[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

For those of you who don't know this, if I recall correctly, the Appendices did not appear in the first printing of Return of the King.

The Appendices appeared in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings and in the Ace paperback edition, though not as much material as Tolkien originally wished to include. These are the same Appendices that appear again in the second edition with only a very small number of modifications and some additions, and these are the Appendices that still appear with a few corrections.

It is untrue to say that the Appendices did not appear in the first printing of The Return of the King.

It is true that some of the material originally planned for the Appendices only appears in Peoples of Middle-earth (HoME 12). But this material is at least of dubious canonicity.

See Peoples of Middle-earth (HoME 12), page 234, which assigns the marriage of Elrond to Celebrían to the year 2300 of the Third Age and later remarks:

The children [Elladan, Elrohir, and Arwen, the offspring of Elrond] were three parts of the Elven-race, but the doom spoken at their birth was that they should live even as the Elves, so long as their father remained in Middle-earth; but if he departed they should have then the choice either to pass over the Sea with him, or to become mortal, if they remained behind.

This seems to slightly expand on the account given in Appendix B, and we are told soon afterwards on the following page in Peoples of Middle-earth (HoME 12) that Elladan and Elrohir were born in 2349 of the Third Age and that Arwen was born in the same year.

But in Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings instead Elrond marries Celebrían in the year 109 of the Third Age, Elladan and Elrohir are born in 130, and Arwen is born in 241. This is a problem with Mithadan’s belief that the extra material in Peoples of Middle-earth (HoME 12) should be accepted on a level with the material published in Tolkien’s lifetime under his control, often this material does not agree with the material published in Tolkien’s lifetime under his control.

On page 257 of Peoples of Middle-earth (HoME 12) occurs in an earlier draft version of Appendix A (emphasis mine):

But to the children of Elrond a choice was also appointed: to pass with him from the circles of the world; or if they wedded with one of Mankind, to become mortal and die in Middle-earth.

This restatement of what would make the children of Elrond mortal is restated in the published Appendix A (emphasis mine):

But to the children of Elrond a choice was also appointed: to pass with him from the circles of the world; or if they remained, to become mortal and die in Middle-earth.

Apparently in his first writing of this passage Tolkien was not particularly thinking of Elladan and Elrohir and only later, when rewriting it, does he make the choice depend on whether the children of Elrond choose to depart with their father.

The difficulty is that this apparently final decision of Tolkien that the immortality of Elladan and Elrohir depends on whether or not they depart with their father is undercut by Tolkien’s definite statement in letter 153 of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien:

The end of his [Elrond’s] sons, Elladan and Elrohir, is not told: they delay their choice and remain for a while.

That almost all of this information comes from supposed notesin the Appendices creates the further difficulty that Tolkien at some point, I can’t find where at the moment, expressed the idea that he was no longer much bothered by supposed discrepancies within the Appendices because the most unrealistic thing in his Appendices compared to comparable real-world chronicles from the real world is that the real-world chronicles contain more discrepancies and inconsistencies than his Appendices.