[jallanite]

Originally Posted by mhagain

Based on that I don't think we've much choice but to accept the published Silmarillion as being anything other than in accordance with JRRT's wishes, which distils the debate down to whether or not it's what JRRT would have done had he lived.

Anyone is still at perfect liberty to personally approve or disapprove what Christopher Tolkien has done, regardless of whether it might have been or not been in accord with his father’s wishes. Personally I generally approve of what Christopher Tolkien has done, which is about the best that can be reasonably hoped for.

He'd become too distracted by cosmological and philosophical matters, and his apparent preferred direction would - IMO have destroyed the myth of the Trees. I think CJRT made the right decisions here.

J. R. R. Tolkien did not intend to destroy the myth of the Two Trees. Much of it appears in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings. In Morgoth’s Ring (HoME X) J. R. R. Tolkien announced his attention to rework his universe into a more realistic round-Earth universe, but still to retain his older flat-Earth cosmogony as Mannish legend, thus allowing the old Silmarillion concepts to still exist, but now to be considered as distorted mythology. He was somewhat imagining a world like that of Classical Greece and Rome, in which almost everyone who was educated knew that the Earth was really spherical in shape following the scientific findings of natural philosophers but still retold the old myths, now commonly known as “the lies of the poets” .

For example, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses the poem begins with a creation story taken from then popular natural philosophy in which a god or gods creates the universe from a confused mass of atoms. Ovid’s Earth is apparently spherical. Ovid writes, beginning with Bk. I lines 32–51 (A. S. Kline’s translation):

When whichever god it was had ordered and divided the mass, and collected it into separate parts, he first gathered the earth into a great ball so that it was uniform on all sides. Then he ordered the seas to spread and rise in waves in the flowing winds and pour around the coasts of the encircled land. He added springs and standing pools and lakes, and contained in shelving banks the widely separated rivers, some of which are swallowed by the earth itself, others of which reach the sea and entering the expanse of open waters beat against coastlines instead of riverbanks. He ordered the plains to extend, the valleys to subside, leaves to hide the trees, stony mountains to rise: and just as the heavens are divided into two zones to the north and two to the south, with a fifth and hotter between them, so the god carefully marked out the enclosed matter with the same number, and described as many regions on the earth. The equatorial zone is too hot to be habitable; the two poles are covered by deep snow; and he placed two regions between and gave them a temperate climate mixing heat and cold.

But later when telling the myth of Phaethon, Ovid unscientifically pictures the Earth as flat with the sun-god rising in the air every day from its eastern parts. See Bk. II line 1 and following.

On page 374 of Morgoth’s Ring J. R. R. Tolkien records in note 2:

The cosmogonic myths are Númenorian, blending Elven-lore with human myth and imagination. A note should say that the Wise of Númenor recorded that the making of stars was not so, nor of Sun and Moon. For Sun and stars were all older than Arda. But the placing of Arda amidst the Stars and under [?guard] of the Sun was due to Manwë and Varda before the assault of Melkor.

Seemingly Tolkien planned to insert similar notes in his Silmarillion when eventually completed. Tolkien in this fashion would be able to retain both his Silmarillion stores of a flat Earth and a more scientific depiction of the cosmology of his world without having to explain everything scientifically.

Beginning with the section “Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth” in Morgoth’s Ring and going through the following two HoME books, when referencing the period before the first rising of the Sun in the Silmarillion tradition, Tolkien always imagines normal days and sunlight, not darkness under the stars. He distinguishes clearly what was written in the Silmarillion document from what supposedly really happened.

In The Hobbit Tolkien in the chapter 8 “Flies and Spiders” originally wrote a sentence which imagines a late first raising of Moon and Sun:

In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight before the raising of the Sun and Moon; and afterwards they wandered in the forests that grew beneath the sunrise.

In 1966 Tolkien revised this sentence to remove the raising of the Sun and Moon:

In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, chapter 4 “A Journey in the Dark”, Gimli recites a poem about the awakening of his distant ancestor Durin:

      The world was young, the mountains green,
      No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
      No words were laid on stream or stone
      When Durin woke and walked alone.

This is set in an ancient time when the moon is still unmarked, but according to Silmarillion chronology the moon should not yet even exist when Durin woke.

Tolkien’s account of the elder Days as given by Treebeard also disagrees with the Silmarillion account.

Seemingly Tolkien when writing The Lord of the Rings decided that no era in which the Earth had been sunless ever existed, except in the Mannish tales incorporated in The Silmarillion. He later consistently distinguished between Silmarillion tradition and traditions deriving from the Wise.

I'm not sure if I'm in a minority or if this is a controversial statement, but I also hugely approve of what CJRT did with the Ruin of Doriath. The image of Thingol's death is one of the most abiding (and saddest) memories from my first reading, and I even think JRRT would have given it the nod as "what really happened" (and no doubt niggled endlessly over some of the finer points).

In The War of the Jewels (HoME XI), page 22, Christopher Tolkien writes:

This story was not lightly or easily conceived, but was the outcome of long experimentation among alternative conceptions. In this work Guy Kay took a major part, and the chapter that I finally wrote owes much to my discussions with him. It is, and was, obvious that a step was being taken of a different order from any other ‘manipulation’ of my father’s own writing in the course of the book: even in the case of the story of The Fall of Gondolin, to which my father had never returned, something could be contrived without introducing radical changes in the narrative. It seemed at that time that there were elements inherent in the story of the Ruin of Doriath as it stood that were radically incompatible with ‘The Silmarillion’ as projected, and that there was here an inescapable choice: either to abandon that conception, or else to alter the story. I think now that this was a mistaken view, and that the undoubted difficulties could have been, and should have been, surmounted without so far overstepping the bounds of the editorial function.

In short Christopher Tolkien disagrees with you. He does not give his account the nod. In any case, Thingol’s death is part of all recorded versions. The site project version is to be found here: http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showthread.php?t=4425 .

It's as if there were 12 Homers each of who wrote their own Iliad, then a later author assembles them into an account which is neither wholly accurate to the 12 sources nor reflective of an actual historical Trojan War.

In part, yes. Christopher Tolkien often goes out of his way to point out minor differences between different versions.

I think that view is actually quite representative of JRRT's own, and may be one reason why CJRT is happy to let the published work stand, even if dissatisfied with much of what he did in constructing it.

I think it more the case that he finds it impossible to generally produce a better version. I was once involved with a product on this site to produce a new version of the Silmarillion. All of those then involved resigned from the project at different times, I first, because of the difficulty of determining which of J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings would take priority when they disagreed with one another. Again and again there was no way of telling what Tolkien would have finally decided, and we did not want to produce just a fan version of what we thought was best, but to do a better job at producing the Silmarillion than Christopher Tolkien had done. It turned out not to be possible to produce the kind of document we wanted.