The source of Eli's wealth

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NigelNinja
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The source of Eli's wealth

Post by NigelNinja » Wed Nov 18, 2020 10:12 am

Until now I, like Oskar, assumed that her money and valuable trinkets simply came from rolling the folks she ate, but I thought that perhaps the money she has was actually given to her.

What if, throughout the decades, rich people who had the proper contacts to reach her or her caretaker paid her lavish sums of money and extravagant gifts to make an appearance at their home? It seems plausible that there would be rich eccentrics that would hemorrhage cash to "hang out with a vampire" for a couple hours.
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dongregg
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Re: The source of Eli's wealth

Post by dongregg » Wed Nov 18, 2020 5:08 pm

200 plus years gives a lot of time for things to happen. lombano wrote a fan fiction in which Eli lived with a goldsmith. Her job was to wake him up from his unbearable nightmares. I would also be comfortable with Eli as a part-time highwayman who had a magpie's propensity for shiny objects. That would not be unusual for a mental and emotional 12-year old.

Any way, we need more stories from that very long period.
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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metoo
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Re: The source of Eli's wealth

Post by metoo » Wed Nov 18, 2020 7:14 pm

NigelNinja wrote:
Wed Nov 18, 2020 10:12 am
Until now I, like Oskar, assumed that her money and valuable trinkets simply came from rolling the folks she ate, but I thought that perhaps the money she has was actually given to her.

What if, throughout the decades, rich people who had the proper contacts to reach her or her caretaker paid her lavish sums of money and extravagant gifts to make an appearance at their home? It seems plausible that there would be rich eccentrics that would hemorrhage cash to "hang out with a vampire" for a couple hours.
I have contemplated this before, as you might imagine...

Albeit this is a film thread, there is some additional info in the novel that sheds some light on this issue.
metoo wrote:
Sat Mar 26, 2011 10:48 am
In the novel, Håkan gives the prostitute boy 10,000, Eli pays Tommy 5,000 and Oskar later gives him 12,000 Swedish crowns. When Eli left near the end, he had brought "a few one-thousand notes". Additionally, they would have had to pay the house mover a few thousand crowns, and they would have had to pay the rent for the apartment. Still, there is a box-full of money left.

Thus, Eli had at least 30,000 Swedish crowns when he and Håkan moved in, and even more before the move. This was a lot of money at the time, the average monthly salary would be around 8,000, Oskar's mother probably had less. Eli just could not have got that money by taking it from his victims, people didn't carry enough money around. Even if in 1981 credit cards were uncommon, so they would have had carried more cash around than people do nowadays (in relative value, that is).
Eli couldn't have got his money from his victims, it was far too much by a wide margin, so he must have told Oskar the truth. He was given the money.

By whom? Your guess is as good as mine.

However, I think it was a single gift. The box contained 100 and 1000 kronor bills, but all of them seemed recent. The 1000 kronor bills changed in 1976. If any of the old ones had been in the box, Oskar would have noticed. The old bills were huge, 210x121 millimeter, 8.3 by 4.7 inches. They were still valid until 1987, but they were no longer in circulation by the end of the seventies.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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