[NCSteve]

Occam's Razor is never any fun, though.

I have heard what you are saying before. I think it was derived from something Christopher Tolkein said. However, as I remember it, CT said Bombadil was a bedtime story, but he didn't know whether he pre-dated the history of Middle Earth.

[AnAmericanMother]

Well, Tolkien started putting his universe together in the trenches in WWI, and Christopher Tolkien wasn't born until 1924. But the Hobbit wasn't published until 1936, so it seems as though the bedtime stories would predate FOTR.

It's o.k., though, as C.S. Lewis has George MacDonald tell his narrator in The Great Divorce, poets (in that case, Keats) oftentimes aren't entirely clear about what they meant.