Quote Originally Posted by Fyraltari View Post
The issue probably stems from that while The Hobbit wasn't intended to be set in ME at first, the Professor had no qualm plagiarizing himself
He always had the ME legendarium as a background for all his works, I think--note that the swords Glamdring, Orcrist and Sting were explicitly stated as having come from Gondolin before its fall when Elrond examines them in The Hobbit (although it's never clearly explained how those swords managed to end up in a troll cave hundreds of miles from where Beleriand used to be, or why goblins still fear them so much several thousand years after Gondolin's fall).