Gandalf's line in the beginning about 'good stories always being embellished' or something to that effect got me thinking.

From Redditor u/naner00:

In the early drafts of The Hobbit, Bilbo kills Smaug using the power of the Arken Stone.

I like to imagine that this was the way that the oral story was told by Tolkien to his child.

Later on he had to adapt it to fit into a book.