As C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia and a friend of Tolkien, wrote a couple of years after The Hobbit was first published, it:
"must be understood that this is a children's book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. Alice [in Wonderland] is read gravely by children and with laughter by adults; The Hobbit on the other hand will be funniest to its youngest readers, and only years later, at the tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realize what a deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true."
"Prediction is dangerous," Lewis concluded all those years ago," but The Hobbit may well prove to be a classic."
