The Don: Never too Old

For 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 is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown ups; The Hobbit, on the other hand, will be funniest to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realize what 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: but The Hobbit may prove a classic.

—C.S. Lewis, “The Hobbit” in C.S. Lewis Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces (HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), p. 486