I mean, The Hobbit was primarily written to be a children’s bedtime story. The fact that adults latched onto it was sort of an accident. Tolkien was primarily a linguist, not a writer. He developed several fake languages, and wanted an excuse to use them. So he did a ton of world building, just to have a reason to write song lyrics in elvish and dwarven.
I mean, The Hobbit was primarily written to be a children’s bedtime story. The fact that adults latched onto it was sort of an accident. Tolkien was primarily a linguist, not a writer. He developed several fake languages, and wanted an excuse to use them. So he did a ton of world building, just to have a reason to write song lyrics in elvish and dwarven.