DarkFather said:I had read The Hobbit before I saw the LOTR films. It was peculiar to me that the tiny plot point of Bilbo's ring was expanded into an epic trilogy. It irks me when minute points in a story are later so elaborated upon, when the story the point originated from worked so well as a stand-alone, and the point as a minute point.
...
Am I the only one annoyed by things like this? It's cheap.
I actually think what Tolkien did was rather clever. And while I am really fond of The Hobbit, I feel LOTR is a far superior work. I don't think this can be compared to EU running amok with detailed stories about every background item. That shows an obvious lack of ideas, when you have to take the most miniscule parts of someone elses story and expand on them. The fact is, if half the EU stories out there didn't have SW in the title, they would never even get published, let alone read.
Tolkien's retcon of the ring was brilliant actually. He was expanding on his own story, and was wholly original. Originally the ring was this really cool thing that could turn you invisible. That is a pretty impressive piece of treasure, not just some tiny meaningless object. When I first read The Hobbit, I thought it would be great to have a ring like that, it was the most interesting part of the story to me. The second book follows up on this amazing little treasure, and shows us that it isn't just some fun little toy you can play around with, but a very powerful and dangerous artifact.