[Galin]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

But wait- that letter was written in 1965, at the same time the Revised Edition of the LR was being prepared. And what did T do in that revision? Why, he doubled down on the Bilbo-transmission theory, making it more explicit than the 1st Ed. had been that the Silmarillion was Mr Baggins' "Translations From the Elvish"- seemingly a complete contradiction of the Numenorean-legend theory.

Who can read this riddle?

I don't see why the two ideas are necessarily contradictory. Numenorean material ends up in Middle-earth, where it can ultimately be translated by Bilbo Baggins in Rivendell. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil was published in 1962, which already included the author-published (cough "canonical") reference:

"These two pieces [poems 6 and 16], therefore, are only re-handlings of Southern matter, though this may have reached Bilbo by way of Rivendell. No. 14 also depends upon the lore of Rivendell, Elvish and Numenorean, concerning the heroic days of the end of the First Age; it seems to contain echoes of the Numenorean tale of Turin and Mim the Dwarf."

JRRT, Adventures of Tom Bombadil

I suppose that if we had to come up with a fan-ficcy ret-con, we could run with the idea of "Arnor library preserved in Rivendell" and go further by positing that the Elves don't write "history" the way Men and Hobbits conceive it, being as they are immortals with perfect memory recall.* Elvish writings about their past would lean towards poems giving abstracted impressions of tales already well-known to the audience, rather like Bilbo's own Lay of Earendil.

Yes, the Eldar wrote history (their type anyway) despite that their lore could be stored in "the vast houses of their minds". For anyone interested, see The Shibboleth of Feanor and author's note 24 about the making of Exilic books.

Therefore Bilbo would instead have turned to the recognizably "historical" works written by the Dunedain-- which would still have to be "Translations From the Elvish" since Arnor's scholars presumably wrote in Sindarin.

*The only problem with that is the in-universe attribution of the Annals to Rumil and Pengolodh. Of course, that authorship would have to disappear under the "Numenorean transmission" theory anyway.

I'm not sure why the authorship must vanish however. For the revised internal history of AAM* [Morgoth's Ring] Tolkien even notes that Rumil made the Annals of Aman in the Elder days, and that they were held in memory by the Exiles, and that those parts which "we" learned were thus set down in Numenor before the Shadow fell upon it.

Still, one would have to assume Bilbo never let Elrond or Glorfindel proofread it!

If they read the material, I would rather expect them to expect that Bilbo Baggins not change the ancient historic or poetic material in the archives, even if parts of it are "incorrect" about some points... no more than a modern translator would need to correct passages from Classical works, if they contained some thing or things modern minds knew to be false, or arguably misleading. Bilbo was attempting to translate materials, not correct them, as Elrond or Glorfindel would recognize, I think.

And by translating certain works as accurately as possible, various points of view could be represented too. Any more purely Western Elvish texts or oral traditions would (or could), for example, contradict certain ideas found in more Mannish texts, and even some of the Numenorean accounts could contain references to what the "wise of Numenor" said about some matter or idea, even if only a scribble in a margin somewhere. In the older conception with Elfwine, Tolkien has Elfwine note that the Tale of Hurin's children was written by a man, but in the Sindarin tongue; and Elfwine writes...

"I have not added to Dirhaval's tale, nor omitted from it anything that he told; neither have I changed the order of the history. But on matters that seemed of interest, or that were dark with the passing of the years, I have made notes, whether within the tale or upon its margins, according to such lore as I found in Eressea."

JRRT, Elfwine and Dirhaval, The War of The Jewels

Why can't something similar be said of Bilbo, altering for example, Eressea to Rivendell? But the stories remain, if not "sacred" at least as pieces of art as well as history. They are not to be corrected by Bilbo, arguably especially as some have already become altered and confused as they passed through Mannish hands and mines before landing on Elrond's bookshelves.

And in my opinion we have to give JRRT some room here, as (very generally speaking), he hadn't even finished the tales themselves, much less their internal histories down through Numenor and east over Sea.