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Originally Posted by Aiwendil
Still - I don't see The Hobbit as horror-less at all. On the contrary, I think that horror is an integral component of it, and of many other succesful 'children's stories'. I think you are right about tragedy - and I suppose that if the style of the revision differs significantly from that of the original, it is in this. But horror and tragedy are different things.
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They are different things - I wish I'd posted that at a time when I should'nt have been in bed!
The 'horror' I meant wasn't that of a 'big scary monster coming to eat you up' - which is basically what all the enemies in TH are, & what the original gollum was - its a deeper horror, of being trapped alone in the dark, by yourself, for age upon age. In short, none of the other 'monsters' Bilbo encounters seem to have feelings or emotional needs - we never wonder whether Smaug gets lonely on his bed of gold under the Mountain. We never think of any of the other 'monsters' having any kind of inner life, so we don't feel pity for them. With the 'revised' Gollum we do feel pity - Tolkien goes out of his way to make him a pitiable figure - & we feel such pity because of the horror of his existence.