If the Hobbit had evolved without LOTR

[afro-elf]

I was reminded that originally the Hobbit was not set in the world of the Silmarillion and was only placed there when the Professor was asked for a sequel to the Hobbit.

How do you think the world of the Hobbit would have evolved if the sequel were not set in ME as we know it today?

What would you have liked to have seen in such a work? Or not have seen for that matter.

For myself, I would have liked for Gandalf to have been simply a human wizard and not evolved into the one of the Istari.

[Earniel]

Interesting idea.

I suspect that in time The Hobbit's world may eventually have collided with the other, fairy-tale worlds from Tales of the Perilous Realm if it had not found a home in Middle-earth.

It would have made a good enough fit, I imagine. But I doubt its sequel would have been able to move out of the 'children's book' sphere in tone or subject.

[Alcuin]

What did Tolkien borrow from his existing stories? Elrond and Gondolin were both borrowed, though I don’t believe Elrond had the importance that character later carried. Half-elves seem to have been more common than Tolkien later decided.

Did he put The Hobbit into an existing geography? specifically, did the Misty Mountains (Hithaeglir) already exist?

I don’t know that Gandalf was ever envisioned as a human. He looked human, but his lifespan was already long if it encompassed that of the Old Took’s, then lasted several decades until Bilbo was fifty years old. A Númenórean would live that long, but I don’t know that Tolkien had even developed the concept of Dúnedain with extended lifespans, or even of Númenor: off the top of my head, I don’t recall when that idea emerged.

By the time he began telling his children The Hobbit, which he wrote down because his children (specifically Michael) kept correcting his changes in previous stories, the Silmarillion tales of Beren and Lúthien, the Children of Húrin, and the Tuor/Gondolin/Eärendil cycle had already been shaping for 20 years or more.