I found another reference from Hammond and Scull, this time in their Reader's Guide, companion to their volume titled Chronology:
Quote:
"... that one of these was to be the Quenta Silmarillion. In support of this idea is a report by Dick Plotz that when he visited Tolkien on 1 November, 1966,
"he, half-heartedly I suppose, was thinking up schemes for rendering the Silmarillion publishable. So far, I think what he is doing is relating it to Bilbo's stay in Rivendell, which is what he said to me.
Now there is a hint of this somewhere in The Lord of the Rings.... But apparently when Bilbo went to Rivendell he was surrounded by Elves and all Elven records for seventeen years. Here was living history and he attempted to write it down, and this is what became the Silmarillion ["An Edited Transcript of Remarks at the December 1966 TSA [Tolkien Society of America] Meeting"; Niekas 19 (Spring 1967), p. 40] Hammond and Scull, Reader's Guide
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I would add that Rivendell contained Numenorean lore too.
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil was published in 1962, so before Tolkien revised the second edition of
The Lord of the Rings and added his
Note On The Shire Records. In
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil we find the description, for example:
Quote:
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"These two pieces, 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 at the end of the First Age; it seems to contain echoes of the Numenorean tale of Turin and Mim the Dwarf."
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This is partly why I think the "Bilbo transmission" and the "Numenorean transmission" can be the same tradition.