The History Of The Hobbit: One Volume Edition

Every collection of real-world myths is of necessity incomplete; there is always some story that has been lost, some figure who is reduced to a bare name or fact.
(John D. Rateliff)

Like the elves, whom he rescued from being treated as dainty flower fairies, Tolkien also redeemed the dragon and re-established it as the greatest of all fantasy monsters.
(John D. Rateliff)

To borrow Verlyn Flieger’s analogy, the individual pieces of elf-lore that have by chance and good luck survived but shorn of their original context are rather like broken pieces of ancient stained glass, retaining their striking evocative quality but their original pattern lost; Tolkien has taken these fragments and reassembled them, ‘remounting, as it were, the stained glass into a new window’.
(John D. Rateliff)