[gwern]

I wonder if even Tolkien's own works would preserve the 'essence' that people see in LotR...

Imagine you took someone who had just read _The Hobbit_, and you gave them a copy of the _Silmarillion_ carefully scrubbed of any identifying information and all of the critical apparatus, just the barebones fiction itself, and with a cover story like 'I got this off Ao3, you might like it'. I wonder how many people would realize it was even in the same fictional universe, much less by the same author?

[pdonis]

Someone who had read only The Hobbit would have a hard time seeing the relationship, yes. That's because Tolkien himself didn't conceive it when he wrote The Hobbit, and even when he started working on LotR; the latter was originally just another story about hobbits, since people had told him they wanted more hobbit stories.

But, as he says in the foreword to LotR, that story got irresistibly drawn towards the older world, and became a story of its ending and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told. (I don't know if I'm giving what he said in the foreword word for word, but I think I'm pretty close.) So someone who read the LotR in its published form would see the connection, if for no other reason than some of the same characters (Elrond, Galadriel, Cirdan) appear in both works. And of course anyone who read the Appendices in detail would see even more connections, because Tolkien put them there on purpose.

(Btw, after the publication of LotR, Tolkien went back and reworked some parts of The Hobbit, notably the encounter with Gollum in Riddles In The Dark. That reworked version is what most people now have read. The really original version, published before LotR, is even less related to the legendarium.)