Quote:
Originally Posted by Galin
For myself, I think Tolkien's long poetic versions were to be part of Bilbo's three volume Translations from the Elvish, or at least The Children of Hurin and Beren and Luthien poems, two different kinds of poetry.
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This actually makes a
lot of sense, because Bilbo, much like Tolkien, was a poet. They both resort to poetry at the drop of a hat, so if you gave Bilbo a choice between translating the
Quenta Silmarillion or the
Lay of Leithian, there's no way he'd even hesitate in choosing the latter.
This also helps explain the sheer size of the
Translations:
Leithian would have come to at least 6000 lines in its later, expanded form (probably much more); at 30 lines to the page that's a good 200 pages right there, whereas the Quenta version of the story probably wouldn't pass 20.
A wonderful companion to
Arda Reconstructed would be an in-universe book on what exactly made up the Red Book, but I'm not sure it could ever account for the fact that
The Hobbit +
LotR made up only 1/4 of the original length...
hS