Certainly Tolkien went down some strange sidetracks in his later Me writings, but I think we must separate works like LotR, TH & Smith, etc, which were in effect completed & something like The Silmarillion which wasn't & never could be. The 1977 Silmarillion which CT put together is
not Tolkien's Silmarillion & I don't think CT would claim it is. Actually, HoME (&UT) is the Silmarillion. The Sil is not a continuous coherent narrative. To quote from Flieger's new book (like Child I'm working my way through it)
Quote:
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In this multiplicity, his mythology would imitate without copying the structure of the many-visioned real-world mythologies with which he was familiar & on which he modelled his own. He knew from the beginning that his music must include not just the stories themsleves but also the storytellers & bards & scribes & translators who were the offspring of his thought. He saw clearly that in order to follow the overall pattern of hte great British & northern European mythologies on which it was modelled, his mythos must both create & depend on a variety of voices & methods of transmission & must appear in many recensions over a great(if largely imaginary) span of time. He, therefore, took pains to orchestrate in many different forms & in many different voices the stories that comprise the central episodes that tell of his heroic & often tragic figures & that express the concerns , the beliefs, & the worldview of his mythis Elves &, later, his Men.
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In other words, for all that some episodes may fail to 'enchant', even (for some readers) 'break the spell ', HoME
is (including CT's commentary) The Silmarillion - or as close to it as it is possible to come - that Tolkien intended. It, as Flieger states, was never intended to be a single story thread, but rather a collection of different accounts by different hands in different forms from different perspectives. The 'Silmarillion' that was (kind of) 'complete' before LotR was written was not
The Silmarillion, but rather one version of it. It wasn't so much that he kept on trying different approaches/producing different versions till he 'got it right' (though this was
part of his motivation) - the different versions were differing
accounts, often intended to stand alongside each other. The fact that he kept all his different versions rather than throwing them away, shows, I think, that it was not a case of later versions simply replacing, & so making redundant, earlier ones. From this perspective, the Book of Lost Tales is equally as 'valid' as the 'Silmarillions' of the 1930's & 1950's.
In terms of their power to 'enchant' on the other hand, some of the versions are more successful than others - but that could be said of the variants of primary world mythologiest that we have recieved.
In short, there isn't
A Silmarillion in the way that there is
A Lord of the Rings, because there was never
intended to be. There was a version of it available in the 30's which could have been brought into publishable form - if any publisher had wanted it, but because of the nature of the 'project' Tolkien would have carried on working on the other versions.
So, in answer to your original question, the rejection of The Sil by A&U wasn't the 'tragedy' you imply. Publication of that version wouldn't necessarily have 'freed Tolkien up' to write other stories. He would very probably have carried on writing the other 'Silmarilions'.
None of this is to deny the great disappointment he felt at its rejection, but as he himself put it 'The Silmarils are in my
heart'....