Contradictions between the hobbit and LOTR?

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

Yes, I have always thought of The Lord of the Ringss being “ history”, The Hobbit as a fairy story and the Silmarillion as myth /legend at least from the perspective of its supposed translator, Bilbo.

I'd generally agree. I think that Tolkien saw the stories similarly to this: LotR was "true", but Hobbit was coloured by Bilbo's perspective. Taking that position meant he could entirely change chunks of The Hobbit, and even contemplate a full rewrite; I can't imagine him doing the same thing for LotR.

As for the Silmarillion... my impression is that Tolkien wanted the Annals and their associated documents to be "true" accounts. When the Grey Annals say under the year 471 that "In this year Huor wedded Rian daughter of Belegund", that wasn't intended to be "out of the mists of time has come the legend of a wedding in the year four hundred and seventy, yea, and one more year added thereunto"; it was supposed to be "this just happened, and we wrote it down".

The older, long-form stories that grew out of the Lost Tales, I think were more 'mythical'. Obviously originally they were, being explicitly tales told around the fire at suppertime (or, in some instances, by kids in the garden), and I don't feel like Tolkien ever drew away from that. So Ainulindale and Valaquenta, the Fall of Gondolin and the Lay of Leithian - these are all retellings, not records.

Which leaves the Quenta Silmarillion itself. A quick bit of poking around suggests that the Quenta was always meant to be a hybrid text - the 'earliest Silmarillion' verse in HoME IV is described as a history constructed from the Book of Lost Tales. I can imagine Tolkien imagining a scribe - maybe in the Havens of Sirion, maybe in Numenor, maybe even in Rivendell - sitting down with a copy of the Annals and a whole sheaf of random legends (including interview notes from that one time she was able to get Glorfindel to actually talk about his past), and attempting to cobble together a coherent narrative from it all.

(That scribe, though, is probably not Bilbo - compression isn't really one of his known skills, and besides, there's not nearly enough songs in the Silm for him to have put it together himself...)

hS