[Maédhros]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

I was partly referring to prose style. The alternative you provided I found indigestible, even as a devotee of the King James Bible - there are only so many "hithers" one passage can take....

I guess that you are not a fan of Tolkien's Lost Tales.
There is a difference in the prose style of the Later Tuor from 1951 and the story in The Fall of Gondolin from 1916-17. (Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin )
From Unfinished Tales: Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin

The tale of Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin (as "The Fall of Gondolin" is entitled in the early MSS) remained untouched for many years, though my father at some stage, probably between 1926 and 1930, wrote a brief, compressed version of the story to stand as part of The Silmarillion (a title which, incidentally, first appeared in his letter to The Observer of 20 February 1938); and this was changed subsequently to bring it into harmony with altered conceptions in other parts of the book. Much later he began work on an entirely refashioned account, entitled "Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin." It seems very likely that this was written in 1951, when The Lord of the Rings was finished but its publication doubtful. Deeply changed in style and bearings, yet retaining many of the essentials of the story written in his youth, "Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin" would have given in fine detail the which legend that constitutes the brief 23rd chapter of the published Silmarillion, but, grievously, he went no further than the coming of Tuor and Voronwë to the last gate and Tuor's sight of Gondolin across the plain of Tumladen. To his reasons for abandoning it there is no clue.

It is thus the remarkable fact that the only full account that my father ever wrote of the story of Tuor's sojourn in Gondolin, his union with Idril Celebrindal, the birth of Eärendil, the treachery of Maeglin, the sack of the city, and the escape of the fugitives – a story that was a central element in his imagination of the First Age – was the narrative composed in his youth. There is no question, however, that that (most remarkable) narrative is not suitable for inclusion in this book. It is written in the extreme archaistic style that my father employed at that time, and it inevitably embodies conceptions out of keeping with the world of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in its published form. It belongs with the rest of the earliest phase of the mythology, "the Book of Lost Tales": itself a very substantial work, of the utmost interest to one concerned with the origins of Middle-earth, but requiring to be presented in a lengthy and complex study if at all.

The problem of putting the two texts together as CT points out is that the earlier version has an archaic style, with respect to the Later Tuor account in Unfinished Tales. The point is that: Is the composition of a full "readable" text of the Tale of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin up to the escape of the fugitives, to be published as a separte work, such as the CoH, regardless with more editorial alterations because of the archaic elements in the earlier tale (and to have a single style prose style of Later Tuor), would that not better than not at all? How many people will not ever know of this story, such as the CoH, if CT had not published it this year? To me, the positives far outweight the negatives, even though this is a moot point because CT probably will never do it.