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Originally Posted by Legolas
"The Necromancer" was originally just some 'black sorcerer' that Tolkien alluded to in The Hobbit as a device to make the world seem much more vast and dangerous than little ole Bilbo and his hobbit hole. He was simply namedropping. At time of publishing, Tolkien didn't know the Necromancer would be revealed as Sauron or what Sauron would be doing in Bilbo's world.
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Actually the Necromancer was always meant to be Sauron, even from the earliest drafts; quoting from
History of the Hobbit here:
Quote:
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"Don't be absurd" said the wizard. "That is a job quite beyond the powers of all the dwarves, if they could be all gathered together again from the four corners of the world. And anyway his castle stands no more and he is flown to another darker place - Beren and Tinúviel broke his power, but that is quite another story."
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That's a clear reference to the
Lay of Leithian and the contemporary
Silmarillion material, and leaves it in no doubt that even before LotR was begun Tolkien had this identity for him in mind.
It could of course still be a case of Tolkien lifting the character of Thű the Necromancer from his other writings and dropping him into the Hobbit, but the point remains: the Necromancer = Sauron was something that was intended even before the Hobbit was completed and the common conception that this was a later idea (one that only arose during the writing of LotR) is in fact quite false.