[Lalwendë]

Legendarium is an archaic word chosen by Tolkien to distinguish between his created faux mythology and a genuine one.

What we are forgetting is that Tolkien intentionally left holes in his work as real mythology has holes. He left enigmas that cannot and maybe ought not be explained:

even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).

It is an incredible work of forgery on one level, a work which makes you believe you are reading real myths and legends. I could go on for days listing all the clever tricks he uses, but one of them is to fool you into thinking there is something else, just there, over the horizon...make you think there are untold tales. But there aren't. It's the scenery. And he warns us that like Fairy Gold, if we go chasing after it we might not find it, nor might we be very pleased when we get there and find it was just an illusion:

I am doubtful myself about the undertaking [of finalizing The Silmarillion]. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Númenor and the flight of Elendil.

All this wanting to 'perfect' Tolkien's work - where does it end? We don't do this to other writers or artists, we don't scrape little bits off Monet's Lily Pond and make it nicer! We're free to use it as a basis for witty parody and paint a new one with a shopping trolley dumped in the middle (like Banksy did) but not to rearrange the original to fit our own needs. I have to say that this tendency displays a lot about Tolkien fans - do we have this Asperger's type tendency to be pedants and want to alphabetise everything? Have it in order? Gather every 'factoid' as a geek might say? Can't we just enjoy what we have rather than treating his work as some science experiment to be 'written up' at some point in the future? At the heart of this lies a simple decision to be made - do you view Tolkien's work as literature or as 'product'?

Tolkien has had people fooled - making us think he left gaps to be filled, to be rearranged, but he left them there just because. He was an Artist. Leave Him Alone!