A principal evidência para a suposição de que o Silmarillion era dos três volumes de Bilbo vem do prólogo do Senhor dos Anéis:
É bem documentado que há muitas mudanças que Christopher Tolkien lamenta fazer ao Silmarillion publicado, mas uma mudança que ele lamenta não fazer é dada no prefácio de Book of Lost Tales 1: / p>But the chief importance of Findegil's copy is that it alone contains the whole of Bilbo's 'Translations from the Elvish'. These three volumes were found to be a work of great skill and learning in which, between 1403 and 1418, he had used all the sources available to him in Rivendell, both living and written. But since they were little used by Frodo, being almost entirely concerned with the Elder Days, no more is said of them here.
Enquanto o dispositivo de enquadramento original de um marinheiro se perdeu nas costas ocidentais da Europa e encontrou as antigas terras dos élficos, onde ele contou as histórias, gradualmente desapareceu, nunca foi totalmente descartado, mas foi removido do Silmarillion publicado por Christopher. Tolkien Mais uma vez de Lost Tales 1:So also I have assumed: the 'books of lore' that Bilbo gave to Frodo provided in the end the solution: they were 'The Silmarillion'. But apart from the evidence cited here, there is, so far as I know, no other statement on this matter anywhere in my father's writings; and (wrongly, as I think now) I was reluctant to step into the breach and make definite what I only surmised.
The letter of 1963 quoted above shows my father pondering the mode in which the legends of the Elder Days might be presented. The original mode ... had (by degrees) fallen away. When my father died in 1973 'The Silmarillion' was in a characteristic state of disarray: the earlier parts much revised or largely rewritten, the concluding parts still as he had left them some twenty years before; but in the latest writing there is no trace or suggestion of any 'device' or 'framework' in which it was to be set. I think that in the end he concluded that nothing would serve, and no more would be said beyond an explanation of how (within the imagined world) it came to be recorded.
Isso não é inteiramente verdade e, de fato, as últimas versões de vários dos contos ainda contêm o modo antigo; por exemplo, do comentário de CT sobre o Akallabeth (hoME 12):
Tolkien sendo Tolkien, isso, obviamente, não era de modo algum consistente e, embora esse dispositivo de enquadramento permanecesse em algumas das histórias, estava totalmente ausente dos outros, enquanto outros eram apresentados como obras de sabedoria pelos Eldar de Tol Eresséa, e outros foram novamente dados sem qualquer contexto.But with the removal of Pengolod and Ælfwine from the published text, the Akallabeth lost its anchorage in expressly Eldarin lore; and this led me (with as I now think an excess of vigilance) to alter the end of the paragraph.
A palavra final é deixada para Christopher Tolkien, em sua introdução ao Silmarillion:
Moreover, my father came to conceive The Silmarillion as a compilation, a compendious narrative, made long afterwards from sources of great diversity (poems, and annals, and oral tales) that had survived in agelong tradition.
E é aí que devemos aceitá-lo.