[davem]

Originally Posted by Maerbenn

The third (1966) edition of The Hobbit that did come out has the Wood-elves lingering ‘in the twilight of our Sun and Moon’ while the Light-elves, Deep-elves and Sea-elves are living for ages in Faerie. But I would not consider that change a ‘mistake’.

The question that occurs to me is whether he wanted to change TH simply in order to make it 'fit' better with the rest of the Legendarium, or whether he actually felt that it wasn't good enough in itself. His comment from 1937 that he

“preferred my own mythology…to this rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Voluspa, newfangled hobbits and gollums (invented in an idle hour) and Anglo-Saxon runes”.

seems to imply the latter

It seems from this comment that he was 'disappointed' with the book to some degree even before LotR was started. Even as a 'children's' book he seemed to have felt disappointed with it - in a 1967 interview with Philip Norman he states:

"The Hobbit" wasn't written for children, and it certainly wasn't done just for the amusement of Tolkien's three sons and one daughter, as is generally reported. "That's all sob stuff. No, of course, I didn't. If you're a youngish man and you don't want to be made fun of, you say you're writing for children. At any rate, children are your immediate audience and you write or tell them stories, for which they are mildly grateful: long rambling stories at bedtime.

"'The Hobbit' was written in what I should now regard as bad style, as if one were talking to children. There's nothing my children loathed more. They taught me a lesson. Anything that in any way marked out 'The Hobbit' as for children instead of just for people, they disliked-instinctively. I did too, now that I think about it. All this 'I won't tell you any more, you think about it' stuff. Oh no, they loathe it; it's awful.

So TH wasn't written for Tolkien's own children, & the style is 'bad' (in Tolkien's own words) because it was written 'as if one was talking to children'. He seems to be saying that he only wrote it isn that style 'because he didn't want to be made fun of'. Strange admission, & one that seems to go completely against his position re Fairy Story as set out in OFS - that Fairy Stories are not for children. In this comment he seems to be saying the very opposite - that the 'immediate' audience for such stuff are children & that when you write such things you say they're 'for children' to avoid being made fun of.

So, up to the time he produced TH he saw children as the primary audience for such stories, but not too long afterwards he could stand up in front of an audience & state that Children are not the primary audience - adults are. I wonder what happened to cause the change?

Whatever, from his words, it seems that both the syle & much of the content of TH displeased Tolkien, & this seems to have been at least partly behind his desire to re-write it.