[Aiwendil]

Petty Dwarf wrote:

I left it XXX because we'd have to ask who was it that saw her like that. The Noldor? All the Eldalië? Pengoloð? That choice may go beyond editing.

If we were going to go this way, I think that my earlier proposal is as good as anything:

But {think not, Ælfwine, that} the shapes wherein the Great Ones array themselves are not at all times like unto the shapes of kings and queens of the Children of Ilúvatar; for at whiles they may clothe them in their own thought, made visible in forms terrible and wonderful. And {I myself, long years agone,} some in the land of the Valar have seen Yavanna in the likeness of a Tree; and the beauty and majesty of that form could not be told in words, not unless all the things that grow in the earth, from the least unto the greatest, should sing in choir together, making unto their queen an offering of song to be laid before the throne of Ilúvatar.

I think keeping the sentence intact as a footnote is best because the intent of the sentence is expressing the intensely personal.

I'm not sure that this is relevant, but I disagree. I don't see the passage as having fundamentally to do with Pengolodh at all, but rather with the Valar.

Maedhros wrote:

How is it that in these two passages, we had no trouble keeping the text into our main narrative yet have have the problem in section §25.? Am I missing something here?

This is an excellent point, and a subtle one I think. If I follow you, your argument is: in the Ainulindale D we have instances such as:

But {thou must understand, Ælfwine,} that when the Ainur had beheld this habitation in a vision and had seen the Children of Ilúvatar arise therein

These clearly suggest that some or much of the surrounding text is the invention of Pengolodh. That is - surely he is not simply reading Rumil's text and adding only phrases like "thou must understand, Aelfwine". He is giving an oral account, no doubt based closely on Rumil's written account, but not matching it word for word. We have so far ignored the fact that in the old version it was an oral account and in our new version it is a written one; we have not tried to wipe out Pengolodh's embellishments and reconstruct Rumil's written text because there is no way of establishing which words exactly Rumil used. Instead, we have more or less pretended that Pengolodh's oral version is exactly Rumil's written version, with only obvious first and second person phrases removed.

I need to think about this situation a little bit more before I can tell you what I think ought to be done.