Wow... interesting perspective. I look at it differently, I see Hobbit as a fairy-tale and the other stories as more mythic. There are shape-changers in Silmarillion, or at least Elves and heroes who can take on other shapes - like when Beren and Luthien snuck into Angband. Or Elwing, who becomes a bird sometimes to fly to Earendil...
I will say that those days are more distant at LotR - we're more often among "civilized" men rather than wild ones. Rohirrim or Gondorians would probably see Beorn as something out of a child's tale, but he fits into his surroundings. He lives way out in the middle of nowhere, which is where you'd expect to find a relic of the older days.
The one thing I do agree with about your comment is that the magic in Middle-Earth fades. Look at the stories of the First Age; there's magic galore. By the end of the Third Age, it's mostly leftover magics by people like Gandalf or the Elves, and they're leaving. As Men come to the fore, the world becomes more mechanical and less wondrous. Now all we have are the stories...
Sue and I did a bit of home improvement type work today, finally finishing up the fence repairs. The work went well, was able to reuse just about all the boards from the previous section replacement, ah, recycle and reuse, just sawdust left and the odd rotten piece. The wood pile needs culling though. The pleasant sound of hand saw, can't be beat on cool morning. However we're not total ludites, the cordless driver does make short work of long screws.
Well, thanks, I guess. :-) It comes from having just finished reading The Book of Lost Tales. Seeing how the stories of the First Age changed over time from their earliest forms was *very* interesting. The Hobbit was written in the 30s; I suspect that some of Tolkien's concepts hadn't changed as much from their earliest forms of the teens and 20s as they did by the time LOTR was published in the 50s.
Rohirrim or Gondorians would probably see Beorn as something out of a child's tale
Well, The Hobbit *is* a child's tale. As I understand it, Tolkien made it up to tell his children at bedtime, and was eventually convinced to write it down in book form.
The one thing I do agree with about your comment is that the magic in Middle-Earth fades.
That's true, although in the earliest concept the Elves' "fading" meant something very different. And I find it very interesting that when the Hobbits are in Lothlorien, asking the Elves there about "magic", the Elves aren't quite sure what the Hobbits mean by the word. Even Galadriel, when she was showing her mirror to Sam and Frodo, says, "... this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean ...."
It's things like that that cause me to wonder if Tolkien, over time, changed his own views on what was "magical" in Middle Earth, and therefore the early stories have things like shape-changing galore, while in the later stories "magic" is just a greater understanding of natural processes.