Arkenstone

What's that? Jewel they got?

The damn Arkenstone.

They got a damn Orkenstone.

Trent Horn wears a giant Orkenstone of his righteousness around his neck.

We are the righteous ones.

We have the Arkenstone.

Blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, enough of that nonsense.

Damn, this place is pretty big, I guess.

The Arkenstone is in these holes.

Find it.

You heard

I'm pretty sure he took it.

It got a little lost in the shuffle with the dragon, but I think you might have it too.

Although, you cannot keep the ring and the Arkenstone.

Remember, because he said Thorin was like, where's the Arkenstone? And he was like, oh, I don't know.

Sorry, Professor.

Well, first of all, what is it made up of, this mound of treasure? Well, a lot of gold, some of which was presumably coins, some fashioned into various items and some seemingly just chunks of unwrought ore, plus silver, a whole load of presumably well-crafted weapons and armour, gems and jewels aplenty, and most valuable of all, the Arkenstone, which was apparently worth one fourteenth of the whole horde, despite being small enough for Bilbo to easily hide upon his person.

This was the treasure of the kingdom of Erebor, plus whatever there was in the town of Dale, and maybe some trinkets Smaug had picked up from elsewhere.

And Erebor was rich.

And as our starting point, we have the text, and this picture Tolkien himself drew of Bilbo, Smaug, and the gold.

Michael Noah of Forbes magazine back in 2012 did a ruse own good work in taking that picture, estimating the size of the mound based on its relative length and breadth compared to Smaug and height compared to Bilbo, assuming 30% air holes in the hoard and a 50-50 gold-silver split, and reached a figure of $14.7 billion for the mound of gold and silver.

Adding in an additional 29.4 billion for a number of outer mounds of treasure, the countless piles of precious things that Tolkien mentioned, 3.9 billion for the diamonds embedded in Smaug's belly, a generous 8 billion for even more diamonds and jewels, £1.1 billion on the various arms and armour, basing that on an assessment of the value of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, another half billion for unseen things in other rooms, and taking account of the Arkenstone as a separate item worth one fourteenth of the total, so £4.4 billion, that came to a total of $62 billion.

I've put a link in the description if you're interested, and please accept this as my hat tip for that great work.

Nymphalos it was named, and the chieftain of the dwarves of Belegost prized it above a mountain of wealth.

Was it the Arkenstone? Probably not.

Therefore the Naugrim laboured long and gladly for Thingol, and devised for him mansions after the fashions of their people, delved deep into the earth.

Where the Esgalduin flowed down and parted Neldereth from Region, there rose in the midst of the forest a rocky hill, and the river ran at its feet.

Tolkien explicitly states that the moment of Bilbo's greatest courage was not directly facing down the dragon.

It wasn't stealing the Arkenstone.

It wasn't fighting in the Battle of Five Armies.

It wasn't facing down Thorin with all of Thorin's, uh, gold madness going on.

He is vastly outmatched because there's a flipping dragon at the end of the tunnel and he, he, he does it.

He goes in.

He finds the Arkenstone.

You know, there's some complications, but [laughs] he's still like any reasonable person who is not in a fantasy novel would understand completely if he was like, "This is way above my pay grade." Like, [smacks lips] the kind of people who fight dragons are the people they write stories about.