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.

[VanimaEdhel]

Originally Posted by Mumak o' Harad

I think that The Lord of the Rings was written under the Hobbits' perspective, and maybe it is, in fact, narrated by the Hobbits; therefore, I think that the books "grow up" with the Hobbits over the course of the story, i.e. from the innocence of the Shire (childish) to the dreads of The War of the Rings/Mount Doom (adult), and the literary style accompanies the Hobbits' development throughout the story.

And, in conjunction with this comment from before, if you think about even the goals of the two "quests", The Lord of the Rings has a more ominous theme in general. There was a lot less at stake for Middle Earth as a whole in The Hobbit - it was a much more personal mission the Dwarves and Bilbo were on. Yes, Smaug also caused devastation to the surrounding people, but there were not entire races of beings at stake. The Dwarves were not going on a journey to save all of their people, but it was more about treasure. Though Dwarves valued their treasure as much as their solitude, they were seeking a tangible luxury, granted one that was rightfully theirs.

Meanwhile, in The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship has the fate of all of Middle Earth resting in their hands. They were trying to protect a far more precious thing: freedom. The tale as a whole encompassed far more land, time, races, and points of view than The Hobbit. In The Hobbit, we're only given the views of Bilbo and the Dwarves, while we achieve at least a general understanding of the motives behind basically every race in The Lord of the Rings. The slightly more simple view in The Hobbit was, as we said, obviously intentional, as it was intended to be more suitable for a younger crowd than The Lord of the Rings. This is not to say that adults cannot enjoy The Hobbit and younger children The Lord of the Rings, but, to reiterate, the main crowd was different. I think that - having read The Lord of the Rings first when I was eight and nine, then having reread it a few times subsequently, there are certainly dark themes that I - and many I know who read them at about the same age - did not quite pick up on until we were older. Meanwhile, as a seventeen-year old, I am by no means "an adult", but I still enjoy The Hobbit as much as I did when I was young.