No offence to anyone but I think your missing the point here.
The hobbit was supposed to be the only work in middel earth when it was realsed.If I am not wrong.But after it popularity the book publisher wanted more from him.
So what I think is that he was just making somthing that had some famliar things in it.He was trying to take you from a transition from one world that we live in to a vary far one.Hence the party.Notice the narritve aspect in the book that wasn't found in any of The Lord of the Rings saga.
It was one of the many things he was trying to do to slowly bring the reader into this world he created.How do you explain a world no one has ever seen.How do you bring people there.He did this vary well,don't you think?
Well just look at the entire book.Its almost like a diffent mind set than the LotR.There is the seeds of ancient things.The fading shadows of them too.But still there not at all the same book.
He was trying to creat some thing for childre.The coffee is unimportent or where it came from.
Where did they get Tobbaco?
Where did they get coffee?
How was it that the shire didn't have winter even though they where so far north?
Why didn't Frodo or Bilbo ever get married,they where old enogh wheren't they.?
If Hobbits eat so much and where so portly why wheren't there ever any hart attacts there?
These are all forms of reality questioning the story.So they don't have anything to do with it.Since its not there place.
But in the 30s or 40s Egyptolagist found traces of cocain in some mummys.Could Tolkien have know about this.Maybe he thought that is wasn't too ridiculs to have Bilbo give his guest coffee.
Maybe what we think of as coffee today was not the coffee that the Dwarfs where talking about?
Maybe its a small detial Tolkien forgot to explain or explained it and we never found out about it.
There are tons of notes and written things no one has ever seen that he has written.It could go on and on like this.
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