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Gandalf needs rescuing from the prison of Orthanc or from the cliff
on which his naked body lies after the fight with the Balrog, it is Gwaihir the
Windlord who bears him away on his broad back. The eagles do no fighting in the
final battle of Cormallen but they come flying to pluck Frodo and Sam off the
slopes of Mount Doom just before it erupts. They are even welcomed by the
beleaguered armies in both works with the identical cry, "The Eagles are
coming!" 6 Yet the birds in the epic are dignified by the more
stately context in which they operate. They no longer rend and tear, as in The Hobbit, but maintain an aloof lordliness as wings of rescue only.
    Examples of this
sort might be multiplied. But of special import is the use Tolkien makes of the
Ring he first described in The Hobbit as a prize won by Bilbo from
Gollum in the riddle contest. Judging by the text of that story as a whole,
Tolkien originally thought of the Ring only as one of those rings of
invisibility that abound in fairy tales, wonder-working but harmless. Bilbo
puts it on his finger and takes it off frequently as a means of escape from
dangers that threaten him from time to time in caves, forests, dungeons, and
battles. Yet it does not enslave him or impair his moral outlook in the
slightest. On the contrary, he has become a stronger and better hobbit by the
time the story ends. After this first version had been completed Tolkien began
writing The Lord of the Rings as a sequel and only then, it seems,
conceived of the scheme of taking over Bilbo's Ring and turning it into the
potent instrument of evil around which swirls all the action of the epic.
Bilbo's finding of it, which in The Hobbit is merely a turning point in
his personal "career," was to be magnified into a turning point in
the history of Middle-earth. The Ring itself, which The Hobbit does not
report as belonging to the Necromancer or anybody else, was to be attributed to
Sauron as maker and master, in order to account for its malignant power over anyone
wearing it.
    The Ring,
therefore, is the link that inseparably binds the later epic to the earlier
children's story. But how to explain the glaring differences between Bilbo's
harmless little gold band and Sauron's ruling Ring on which hung the fate of
the world? Tolkien does not really try to explain them in any detail, but he
does give some hints to pacify the curious reader. In the section of his
Prologue to the second (1965) edition of the epic, titled "Of the Finding
of the Ring," Tolkien remarks that Bilbo had not told his friends the true
story of how he obtained the Ring and that Gandalf had long suspected the
falsehood. Such a lapse on the part of a usually truthful hobbit struck Gandalf
as very "strange and suspicious" and made him begin to doubt that the
Ring was the innocent plaything it seemed on the surface. Of course, Gandalf
knew the story of Sauron's Ring. He was starting to wonder what the cause of
Bilbo's deceit could be and to connect it dimly with the Ring that had come so
mysteriously into his possession.
    By this new
element prefacing The Lord of the Rings, as well as by some textual
modifications in the latter editions of The Hobbit, Tolkien provides for
the necessary transition from the latter's mere ring of invisibility to the
epic's great Ring of Power. Even so, of course, for the purposes of The
Hobbit Bilbo's ring continues to be only a toy, useful for escapes and
escapades, but having no deeper moral significance. No reader who had not
previously read the epic would sense anything malefic about it. The story of The Hobbit has its own kind of logic quite different from that of the epic.
To confuse them is to do a disservice to both tales. In sum, it is important to
see The Hobbit as essentially independent of the epic, though serving as
a quarry of important themes for the larger work.
    To illustrate the
latter point further, consider how similar the two pieces are in their basic
structure. Both begin at Bilbo's home