Please excuse someone who has read little of the HoME series butting in.
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It is no good telling ordinary hobbits about dragons: they either disbelieve you or want to disbelieve you, & in either case stop listening.
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It does Tolkien credit as a writer that he was able ultimately to work this idea into his story without having the narrator say it. Instead, he has the likes of the Gaffer and Ted Sandyman in conversations in
The Ivy Bush and
The Green Dragon convey the view of "ordinary" Hobbits.
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One more minor observation that I find amusing - Otho Sackville-Baggins is a lawyer by profession in the fourth version. Does that reflect Tolkien's own attitude toward lawyers, I wonder?
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Glad to see that the oft-used device of lawyer-as-baddie has an honourable history (despite, to my mind, being wholly unfair
).