[Sharlin]

The Hobbit is also a whimsical children's book, and doesn't have anything to do with saving the world (a world that Tolkien had not developed anywhere near the state in we see in LoTR when he wrote The Hobbit almost 20 years earlier).

[jfengel]

The world was pretty well developed, but The Hobbit isn't really set in it. The Hobbit was retconned into his broader Middle-earth as the sequel grew in the telling. He'd been re-writing the material that became The Silmarillion for decades. (And he offered it to the publisher instead of a Hobbit sequel, and they said "what else ya got?)

This despite the fact that some names and elements were re-used. He often cycled the same names around until he found where they fit. Which also makes reading early drafts of the Hobbit fun when Thorin was named Gandalf.

[FarmerPotato]

And like all good books for children, it contains many things that can inform your character for life.

[jojobas]

It was a children's book and probably isn't anymore.

[hackyhacky]

Was its license rescinded by the International Society of Children's Books? Thanks for letting me know, I'll be sure to tell my child to stop enjoying it.

[stackghost]

I read it to my daughter when she was six, and she loved it. We did one chapter a night. I did almost no editing as I read.

By the time we read LOTR she was eight, and we never did finish ROTK because the Frodo and Sam parts really do drag on (I get that he wrote them this way so that the reader would get a sense of just how arduous the journey was, but...)

[xyzzy_plugh]

Rest assured, I can personally confirm that it is still a wonderful children's book.

[tokai]

How could that status ever chance? Being widely read by adults doesn't change if its an children's book or not.

[npinsker]

Theoretically it could change via literacy rates and attention spans going down?

[tokai]

No it couldn't.