[William Cloud Hicklin]

Brljak's argument would have greater force if the 'fiction of translation' were present in the writing of the story, but we know that it was a concept that arose during the writing of the appendices/Prologue (which in their first drafts were actually done before 'The Grey Havens', where the 'metafiction' is present in the form of the Red Book).*

This 'after the fact' manner is clearly shown I think in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, where the Preface employs the Red Book fiction, but all** the poems had in fact been written many years before, almost all before the Lord of the Rings and some even before The Hobbit, and which when composed had no connection to the Legendarium at all.

This is I think unlike the very conscious metafiction of The Name of the Rose, where Eco postulates a (vanishing) manuscript tradition right from the start in order to shroud his tale in a sense of did it/didn't it?, and the questions of whether Adso is telling the truth, and whether Adso even existed or it's all a clever forgery, are constantly at play in the background

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*In this context it's worth noting that the idea of The Hobbit being taken from Bilbo's memoirs nowhere appears during TH itself; it was a post-facto element that arose in the final epilogue.

**Except "Bombadil Goes Boating," which was new