Here’s a kind of thought experiment, prefaced with the understanding that The Hobbit is a fictional tale, unlike The Lord of the Rings, which is clearly a found-footage documentary. As I recall, bilbo returns home from the mountain with a small horse laden with two packs of treasure from Smaug’s horde. One thing I’ve always been curious about is what that translates into in terms of actual wealth. Let’s stipulate that the packs are only of gold, no jewels. I don’t know exactly what a small horse could comfortably carry from day to day on the trip back—maybe 125 pounds of gold? What happens when he arrives home? Medieval and feudal societies tend to be very cash poor. There aren’t really any banks so wealth is hoarded in land. To add to this, bilbo arrives home with a mitheril chain mail shirt and a sword that would both make him by themselves one of the wealthiest people around. Boromir will say to Frodo without irony that the chain mail is worth more than the value of many small kingdoms. So again, what realistically could bilbo do with that wealth? To use it would be to spawn massive inflation. Who wants to give a ballpark estimate on what bilbo’s wealth would be in 2022 dollars?