[davem]

I hope everyone will bear with me here, because I’m going to repeat some of my earlier points, but I want to try & clarify my position.

There are different kinds of changes made in this new edition. The first kind is the change from:

’Thank goodness you don’t keep any boats on the west bank!’ said Frodo. ‘Can horses cross the river?’

‘They can go twenty miles north to Brandywine Bridge - or the can swim,’ answered Merry. (A Conspiracy Unmasked)

to ‘They can go ten miles north’, which is fine, because its correct, & should have been changed, but it was missed in the proof-reading stage.

Another kind of change happens in this chapter (The Great River), where the line ‘Nonetheless they saw no sign of an enemy that day nor the next.’ is altered (apparently correctly) to ‘They saw no sign of any enemy’. This doesn’t really change the meaning of the statement.

But I still say that changing ‘theydo not count the running years’ to ‘they need not count the running years’ alters the meaning & implication of Legolas’ statement.

Its the qualifier, ‘not for themselves’ that makes the difference. Of course, without that the statement ‘they do not count the running years’ would be incorrect, as Celeborn has already shown that they can count the passage of time. But with that qualifier it is changed from a statement of objective fact to a comment about the Elves relationship to time.

Despite what other’s have argued (very cogently) I think there is a difference between ‘do not’ & need not’ for this very reason - Legolas is speaking (& I think the whole context confirms this) about the Elves relationship to time - how they think about it, how they relate to it & what it means to them.

As I said, I can’t see that CT’s statement that his father simply inserted the word do to fill a lacuna in the copy he made for him, & that his father’s original need should stand doesn’t hold up. At this time Tolkien hadn’t come up with a definitive text - he was still working on it, & its likely that he decided on reading through the text that do expressed his thoughts better than need.

Whatever. The issue is whether there is enough evidence to justify the change back to need. I can’t see that there is enough evidence - certainly not as much as in the other two kinds of case I mentioned. Or even in the case of the change from ‘He (Pippin) was smaller than the other’ to ‘He was smaller than the others’.

We also have to take on board Bb’s point about CT’s role in this. Its one thing to change the Silmarillion texts to make them acceptable for publication, as they had never received Tolkien’s final approval, & it could be argued that maybe he would have accepted the changes CT made. But that’s a different issue, as it never came to that. He didn’t achieve a final form. In the case of this change we have Tolkien’s final approved version & CT has authorised a change which (imo) alters the meaning of a major character’s statement on an issue of central importance in the Legendarium on the flimsiest of evidence.

So its a matter of CT’s authority. This is not a case of making a change for the sake of coherence, or picking from variant readings, each of equal validity as was the case with the Sil texts. This is a matter of changing the meaning of a characters words in an established, authorised text. Does CT have the right to do that? And if he does, where does it stop? Could he make any change he wanted? And if he can change the text, why not someone else? If a new version of a chapter was discovered with greater changes in it, would it be right to replace the existing text with those later changes? Also, CT has shown (quite convincingly) that there is a later version of the Earendelnwe (as I pointed out earlier), yet that version is not used in this edition - why not? This change (& there may be more, I’m only focussing on this one because I’ve picked it up due to the fact that we’re currently reading this chapter in the read through), it seems to me, has been made with less justification than that one would have had. This touches on the Canonicity issue for me, as it changes LotR from a ‘canonical’ text & opens it up to the possibility of other changes.

Is this new version ‘better’ than the old one? Its the first revision not authorised by Tolkien himself. It seems to me that if this one is accepted then we’re crediting CT with equal rights over the text to his father. Does he actually have those rights?