Nice review.

I think part of the “why don’t you end now” issue is that, structurally speaking in genre terms, The Hobbit isn’t fully a modern novel. It’s got enough elements of it that it can code that way, but really sits between and across a few structures.

So you read it, your brain sees the structures of a novel, and then skips a track when the book doesn’t actually follow it all the time.

I also don’t know about blaming Lewis. I haven’t read the series in awhile, but the Narnia books had torture and murder and literal Armageddon, so….