When Gandalf is finally telling Frodo about the true history of the One Ring, Tolkien mentions that “ Gandalf was thinking of a spring, nearly eighty years before, when Bilbo had run out of Bag End without a handkerchief.” But what you might miss is that, in the paragraph preceding this sentence, Tolkien mentions that it’s been 17 years since Bilbo’s birthday party.
There’s actually a huge time gap in Fellowship of the Ring that they really didn’t show or explain in the movies, so it’s left a lot of fans confused about just how much time passed between Bilbo’s adventure and Frodo’s. How Many Years Between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings?
