[Aiwendil]

I'm very glad that we've come to an agreement on principle 7 itself. I think the remaining issues that you've raised are minor ones.

the only question I have is what decides the 'greater' or 'lesser precedence' of a text?

As I understand it, principles 1-3 establish the precedence, or priority given to the various texts. So for example LotR is a text of greater precedence than LQ, according to principle 1. LQ is of greater precedence than The Book of Lost Tales, according to principle 2. I think that these principles are relatively self-sufficient in terms of determining an order of priority among most texts. There may be a few instances where we have two texts that cannot be easily prioritized, but I think those cases are quite rare. As far as I can recall, none of the many grey areas we have found ourselves in so far has fallen into that category. The grey areas that we have dealt with (inevitably) have mostly revolved around 2b and 5, which essentially govern cases where a text given higher priority by 1 and 2 is, for some other reason, not to be used. There are indeed ambiguities here, as we have seen (cf. debates on Myths Transformed, 7 Balrogs, etc.)

So, in short: I think that our present principles establish fairly well which texts have priority over which. Moreover, I think that the ambiguities that do arise probably cannot be systematically dealt with. That is, there is bound to be some ambiguity in the principles.

Also, there is the point of dealing with parallel texts such as the Annals of Aman and the LQ2 which were composed at roughly the same time, and often present variants of the same story. These are I think, issues, that need perhaps some clearer guiding principle, even though they are not [seemingly] thorny issues our current principles are designed to address.

I'm forced to disagree; I think that our principles do address this. Insofar as simply establishing priority, there are two principles to consider for AAm vs. LQ2. The first is number 2, which gives LQ2 precedence by virtue of its later composition date (only a few years, perhaps, but later nonetheless). So, just going by that, all contradictions between the two would have to be decided in favor of LQ2. The only exceptions would be in cases covered by number 5 - where the later text is demonstratably "in error" (as is the case for the cursory LQ2 revisions found in HoMe XI). There is, and there can be, no universal rule for deciding when the text is "demonstratably in error"; that's simply one of the ambiguities we have to live with.

But the above discussion, and indeed the relevant principles, only refer to contradictions between two texts. I think this is important to remember. If text A has precedence over text B, then all contradictions between the two must be resolved in favor of A. But this does not mean that we can't use text B to form part of the narrative (or else we couldn't have used the BoLT Fall of Gondolin). What it does mean is that if we use text B, we must correct any contradictions with text A.

This leads into a new question - and one that I think you were getting at. Our principles as they stand tell us only certain things. One thing they do not strictly tell us is what to use as our base text for any given section. There are guidelines on this - number 3, for example, allows us to use text created by Christopher Tolkien if there's no primary text available. But there is nothing in the principles that forces us, for example, to use the old FoG. This has so far been left to the group to decide.

Personally, I'm not sure it would be a good idea to introduce a principle that tells us, or tries to tell us, what text to use in any situation. Any such principle would, I think, either be too vague and ambiguous to be useful or be too strict.