[Galin]

Originally Posted by cellurdur

I think you are making too much of an effort to make the statements contradict each other. As things stand the later works are all in agreement.

Well I could say something similar concerning your opinions For example...

Elendil's height is not reduced in anyway. In the Unfinished Tales he gave us an accurate exact height for Elendil being around 7'10. In notes elsewhere he generalised that Isildur and Elendil had been 7ft. The statements once more are not contradictory unless you want them to be.

... why assume the 7 foot reference is not accurate? I could say the statements are not in accord unless you want Tolkien to be speaking so generally that when he writes 7 feet for both Isildur and Elendil he really imagines Elendil 10 inches taller [!], with the reason to think so being some description he may not have even remembered at the time, or may have been purposely revising.

There is no indication in the passage concerned that Elendil is taller than 7 feet. And I note Hammond and Scull's presentation of the two accounts in their Reader's Companion to The Lord of the Rings [see Numenoreans in the index, the first reference here is to the 'rangar account' published posthumously in Unfinished Tales]:

'Thus Elendil, by this account, was apparently almost eight feet tall. But in another late, unpublished note Tolkien wrote that...'

And then they quote the seven feet tall description. Well, when I note a given idea and then plan to introduce a seeming contradiction, or at least a reasonably arguable one, I use 'but, however' as well.

When I say a rugby team was full of 6 footers, I don't mean that everyone in the team was exactly 6 ft. I mean that everyone was at least 6ft.

And in my interpretation of Tolkien's reaction to the artwork of Pauline Baynes I do not say, of course, that Tolkien meant every Elda was exactly 6 foot 6.

Unless the information contradicts itself I see no reason to not accept the harmonious version.

(...) 'Some' of the great kings were taller than the average, which is not noted here. In other passages we learn that the average height was 7ft.

That's not what Tolkien wrote in any case, in the passage I interpreted above.