I've said it before, and I'll say it again: one of the only few bad things about Tolkien's legendarium is that it makes 90% of all other fantasy worlds look either completely or somewhat mediocre in comparison.
Like, what do you mean you don't have a fictional language for your fantasy world? WEAKLINGS
This man right here gets it.
Yep, Tolkien's linguistic puns and translation jokes are legendary. Although it's not accurate to say the in-universe origin of the books is that an elf told the stories to Tolkien. Rather, Tolkien is translating them from a volume he found, written in Westron, called the Red Book of Westmarch. This contains Bilbo's book (The Hobbit), Frodo and Sam's additions to it, (LoTR), as well as Bilbo's translations of Elvish histories he encountered during his time in Rivendell (The Silmarillion). These were all in one volume and Tolkien himself made the editorial decision to publish them all separately. Even more fascinating, the Red Book is not even the original writings, which of course would have been lost by now to time and disintegration. It's actually a copy of the original, or probably a copy of a copy, multiple times removed. And it wasn't copied from the original, either, but from a copy that made it to Gondor where it was annotated and corrected. There's probably even more to its history that I'm forgetting, but yeah, even this kind of metatextual provenance was something Tolkien thought a lot about that very few writers even consider anymore. Which, of course, they're not obligated to; but the fact that Tolkien was even interested in that kind of thing just shows how above and beyond he went
