Hello friends!
It's your chat thread speaking lol
First of all I think it's a great honor to have your noob-ish comment expanded to a 4-pages chat thread(!)
Oh and please pardon my grammar or other errors, unfortunately english is not my mother language.
Anyway, I wanted to apologize for causing such a turbulence by calling the hobbit a "children's book". I never meant to insult or offend anyone in this forum or -even worse- imply anything about this excellent book. I'll be brief. Tolkien is simply peerless. He and his work belong to the world; he will ever have a place among the true geniuses of literature like Fiodor Dostoyefski, Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck and others.
What I meant by calling it a "children's book" is that I find it so much friendlier to younger readers than the Silmarillion or the LotR. Simple as that. Even if Tolkien himself hadn't implied it, it would still be a reasonable conclusion. Yet there lies the magnificence of Tolkien; He wrote a book about a small creature going out in the great world and making a difference. This notion itself is enough to grab a young reader's attention all through the end. A mature reader would be already there whithout any help.
I do not claim that I have enough knowledge about literature in general to even attempt to analyze Tolkien's writing. I am just grateful that he published his works and now everyone can enjoy them. And I think it's a shame to compare Tolkien's Arda with other lesser speciments of epic fantasy literature. Harry Potter? Who the h*** is that? It's like trying to compare a tall mountain with a pile of rocks- nonsense!
I for one thing, grew to cherish the english language because of Tolkien.
Someone said that when Tolkien wrote about Bilbo's magic ring he didn't know that it would turn out to be the One ring, one of the main motifs in the LotR. In the Hobbit we get only glimpses of the main theme that rules his other books- the climactic march towards a permanent transformation of the world. But that's perfectly understandable since it's the story of an adventure from the hobbit's point of view. Not Thorin's, not Gandalf's, not Beorn's. Bilbo's. So that the reader- even a young one- can relate more easily to the protagonist. The idea of the book is that of a journey to the unknown. As the hobbit slowly learns more about the world as he goes on, so does the reader slowly immerses himself into Tolkien's world. Your first impression of a merry little story changes very soon and dramaticaly. The story soon turns into a darker hue as places and characters get introduced, sometimes in detail, others with just a brief background story, others with none at all. Just the way human memory works. Take one of your journeys for example. Do u get to know and then recall every detail of every place u visited or person u 've met along the way?
Ahemm, well... pardon me friends, I got too excited.
Not a children's book, a book that would make even children go nuts!
I'm just saying that I'm not really sure how to classify it 
), adult, etc. I think it fits into the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre overall though, but I see that as a different matter.
. I have to admit though, as I get older, I have to rely on a sometimes faulty memory 
, and research for it's own sake. So it's great to have youngsters around with all the info at their fingertips 
. It seems that the New Members section of the forum has become a default "chat" sub-forum. We do discuss a lot of personal and non-Tolkien issues here.