Transmission theory: what the heck was Tolkien thinking?

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

(Incidentally, this would not be the first time Tolkien entertained two contradictory ideas simultaneously- for a while in the writing of Book V, he seemingly had Frodo look out at the moon over the Forbidden Pool at the same time as Pippin aboard Shadowfax *and* Pippin on the battlements of Minas Tirith!)

I suspect that this is the answer to the riddle right here...unless the records Bilbo worked from were saved archives from Arnor, which I suppose is possible.

Still, he was right there in Rivendell for the entire latter part of his life on Middle earth with, presumably, plenty of elvish records right there to hand...

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I suppose that if we had to come up with a fan-ficcy ret-con, we could run with the idea of "Arnor library preserved in Rivendell" and go further by positing that the Elves don't write "history" the way Men and Hobbits conceive it, being as they are immortals with perfect memory recall.* Elvish writings about their past would lean towards poems giving abstracted impressions of tales already well-known to the audience, rather like Bilbo's own Lay of Earendil.

Therefore Bilbo would instead have turned to the recognizably "historical" works written by the Dunedain-- which would still have to be "Translations From the Elvish" since Arnor's scholars presumably wrote in Sindarin.

Still, one would have to assume Bilbo never let Elrond or Glorfindel proofread it!

--------------------

*The only problem with that is the in-universe attribution of the Annals to Rumil and Pengolodh. Of course, that authorship would have to disappear under the "Numenorean transmission" theory anyway.

[gondowe]

What about.
Rumil wrote the Ainulindalë. -->Pengolodh rewrote it based in Rumil and added things.-->Pengolodh wrote Valaquenta, Quenta Silmarillion, etc.
This could have been in Gondolin, in the Second Age or in Eressëa after his return.
The Elves visited Númenor--> made transmission of the "tales".--> Men passing many years (Sauron in Númenor), filter the stories.--> The wrote or oral transmission passed to Arnor, preserved in Imladris.
Elrond never talked with any Valar. Glorfindel only to help.
Bilbo translate-->Findegil's copy of the Thain Book-->Tolkien translate--> We read.

Greetings.

PS: Hello my colleagues of TFTE. Here I am. Very, very busy, years older, without time to work, but with the project in mind..... in the future?

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

unless the records Bilbo worked from were saved archives from Arnor, which I suppose is possible.

I always assumed that this would be the solution. It works perfectly, doesn't it? Elrond kept other artefacts of Númenor in Rivendell, and "Translations from the Elvish" doesn't necessarily mean "Translations of works written by Elves", just "Translations of works written in an Elvish language", which the Númenórean literature in Arnor presumably would have been.

[Formendacil]

Aragorn *did* say that Bilbo's work on First Age topics was cheeky.