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Old 05-29-2016, 04:33 PM   #31
Galin
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
 
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 1,031
Galin is a guest at the Prancing Pony.Galin is a guest at the Prancing Pony.
For me Tolkien's "final" version of Galadriel and Celeborn is what he himself decided to publish about the two. He can tinker all he wants in his private papers, some of which are so adumbrated they needed to be paraphrased by Christopher Tolkien, but was he really going to step on this history, already in print (thus already thought of as internally true to his readership), creating another arguably notable Galadriel-related inconsistency within the internal corpus?

We can't know of course... but we can know are those ideas Tolkien considered for publication and said "yes" to [I think JRRT just forgot what was in print and was influenced by his chat with Lord Halsbury. And for all we know the late story remained in such an unfinished state because Tolkien finally remembered -- the same day he began the new version possibly -- what he had already published about Nerwen. Just one possibility among others of course].

Anyway what is clear is what Tolkien himself actually published about Galadriel (banned for her role in the Rebellion), and Celeborn (a Sinda). Christopher Tolkien even remarks that (he thinks) if his father had remembered that Celebrimbor had been published as a Feanorean that he surely would not have altered him to being a Teler...

... the same should seemingly go for Celeborn and Galadriel, I would think.
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