A 'darker' Hobbit

[davem]

This is another interesting bit I found from Rateliff:

"It can hardly be coincidence that as late as 1940 (sic), when writing the
opening chapter of The Hobbit, Tolkien felt free to include not only
references to Beren,... [more of his mythology]... but also to the Gobi
Desert, Hindu Kush, and "the Wild were-Worms of the Chinese" as part of
Bilbo's world.

Clearly here we are dealing with the first draft of the story, & these primary world references were removed before the story was sent to the publisher. But one can see a continuum here - we have at the start a very 'fairystoryish' world, filled with references to 'exotic' places like the Hindu Kush & the Gobi Desert, & at the end, by the time of the proposed '3rd edition' an attempt to fully integrate TH into the Legendarium, not just in terms of style, but also of language.

I think in a way we can see the process repeated in LotR - the early chapters, as Mith points out, are very close in style to TH as we have it, while by the end we are completely in the world of the Sil. Hence, if this 3rd ed. of TH had been completed One can only assume that the early chapters (or at least the first chapter) of LotR would also have required re-writing as that would have seemed 'out of place'.

Lal's point is interesting - given a 3rd ed Hobbit would have replaced the one we have, how many fans would have been drawn into Tolkien's world? Would any of us really want to sacrifice that innocent world, where there was less noise & more green, simply to have something that 'fitted' better with LotR? Its not so much the 'darker' style that would have 'excluded' children, perhaps, as the more adult style & language that would have resulted - its not a book that parents would have chosen to read to their children.

And of course, one would have to wonder (given the reaction of A&U's reader to the Sil legends Tolkien offered as a sequel to TH) whether, if TH had been in a more 'adult' style in the first place, we'd have anything of Middle-earth at all. It seems that publishers were much more 'tolerant' of 'fantastical' literature back then when it was aimed at children (not discounting, of course, the works of Dunsany & Morris).