[Child of the 7th Age]

Davem,

Hmm, don't know if that alleviates or exacerbates the problem. Of course, printers errors should be identified & removed, but my difficulty is with changes like the one that started this thread off, which alter the (percieved) meaning of a character's statements. I accept that some changes are the result of annotations made by Tolkien in his copies of LotR, some in notes that he made. On that basis such changes could be made in order to achieve the version of LotR that he would have wanted.

I heartily concur with your first sentence, in the sense that these edits are just part of a long process of revisions, which were initially begun by JRRT and then continued by his son after his death. If you are uncomfortable with the earlier process, you may be hesitent about the later one (and vice versa). Despite the hoopla over this particular publication, I honestly don't see a huge difference between what is happening now and what occurred before.....except for one thing.

Some of the edits in the present edition were not initially the product of CT himself, but of Cristina and Wayne Hammond. When I signed up for the Tolkien Collector several years ago, I wrote Cristina about their work as librarians. She included a return note where she mentioned they had been commissioned by Harper to do the editorial work for the new 50th anniversary LotR volume plus a volume of annotations to that book. She also stated that all their suggested edits would be reviewed and approved by CT. This delegation of authority doesn't surprise me. CT is getting on in years, and perhaps no longer does the nitty gritty work he used to do. But it does suggest that the circle of editors has widened: we've gone beyond the initial group of the Tolkien family to the "next generation" of editors. This, I think, is an important transition. Like Aiwendil , even if I didn't always agree with CT, I always trusted CT: he treated his father's text with integrity and didn't consciously try to substitute his own interpretations. Now we have a new group of scholars who have excellent credentials, but don't have the same ties of personal loyalty to the family.

As to what is a printer's error and what effects the meaning of a character's statement, that is a very fine line. As Davem has so aptly shown, the change of a single word can have significance. And there were so many drafts of material at different points in Tolkien's life, that some element of choice is necessarily involved.

Of the hundreds of post 1973 edits, some of these changes may constitute something more than correcting a printer's error. One of the interesting things I noticed in Hammond's bibliography is that the earlier editions, those written while JRRT was alive, have a line by line account of every edit. The later editions written after the author's death may list only one edit as being the "most important". Of course, there is a value judgment here on the part of the editor, since we don't even see the others deemed "less important." This statement from the Unwin paperback edition of 1979 is typical:

This latest edition has been reset and minor corrections have been made throughout.

Bb mentioned earlier she was concerned that this edition was being marketed as "the edition Tolkien would have wanted." But that has happened before, if not with such strong language. Ever since the snafu between Ace and Ballentine, Tolkien's works have often included some kind of statement indicating that the particular edition is to be regarded as the "authoritative" text that the author wanted. In 1983, the following more explicit statement was added by CT for the first time, undoubtedly in acknowledgment of his own continuing hand with the text. The italics are mine:

The text of this edition incorporates all corrections and revisions intended by its author and, taken with the other two volumes, constitutes the authoritative edition...

The key words in this statement are "revisions", "intended", and "authoritative." Revisions signify more than corrections, and intended could cover the judgments made by CT as well as those actually done by his father. The present marketing job is more slick, but I honestly think the editing process is not too different from that reflected in these earlier editions.

Like Aiwendil , I still have basic faith in CT and the integrity of the text. And it will be interesting to see the specific 360 changes made and to raise the type of question that Davem has raised here. Yet, overall, given the fact that JRRT himself changed his view on so many things in Middle-earth so many times, we are never going to have 100 percent certainty. We have to hope that the editors chosen show integrity and circumspection. So far, that has been the case.