[littlemanpoet]

Wow, Mark, thanks for the kindness! You represent my thought well, of course.

But the quality of the effect will be different.

Reading the synopsis alone gives one the skeleton of the fairy tale: the plot, hero, villain, main artefact, the heroic task to be achieved, the denoument.

Reading a snapshot, such as the doodles on the back of a page of minutes, give you a flavor, or something - - - but if you did not know the story, wouldn't the flavor be different? You know who Gandalf was, and what a Hobbit is. Tolkien knew Gandalf as a Norse dwarf when he wrote that line, though it obviously sparked some deep creative thing in him; and he had no idea what a Hobbit was - yet - at that time.

Reading an entire chapter (perhaps one may call it a panoramic snapshot), which was how I was introduced to Tolkien, gives one a different taste. This is what happened to me. My older brother read Riddles in the Dark to me when I was age 8 -in the dark, as a bedtime reading. I was hooked! But my experience was quite different from Tolkien's, obviously

I immediately began reading the book for myself. Desire with a capital "D" hit me for the first time during a mere description of traveling (doesn't that say volumes about me?) - from the Shire to the Ettenmoors. It was meant by Tolkien to be a recounting of moving from pleasant, recognized, homely environs to inhospitable wilds, but I remember seeing the blowing leaves in the trees, the lonely hills, the endless miles of wild land with just a single road passing through its vastness, with old ruined castles built by kings long ago that some said were evil. - - A world was opened up to me in that single passage, a world I wanted enter.

So in my estimation, The Hobbit has mythic elements. So I agree in general with point #1, and entirely with point #2, that the pleasure of mythic fairy tale is not in suspense, etc.

Point #3, that human sympathy is at a minimum..... well, in thoroughgoing myth, quite. In traditional fairy tale, I think this also holds. Consider the tales collected by the brothers Grimm as an example. But in mythic fantasy, something that is unique to the 19th through 21st centuries, human sympathy is absolutely essential.

Mythic fantasy is a new entity, first developed by such folks as William Morris and Lewis Carroll (Tolkien liked "Sylvie and Bruno"). Davem is correct that the Silmarillion and the Lays of Beleriand, etc., were myth. Tolkien designed them that way. But LotR and the Hobbit (as well as Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major) are mythic fantasy. It contains the stuff of myth, legend, and fairy tale, but renders it in a modern novel or short story.

The Hobbit, by the way, most definitely contains the fantastic. There's a Ring that endows its wearer with invisibility, there are Elves who can disappear from view in the flash of a moment, there is a dragon, there is an oracle and prophecy, a special keyhole that can only be seen by moonlight. Very mythic and folkloric.