[Happy Monkey]

There's actually a pretty good parallel between HP and LOTR. The first Harry Potter is fairly lighthearted and goofy, with slapstick and sillyness, like the Hobbit. As it goes on, it gets more serious and adult, as does LOTR. As a large work, the elves sitting in trees singing insulting songs from the Hobbit doesn't completely mesh with the LOTR elves, and maybe the silly and/or punny names initiated in the first Harry Potter clash a bit with the darker directions the story goes in later volumes. But that's something that can easily happen with any work written over the course of years.