... Let us get into further discussions.

The Hobbit is quite different, as you all will have noticed, from The Silmarillion. There are very few more jarring transitions available to you in the body of Tolkien's fiction than moving from one to the other.

The tone could hardly be more different between the two, as well as the register and the vocabulary. Notice what he does with names? We've been talking about names, and of course many of you have been very understandably labouring with the number and complexity of the names in The Silmarillion. It's one of the things that makes that text so challenging. How do the names work in The Hobbit? 

Other than the personal names of the major characters almost every name in The Hobbit is a simple description of the thing. The Hill, The Water... what's the town called? by Water, 'cause it's by the water. Hobbiton, the town of the hobbits. Eventually they're going to go to The Lonely Mountain, which is by The Long Lake and they're connected by the River Running, cause it runs down from the mountain to the lake. On the lake you'll be able to find a city called?... 

- Dale.

- No, Laketown. Dale is the city that's under the mountain, cause it's in a little valley, the dale that's in front of The Lonely Mountain... Even Beorn has a name like this. Beorn means "bear" in anglo-saxon. Who's the king of the goblins? The Great Goblin, of course.

In this way it couldn't even be more different than The Silmarillion although... in some ways there are still similarities. He's still being very careful with names.  One of the primary differences is that these names are English names instead of Elvish names. In fact he sometimes still gives us the Elvish names. Laketown, we're told, used to be called Esgaroth too. But he doesn't lean on that.

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--Corey Olsen