Sauron, the Necromancer

[William Cloud Hicklin]

So... quite contrary to what I'd heard, The Hobbit was always meant to be set in the same world as The Silmarillion?

Yeppers- or rather, Tolkien drew on his legendarium as convenient to provide a setting for his childrens' story, which he didn't regard at the time as 'canonical.' Beren and Luthien, Gondolin, the Three Kindreds of the Elves and "Faery" in the West- all there from the start. On the other hand so also is the Gobi Desert.

Tolkien himself misled us all in his letters, making the claim for both Hobbit and the Numenor legend that they were originally unrelated to, but then brought into, the main mythology. In both cases it just tweren't so.

More on this on the "proto-geography of the Third Age" thread.