[Child of the 7th Age]

I've been reading this thread with interest, but haven't had time to throw in my two cents until now. Davem's question is an intriguing one:

Although one question remains (unfortunately, the central one here). Does altering a few words in the text and thereby altering the meaning in some respects create a new "original work"? Hmm, perhaps some further research is on order ...

I will give a wide berth to any legal questions or copyright issues. I'm married to a lawyer and know when it's best to keep my nose out of something on which I don't have the slightest expertise. But I do know something about vairant editons of LotR. As we look at the 2005 revisions, we need to keep in mind the overall publishing history of the book.

From the very beginning, the text of LotR was never set in stone. Errors by publishers, Tolkien's attempts to correct them, and his own efforts to make the Legendarium more "consistent"--all this led to numerous revisions. Nor did this process stop with Tolkien's death. From 1974 on, CT sent numerous suggested "corrections" to Allen & Unwin, and later Harper-Collins. When LotR was placed in word-processing files in 1994, further efforts were made to "standardize" the text and iron out supposed errors, all this long after Tolkien's death.

Douglas Anderson's preface to the 50th Anniversary edition contains a brief history of some of these changes. But if you want a detailed list of all the variations in the text, just look at J. R. R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Biography that was compiled by Wayne Hammond in 1993. There are over 400 pages of very tiny print (Child has to hold the page two inches from her nose to make out anything!). Some of the pages contain descriptions of editions, different cover illustrations, the size of particular printruns, etc., but a lot of it is annotating hundreds, perhaps altogether thousands, of variations in the text. (This is sometimes the only way you can tell if you have a particular printing.) Not only have punctuation and words been changed, but even the maps themselves. For example, the version of the general map of Middle-earth redrawn by Christopher Tolkien for UT was used in some later editions of the LotR itself, starting with the Unicorn editions of 1983.

I don't think you can see these current revisions --360 in number--as being all that different from the earlier history of the book. Tinkering with the text, the illustrations and the maps has been going on for several decades, and each edition that comes out prides itself on being "definitive"-- the one closest to what the author really intended. This current example is little different in this regard. (I honestly think it would be possible to go through the earlier texts listed in Hammond and find other examples of the kind of question that Davem raised, that could generate debate if examined closely.) So my personal opinion is that what's happening now is not all that different from what happened before. We've managed to accept the earlier revisions with little problem, or no sense that the author's text has been violated, and I suspect the same will be true with these changes as well.

Finally, I don't think we can begin to assess the nature of these 360 changes until we see the guide that Hammond and his wife C. Scully will be putting out that will deal in depth with each change (as well as many other things). I stumbled upon a website with a forum where Hammond popped up to answer somkeone's question about the changes in the text. Like Davem, this poster expressed concern about what was going on with the new edition:

Have the 400+ "corrections" by Christopher Tolkien been listed anywhere? I'm pretty finicky about such things.

Hammond replied by exlaining they'd all be in the upcoming guide but that the sheer volume of material they'd located kept pushing back the publishing date:

Believe me, Christina and I are working very hard to finish this. The main reason for its delay is that we've found so much new information about Tolkien in libraries and archives that we've needed more time to process and describe it all. What was originally to be only one volume became two, which added complications of format and indexing. Also, along the way,.... Christina's father died, and I've continued to have a full-time library job which has become even more demanding with the years.

Anyway, we're sorry that you're having to wait for the Companion and Guide, and appreciate that you're looking forward to it.

Hammond also indicated that all future editions of the LotR would likely include these same changes "as well as corrections to any other errors that might come to light."