[Rumil]

Many plaudits to Child of the Seventh Age!

Strangely, though I read the Hobbit after the Lord of the Rings I have always loved it too. I think that I had tapped into Tolkien's 'book within a book' concept ie the Lord of the Rings essentially being an ancient copy of the Red Book of Westmarch, written by Frodo et al, and languishing high on a dusty shelf in the Bodleian library until the Prof discovered it one drizzly summer's afternoon when the cricket had been abandoned due to poor light.

Now to run with the Hobbit, I see it as a 'children's book within a children's book'. Although the Prof claims to have written it for his children, I strongly suspect that Bilbo wrote it to entertain his young relatives when they were a similar age. Therefore, when one comes back to it after LoTR, it's a bit like a detective story - how does it fit together with the 'real world' of Middle Earth? Through Bilbo's tale we get to see entire additional swathes of Middle Earth, and if the style appears childish, just remember that while it was Frodo's bedtime story, it also covers events of great significance and seriousness. After all, if it was written in the highfalutin idiom of Gondor, the tale wouldn't have been half so entertaining I'm sure.