[Petty Dwarf]

Aiwendil and Maedhros suggested to incooperat the passage into the text, by deleting the indications of the spoken communication. This would mean to make the observer of scene unkown and to give the actuel wording to Rumil. The advantage is that we hold the passage as a part of the text.

It might give the wording to Rúmil, but it might not. The ultimate author of this version we're dealing with is Pengoloð. True, he styled it after Rúmil's in Valinor, but that version and its author stayed there. It can be left for the reader to decide which narrator the Yavanna line came from. If we leave the it ambiguous it can rightly come from either.

Antoine and I suggested to move the passage into a footnote. The advantage is that we could leave the passage in the mouth of Pengoloð without to much emendations in the passage itself. The disadvantage is that we lift a spoken word of Pengoloð to a writen word a scribed to or written by Pengoloð and that we creat a textual footnote (in contrast to editorial footnotes) which we have avioded so fare.

We are talking about Tolkiens last version of the Ainulindale written in a time when the Lord of the Rings was published (if I am not mistaken). So he left that passage and we should try the same.

Not really. He left that passage in with the entire conception of the Ælfwine-Pengoloð convo. We've already made the editorial decision to move away from that, just as CT did. We're actually very far off from Tolkien's last version of Ainulindalë, but sadly it's a concession we have to make because we can't make Tolkien's true version work without radical new writing. By the same token, that is an enormous editorial leap to make. By comparison placing the Yavanna tree remark in a footnote is slight.

I'm going to tentatively throw in with the footnote idea. There does seem to be a precedent for it considering the final part is a pure Pengoloð footnote. And we do know for sure this line is taken directly from him since he said it to Ælfwine.