'Giants' (like 'ogres' no doubt) are a trace of the fairy-tale
The Hobbit showing that it originally wasn't intended to be a part of the legendarium that came to be with
The Lord of the Rings by fusing it with the world of
The Silmarillion (the completion which Tolkien was unsure of).
For further discussion of Giants, I request that any comments be made on
this recen thread. I advise you to go there and read Squatter's posts. You can see the past threads about Giants on the
index of Haudh-en-Ndengin - there are some good posts in each. Giants are basically discarded as a discrepancy as I've mentioned above - there's a thread about the discrepancies of
The Hobbit in general
here.
Squatter sums it up well -
Quote:
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I think it is important to remember that when Tolkien wrote The Hobbit he had no idea that he would later write The Lord of the Rings. It was never intended to be the sort of high adventure that the later work was, and it naturally contained many elements of Faërie that were inappropriate or difficult to place in the later conception. He could rewrite it to a certain extent to fit with the later book (such as in the case of Bilbo's meeting with Gollum), but he tended to do this only when he had to do so to avoid direct contradiction. As a result, there are a number of places where The Hobbit and its sequel don't quite see eye to eye: an auctorial failing that doesn't significantly affect the story except for the most incurable pedant.
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