alt Hacker NewsThe Hobbit is also a whimsical children's book, and doesn't have anything to do with saving the world (a world that Tolkien had not developed anywhere near the state in we see in LoTR when he wrote The Hobbit almost 20 years earlier).
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FarmerPotato • today at 8:03 AM
And like all good books for children, it contains many things that can inform your character for life.
The world was pretty well developed, but The Hobbit isn't really set in it. The Hobbit was retconned into his broader Middle-earth as the sequel grew in the telling. He'd been re-writing the material that became The Silmarillion for decades. (And he offered it to the publisher instead of a Hobbit sequel, and they said "what else ya got?)
This despite the fact that some names and elements were re-used. He often cycled the same names around until he found where they fit. Which also makes reading early drafts of the Hobbit fun when Thorin was named Gandalf.