[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

That'll teach me to check my facts before I post. 1925 was still well after the First War, though; and Tolkien himself has described how he began The Hobbit by writing the first sentence without being entirely sure what it was that he was writing about. I agree that a lot of the childlike qualities in this earlier work are probably intended to engage with his intended audience, but I still don't see what this has to do with the world wars. If anything, we should look to the Battle of Five Armies to see how war coloured his writing. He was himself invalided home after a reasonably short stay at the front, and it might have been very easy to imagine that he had been knocked out for the whole battle and simply woken up for the aftermath. I think it particularly significant that the battle is so very nearly fought between those who are not rightly enemies and for money. Only thanks to the quick thinking of Bilbo does it gain a more heroic quality and result in peace.

I still think that the smallness of hobbits is irrelevant. There has been a strong element of the diminutive in more or less recent fairy-stories; and although Tolkien moved away from this he was still influenced by it in his earlier writing. It could be that the small size of hobbits is the last gasp of his support for this device, already rejected in the Silmarillion material.

As for the long childhoods of Elves and Númenoreans, it seems to me only logical that longer-lived races would have longer childhoods. If one has centuries to live, what are a few more years in growing up? Also one's elders, being possibly hundreds rather than just tens of years older, might well think of fifty as a callow age. Legolas refers to his companions in the Fellowship as 'children', because he was already old when even the eldest of them was born. It all comes down to perspective in the end.