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It seems to me that his memory could have begun before the star-kindling even if he remembers that later age
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This is true, but it would seem odd for Tolkien to write some dialogue that seems intended to demonstrate a character's great age but which makes no reference at all to his presumed earlier memories.
As for the kindling of the stars, my knowledge of the
Silmarillion material never was that amazing; perhaps it's time that I read it again.
My main point remains the same: Tom Bombadil is none of the above: he's a character who had nothing to do with Middle-earth at the outset, and who therefore was never assigned a satisfactory place in that reality. To look for one seems to be to forget that Tolkien's Middle-earth is invented, and that he freely admitted its imperfection. My reaction to some of the more common Tolkien imponderables has always been that they tend to be totally disproportionate, concentrating on really quite unimportant details of the story. Tom Bombadil's origins are less boring than Legolas' hair or Balrog wings, but there's still no answer, and surely his role in the narrative is clear enough. Does it really matter that we can't fit him neatly into Tolkien's world? I also wanted to point out the opinion of Christopher Tolkien, who is quite definite about the two alternatives I outlined in my previous post. My own view is very nearly 'who cares?', but when I turned up that information in HoME VI I remembered this and other discussions.