Since the second edition of the
Lord of the Rings was first published by Ballantine in 1965 while Plotz’s interview with Tolkien occurred on November 1, 1966, indeed it more than “looks like Tolkien had already added his
Note On The Shire Records (revised edition), which included that Bilbo’s
Translations From The Elvish were
‘almost entirely concerned with the Elder Days’.”
Thanks for verifying that this was not just
my theory.
Tolkien does refer to Ælfwine still in some texts written following
The Lord of the Rings and so Tolkien did at least for a time consider some version of his Ælfwine story as still valid. Possibly he considered that Ælfwine was given the complete Thain’s Book version of the Red Book of Westmarch by Pengolodh in Tol Eressëa. (Also possibly not.)
Tolkien also in some writing imagines himself as in contact with present-day Hobbits. For example in the
FOREWARD to the first edition, Tolkien writes:
To complete it some maps are given, including one of the Shire that has been approved as reasonably correct by those Hobbits that still concern themselves with ancient history.
The complications of a tale that required both Ælfwine and present-day Hobbits may be sufficient to explain Christopher Tolkien’s remarks on page 5 of
The Book of Lost Tales Part I (HoME 1):
The original mode, that of The Book of Lost Tales, that in which a Man, Eriol, comes after a great voyage over the ocean to the island where the Elves dwell and learns their history from their own lips, had (by degrees) fallen away. […] I think that in the end he concluded that nothing would serve, and no more would be said beyond an explanation of how (within the imagined world) it came to be recorded.