4. Another quaint aspect of this chapter’s being most closely duplicated by The Lord of the Rings is that, when written, The Hobbit did not occupy the fully imagined world we now know as Middle-earth in the Third Age. This is because there was no such world yet – it came into being later, as LotR expanded in every direction from TH. Looking back today, there are some noticeable differences in setting, culture, and tone.
It’s pretty well known that Tolkien semi-accidentally revised the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter for the second edition of The Hobbit in 1951, to get the Ring and Gollum in line with what they became in the sequel. But he didn’t touch the rest of the story at the time. He did attempt a full LotR-style rewrite around 1960, but he abandoned it on the advice of friendly readers. In 1965, to reassert his paperback copyright in the USA, he revised The Hobbit again, for a third edition, and used the opportunity to get it at least a little more closely aligned to the later tale. We see the results especially in this chapter; here is a comparison of one of the most extensively changed paragraphs.
This is the original from 1937:
Things went on like this for quite a long while. There was a good deal of wide respectable country to pass through, inhabited by decent respectable folk, men or hobbits or elves or what not, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf, or a tinker, or a farmer ambling by on business. But after a time they came to places where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Inns were rare and not good, the roads were worse, and there were hills in the distance rising higher and higher. There were castles on some of the hills, and many looked as if they had not been built for any good purpose. Also the weather which had often been as good as May can be, even in tales and legends, took a nasty turn. – TH II, 1st ed.

(I’ll skip the far more extensive changes in the 1960 rewrite, which was never completed or published. It can be read in Rateliff’s History of The Hobbit. Hint: this one paragraph becomes three; they stay at the Prancing Pony at Bree, and even pass the Forsaken Inn!)
The paragraph was rewritten this way in 1965:
At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people. Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that day had taken a nasty turn. Mostly it had been as good as May can be, even in merry tales, but now it was cold and wet. In the Lone-lands they had been obliged to camp when they could, but at least it had been dry. – TH II, 3rd ed.

Really? What are chances of there being such a thing?
Trolls purses are the mischief, as you probably know.

And just a couple of sentences before, it is stated that picking trolls' pockets is very easy and usually profitable! Do you still trust the narrator?

Tolkien was just using familiar language to set people in their class, something readers would easily relate to, at least in the generation he was writing LOTR in. So even though I'm American, I hear a Cockney accent from the movies when Sam says, "Lor", which may not be strictly what Tolkien was getting at but tells me as a reader that Sam is of a lower class and using slang.

There is far more of an emphasis on the weather changing in the latter text - this does remind me of Curious and his questions regarding the weather; but perhaps it is just a matter of changing the order of phrases? I do not have the first version here.