This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

if Wiz is part Time Lord and can play with timelines and time machines, let's go back to 1937...

For it must be understood that this is a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. Alice is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown ups; The Hobbit, on the other hand, will be funnier to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.

Review published in the Times Literary Supplement (2 October 1937), 714. Reproduced here https://www.theparisreview.org/...ews-the-hobbit-1937/

He brought back old images of heroism and epic action, old mythic patterns, and fixed them in the modern mind. The Hobbit was his Odyssey, Tolkien an unexpected and unlikely Homer.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/...nduring-success.html

TIME documented the phenomenon in 1966, declaring that hobbits were the new literary heroes on American college campuses. “[The] Rings trilogy was first published in the U.S. twelve years ago, had a small but dedicated coterie of admirers, including Poet W. H. Auden and Critic C. S. Lewis, but languished largely unread until it was reprinted last year in two paperback editions,” the story explained. “Since then, campus booksellers have been hard put to keep up with the demand. At the Princeton bookstore, says one salesman, it is the ‘biggest seller since Lord of the Flies.'”

Why was it such a hit, besides the more accessible paperback format? Though Tolkien said he hadn’t intended any sort of message for modern readers, the students to whom TIME spoke said that they appreciated the chance to escape from the complicated world of the 1960s to one where you could “cheer the hero and boo the villain.” It was a perfect match between a generation and the precise breed of escapism it demanded.

And, though The Lord of the Rings was the story that captivated those college-age readers, it was The Hobbit that became America’s best-selling mass-market paperback of 1966.

http://time.com/...ersary-1937-reviews/

Whenever a book makes a big success, publishers scour the nation waving chequebooks – “Anyone here ever felt depressed and cheered up when they met a flower/Scottish lake/water vole?” – and the fruits of their search hit WH Smith[*] 18 months later.

'Why yet more books about Nazis and the future make my heart sink' by Sam Leith (who is literary editor of the Spectator) https://www.theguardian.com/...-publishing-literary

[*WH Smith is a widespread chain of shops in the UK selling books, stationery and other things. In the days before Amazon, WH Smith's book buyers were respected and feared figures among publishers, a sale to WH Smith being crucial to getting your book out.]

'Dwarves': you know what they are. Gruff, practical, industrious, stout, gold-loving, blunt-speaking, Scottish-accented, Viking-helmed, booze-swilling, Elf-hating, ax-swinging, long-bearded, stolid and unimaginative, boastful of their battle prowess and their vast echoing underground halls and mainly just the fact that they are dwarves.

Ever since J. R. R. Tolkien raided the Norse myths for good stuff, almost every fantasy world has included them... and most of them have stuck closely to the original.

... An entire race of miners and blacksmiths, with names like Dwarfaxe Dwarfbeard and Grimli Stonesack, who are overly sensitive about any perceived slight, always spoiling for a fight, unable to speak two sentences in a row without calling someone "lad" or "lass," and possessed of a love of gold and jewels that drives them to live in Underground Cities where they dig deep and greedily (often with catastrophic results).

"Our Dwarves Are All the Same" from TVTropes https://tvtropes.org/...DwarvesAreAllTheSame

Many stories will have animosity between a beautiful, highly advanced race or civilization, and a much more gritty, industrial, technological force. This theme of Harmony Versus Discipline and Romanticism Versus Enlightenment is very common, regardless of the genre.

In many fantasy fictions these roles are filled by Elves and Dwarves.... but the core of this trope isn't about them. It's about how that plays out in lots of stories that have no elves or dwarves in them at all. In historical fictions/fantasies, you'll find aristocrats versus barbarians, for example, which could be exchanged for elves and dwarves quite easily. Science Fiction will have some variation on Eloi and Morlocks, or a Crystal Spires and Togas race versus a Proud Warrior Race, or a primitive but nature-oriented race versus humans. In a contemporary business setting, it'll be marketeers versus engineers. A lot of the modern retelling of the classic Cowboys and Indians western sagas has been presented as this sort of "spiritual barbarian vs. industrialized civilization" theme. Force and Finesse tends to describe their contrasting combat styles.

Elves vs. Dwarves, TVTropes https://tvtropes.org/...n/ElvesVersusDwarves

As radio and film adaptations of Tolkien’s works were released in later decades, you can see the slow evolution of the dwarven accent from the low British of 1977’s cartoon version of The Hobbit, to the more stylized accents of the pair of dwarves in 1985’s Legend, to the Welsh-by-way-of-Scotland grumblings of John Rhys Davies’ Gimli from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, right into the aggressive rolled R’s of Hearthstone’s dwarven Innkeeper.

“What you get is a sense of Celticness,” says Dominic Watt, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Speech Science at the University of York. Watt explains that many of the virtues associated with the stereotypical fantasy dwarf are also associated with the Scottish accent. “Scottish accents tend to be evaluated pretty positively,” he says. “Shrewdness, honesty, straight-forward speaking. Those are the sorts of ideas that the accent tends to evoke.” Watt also says that there are similar cultural stereotypes surrounding the drinking habits of dwarves and Scots.

'Why Do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty?' By Eric Grundhauser, Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/...s-sound-like-royalty

3. Finally, I do like the 'Dwarves and Elves' trope listing for its insight into the idea of the refined and coarse races. I too immediately thought of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine and his Morlocks and Eloi just from the opening sentence, and there they were a line or two later.

And that makes me think that this trope doesn't just descend from the Noble Savages and the Civilized Europeans. In Wells' book, the division stems from the industrial working classes vs. the educated upper classes. Going back further, we might find the literate aristocracy's traditional contempt for the money-making, practical merchant: the Lords vs. the Commons.

Since literature has always been the province of the tiny minority of educated folk in premodern societies, I wonder if fantasy as a written genre hasn't overlaid the prejudices of millennia of degree-holders' social contempt for practical workers onto the oral traditions of European folk from which we think Tolkien's fantasy tropes come?

how much hobbits are actually humans.