[William Cloud Hicklin]

Here is at least a conceptual framework to play with: Bilbo was working in Rivendell making use of Elrond's library. But there was a problem here- the Elves don't write "history" in the way we mortals understand it. Being immortal, their requirements were different and they were much more inclined towards poetic recastings of things commonly known (among themselves), stuff even more obscure to an outsider than Bilbo's mock-elvish Earendil poem was to us pre-Sil LR readers.

The "Elvish" Bilbo translated, then, was not works by Elves but rather Dunedainic works in Sindarin, those surviving books from the royal library at Fornost which had been committed to Rivendell for safekeeping: histories written by Men which were far more comprehensible to Bilbo's mortal mindset. (According to this theory, even the Annals would not have been contemporaneous Elvish records a la medieval chronicles, but a Numenorean or Dunedainic reconstruction of the timeline of the Elder Days.)


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