Tolkien's 'Hobbit' as Children's Lit

That's one of my favorite bits from The Hobbit. It's also, perhaps, the passage that pushes most insistently against Tolkien's reputation as it's developed. Tolkien is generally lauded for his careful, monumental world-building—for his intricate languages and his sweeping sense of history. And yet, here he is, with deliberate whimsy, knocking (driving?) his reader out of Middle-Earth and back to just-plain-England for the sake of a silly and utterly gratuitous joke. I suppose it's possible that the elves and dragons play golf in Middle-Earth, but whether or not, it's an incongruous idea, which makes tends to make the milieu unravel, rather than weaving it together. Putting hobbits and golf together is the act of a storyteller who has his eye on effects other than consistency.