[Galin]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

[Tom] had now wandered into strange regions beyond their memory and beyond their waking thought, into times when the world was wider, and the seas flowed straight to the western Shore; and still back and on Tom went singing into ancient starlight, when only the Elf-sires were awake. [...] "When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless -- before the Dark Lord came from Outside."

To my mind, none of that necessarily means Tom told the hobbits that the Sun and Moon were created after the Earth, unless you mentally inject information that Tolkien himself had yet to publish. How many first-time readers would take this to certainly mean that the world was once actually flat, and that the Elves lived on an Earth with no Sun?

A line in The Hobbit however: "In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight before the raising of the Sun and Moon; . . ." was revised by JRRT in the 1960s to: "In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; . . ."


Concerning the rest of your argument, I don't see why the physical presence of Aman is problematic for example, but generally speaking, I would say that garbled traditions allow for certain, externally "older" ideas to remain, rather than be bulldozed. And that's the beauty of it.

But the biggest problem would be this- however misguided the early Numenoreans may have been, and we'll pretend that their visitors from Eressea and their own visits to Lindon didn't set them straight, by the time we're into the Third Age the scholars of Arnor would have been in regular contact with Lindon and especially Rivendell, where the Elves knew better. Heck, Glorfindel personally remembered the Trees and had crossed the Grinding Ice! And then we have the problem of Bilbo, whose Translations from the Elvish was, in the Second Edition, at just the time of this interview (1965-66), being at least heavily hinted as being the Silmarillion. And if Bilbo was translating "from the Elvish" at Rivendell, then surely he would have got the straight scoop, not old Numenorean legends!

We've had this discussion before, especially with respect to the Numenorean-Bilbo transmission. In your thread (from 2016, Barrow Downs) "transmission theory: what the heck was Tolkien thinking" you ultimately posted:

http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showthread.php?t=19054

Actually, I think I'm coming around to the "uncritical translation of old legends" view of Bilbo's work especially in light of T's description of Quenta Silmarillion as a compilation made in Numenor, focused around the Great Tales (all of them about Edain). This is especially appealing in that we know that Bilbo was quite fond of Aragorn and very interested in his lineage. The only (minor) problem there is that "Translations from Numenor" or some such might have been a more accurate title, even though the given one isn't inaccurate (presumably the Numenorean QS was written in Sindarin).

I had something of a small epiphany in this regard brought on by analogies made here to classical mythology. We have all read collections of "Greek" mythology-- except that many of those stories and several of the best known in fact come from Ovid, a Roman; further confusing matters is the fact that often these collections, especially the older ones, use the Latin rather than Greek names of deities (even that reflects Roman "garbling;" with the exception of Apollo, the Roman pantheon were native Latin gods who were subsequently syncretized with the Greek and appropriated their legends).

I thought you were edging closer here to (something like): so what if Glorfindel knew differently. No?

(On that note, remember that almost no Numenorean writings survived the Downfall)

At the moment I can't recall, is this in print (as in published by JRRT himself)? In any case, the following is:

"These two pieces [poems 6 and 16], 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 of the end of the First Age; it seems to contain echoes of the Numenorean tale of Turin and Mim the Dwarf."

JRRT, Adventures of Tom Bombadil