[davem]

Originally Posted by LMP

- it strikes me that The Hobbit has more of a Brothers Grimm feel than LotR, especially with talking purses, and trolls that turn to stone at daybreak; not to mention the feel of Mirkwood and all that. In other words, The Hobbit strikes me as strongly folkloric, though canted for children (which Tolkien later regretted, according to some letter or other)

There's some interesting stuff re the origin of TH in this 1967 interview with Tolkien:

http://www.nytimes.com/1967/01/15/bo...interview.html

Try these quotes from Tolkien himself, which may shatter some long held beliefs:

"The Hobbit" wasn't written for children, and it certainly wasn't done just for the amusement of Tolkien's three sons and one daughter, as is generally reported. "That's all sob stuff. No, of course, I didn't. If you're a youngish man and you don't want to be made fun of, you say you're writing for children. At any rate, children are your immediate audience and you write or tell them stories, for which they are mildly grateful: long rambling stories at bedtime.

"'The Hobbit' was written in what I should now regard as bad style, as if one were talking to children. There's nothing my children loathed more. They taught me a lesson. Anything that in any way marked out 'The Hobbit' as for children instead of just for people, they disliked-instinctively. I did too, now that I think about it. All this 'I won't tell you any more, you think about it' stuff. Oh no, they loathe it; it's awful.

...Tolkien says his mother gave him his love of philology and romance; and his first stories were gathering in his mind when he was an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford. When war came, however, he didn't write in the trenches as some chroniclers insist. "That's all spoof. You might scribble something on the back of an envelope and shove it in your back pocket, but that's all. You couldn't write. This [his study] would be an enormous dugout. You'd be crouching down among the flies and filth."