New Style...Why?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by davem

I think the most interesting thing to consider in this context is the way that as LotR took on its own more adult style Tolkien went back & changed The Hobbit - I'm talking about the revision of Riddles in the Dark, which is much darker & more filled with 'pathos' in the later version. So we have LotR starting out a children's story but growing into an 'adult' story which feeds back into The Hobbit & leads that to become more 'adult'.

Well, it seems to me that we have more than enough evidence of how Tolkien was constantly rewriting and revising to create internal consistency in both the legendarium itself (as mythology) and in the written texts themselves. Perhaps as a philologist dedicated to the concept of consistent historical development, he could not bear the idea of evolutionary jumps, leaps, and gaps in the 'fossil' records, so to speak, so that he worked to provide plausible consistency. This is certainly how he handled his elven names, isn't it?

He simply treated story with a similar 'backward revision', so that even the initial "children's story" idea was reworked to fit in better with where that story lead. Thus, we have this flow from one text to the other, not seamless by any means, but made more coherent by the author's professional habits.