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Originally Posted by Pitchwife
That's an intriguing speculation by Mr Noad, and I quite like it - would solve a lot of our problems here. Perhaps Tolkien had access to the Red Book in both the original language and Ælfwine's hypothetical Old English translation?
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Yes I think that's the idea: some copy of the RB and an OE version to help the modern translator (the notion based, at least, on what Mr. Noad wrote above).
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Is it? I'm not sure when Tolkien came up with the idea of a Mannish/Numenorean tradition, but Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish are mentioned in the LotR Prologue (is that in the Second Edition only? (...) and 'extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilbo in Rivendell' in the last chapter of the narrative itself.
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Good point, Bilbo was already writing according to the first edition (if I recall correctly the
Note on the Shire Records was added to the second edition), so I should say 'Numenorean transmission' compared to Elfwine, even though I ultimately view Bilbo's translations as connected, a part of the former.
Going from memory here: Elfwine is mentioned often enough in the early 1950s phase, after
The Lord of the Rings was written but not yet published, and as we see with
Elfwine And Dirhaval, even as late as 1958.
I think the Numenorean/Mannish idea generally appears around the later 1950s and 1960s (we might include the Tolkien-published
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil references here) -- but curiously there is at least one Numenorean-type reference connected to an abandoned typescript of the
Annals of Aman, (or AAm* in Morgoth's Ring) which text Christopher Tolkien is inclined to think belongs to an earlier phase rather than later.
Anyway, the Elfwine references in the early 1950s concern texts relating to the Elder Days, and I'm not sure what Tolkien had in mind at this time, despite the published description in
The Lord of the Rings surrounding Bilbo's work.