[Aiwendil]

Bethberry wrote:

Everyone seems to assume that since CT was so close to his father, he knows what JRRT intended. Yet is this a reliable assumption? Instead of the difficulty of determining what one author "intended", now we have the situation of determining what two minds "intended".

Ah, but I didn't say that CT knows precisely or can divine his father's wishes. I said rather that his goal is clearly to present the material as his father intended. It may seem a trivial and obvious point, but I think it needs making. Some of the fears that have been expressed concerning changes to the work (particularly concerning possible future changes) seem to me to be overreactions for just that reason. CT would never implement a change to LotR merely because he thought it would improve the text. He would, I'm sure, never contemplate any change remotely like "gay" > "happy". None of the changes he has implemented (as far as I know) are in any way like that; they have all been made based purely on textual evidence concerning what Tolkien intended the text to say.

But it seems to me that people do not stop to ask what might have been the role of CT's own interpretive pov which influenced how he understood or even remembered things about his father's work. And, after all, he is now eighty years old. I do not wish to be mean when I say that at eighty the memory can play tricks, even with those who keep impeccable records.

Actually, I fail to see how his memory is relavant at all. Where has he made a change based solely on his recollection of his father's wishes? If there is such a change in the new edition I would be rather surprised. As a matter of fact, even in reading HoMe, where his commentary is quite extensive, one hardly ever comes across a reference to a recollection of his - in fact, apart from the frequent use of "my father" to refer to JRRT one could hardly guess that the commentator even knew the author.

Every argument that I recall CT making about his father's work anywhere is one based on textual evidence rather than recollection.

I am not in any way disparaging the work of Christopher Tolkien. I am simply saying that in any powerful voice which speaks for an author, there will be questions of direction, choice, interpretation, context.

In a way, that's certainly true - as indeed it must be of anyone that approaches any author's work.

Yet I must say that I don't see it as being all that significant in this case. To refer again to HoMe - CT's commentary is almost never interpretive. The arguments he makes and the conclusions he reaches are almost exclusively concerned with matters such as the dates of composition of various texts and the literal meaning of certain passages.

Now it's certainly possible that his particular substantive interpretation of his father's work may have in some cases influenced his choices in preparing the new edition of LotR - I'll grant that. But it seems to me that the proper response is not to question the process in principle, but rather to examine his analysis of particular instances in an objective way. When a scientist publishes a paper, the reaction of his or her peers is not to ask "How might this person's particular world-view have biased his work?" but rather "Is this person's conclusion a valid one, based on the available evidence?"

I don't mean to suggest that I find the consideration of Christopher's role with regard to his father's work worthless or uninteresting. Rather, I think that there is more meat, as it were, in questioning his particular analyses objectively than in questioning his involvement in the abstract.