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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 8865930" data-attributes="member: 59082">One thing to consider is that The Hobbit wasn't written as "the first Middle-earth story." It was essentially a novelization of a bed-time story he told to his kids, which his friends at Oxford encouraged him to write up and publish. In his telling and writing of it, he wasn't placing it within the context of his passion project: the languages and myths of Middle-earth, and the stories that would become the Silmarillion. He was telling (and writing down) a bed-time story for his kids.When he wrote it, there was no One Ring, no Sauron - at least not the Sauron that we know and love from LotR, just a hazily described figure called "the Necromancer" who was bad and powerful, but not-yet-known-to-be the servant of Morgoth, and a fallen Maia. The magic ring that Bilbo finds is just a magic ring. Gollum is just a creature that loves that ring. And Gandalf is just a wizard, old and wise - but not Olorin, one of the Istari sent by Manwe to Middle-earth to assist the free peoples in their war against Sauron and his machinations.After The Hobbit's success, Tolkien's publisher asked him to write a sequel story: "We want more hobbits!" Tolkien essentially replied with, "OK, but only if you also publish my true magnum opus" (the work that would later be compiled as The Silmarillion). Commence a 15-year period in which Tolkien writes LotR, while trying to convince Unwin that The Silmarillion was publishable... after taking a look, they said no, again and again.As Tolkien wrote LotR, it shifted in tone from being Hobbit-esque to what it became. In fact, you can see this in the narrative of the novel itself: The opening sequence in the Shire starts as very Hobbit-esque, but gradually the story darkens and deepens. They leave the home/the farm/the cozy pastoral landscape. In the larger world, there are Ringwraiths and orcs and Sauron, and a sense of being in a much larger story that has been unfolding for millennia.That "deepening" part is key. In the process of writing, and placing Bilbo's world within the larger world of the Silmarillion, the lore of the Hobbit was re-contextualized. The Necromancer became Sauron (he wasn't Sauron in 1937), the magic ring of Gollum became the One Ring and, to illustrate the tonal difference, Trotter became Strider, who was really Aragorn.Tolkien himself said that he wrote The Hobbit for his kids but, early in the process of writing The LotR, it became clear that a larger, darker and more adult tale was coming through him. So if the hobbits are essentially stand-ins for his own children facing a large world, LotR puts those "children" in the context of much bigger world, with dark powers and forces far behind the boundaries of the childhood fantasyland that is the Shire. We see this in the early chapters, especially The Shadow of the Past, as the larger world is introduced to Frodo as more than just a fairy tale.</blockquote>

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