Dear
Mith, I'm afraid the mere fact that you chose this thread title and I got the allusion makes both of us hopelessly middle-aged.
And while I'm at it, I couldn't resist (with apologies to The Undertones):
Another book from the library
'bout a hobbit's treasure hunt and burglary
It's the best that I ever read
only Thorin's death made me feel so sad
I wanna read past bedtime with a flash light
get teenage kicks all thru the night
Back on topic, I first read TH in my late teens, so I've no idea how I would have reacted to it as I child... but the books I loved at, say, 10 or 12, such as the Leatherstocking tales or Karl May's Winnetou books, all had a fair amount of violence and death in them, so I don't think that would have bothered me, and most of them were well beyond 300 pages long; the precocious bookworm I was might even have been slightly annoyed by the Prof's condescending auctorial comments.
I think you have a point about the lack of alternatives to reading in our pre-teen times, compared to today's multimedia overload; but then again, I'm confident there'll always be some precocious bookworms in every generation, and JK Rowling's success seems to prove they won't be deterred by thick volumes.
So I wouldn't make too much of this. Like
Nerwen says, age-grouping in bookshops (or libraries, for that matter
) can be pretty arbitrary sometimes.