Quote:
Originally Posted by R.R.J Tolkien
Nice to see you on this forum as well my wise friend. I am not one to question you so it seems I must accept maiar was not fully developed yet. However the strength of the balrogs and at least some of the history of them seemed clearly finished in the letters of tolkien at this point. He had even previously tried to publish what he saw as a consistent [few touch ups] sillmarillion with the LOTR. I would also say while he may have never totally finished the sillmarillion due to lack of energy in old age, he thought it close to finished and tells of its history many times in its letters that matches the published sillmarillion we have today.
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While I wouldn't advise anyone to accept everything I say without question, I appreciate your vote of confidence and especially your kind words about my essays; thank you.
The 1977 Silmarillion is not a great guide as to what Tolkien's latest intentions for the First Age were (though his intentions would undoubtedly have continued to evolve had he lived longer). Tolkien contemplated a lot of major revisions late in his life and the Later Silmarillion (
HoMe X-XI) has a lot of examples of points on which Tolkien never made up his mind. I do think there is solid evidence in some cases (such as the excision of Elfwine) that Tolkien more or less definitively decided the change should be made, but he did not engage in large-scale rewriting of established texts towards the end of his life. As a result, much of the Silm is based on Tolkien's mid-ish 1950s (pre-Myths Transformed) conception of the legendarium, although some passages are based on much earlier texts that Christopher mixed later ideas into to achieve at least partial consistency. It is natural, then, that there is a good deal of compatibility between the 1977 Silm and letters that Tolkien wrote in the mid-1950s such as Letter 144 (as you point out). But Tolkien explored a lot of different ideas (some radically so) later on.
Christopher Tolkien did not entirely ignore his father's later ideas; he removed the Second Prophecy of Mandos and the Elfwine framing device, although in the latter case he did not replace it with a different framing device (something he discussed the downsides of in the Foreword to
The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1), but in general he did not implement radical changes to the mythology. I don't want this post to come off as an attack on Christopher because I think he did a remarkable job when faced with an unenviable situation, but I do not think that the 1977 Silm was intended to be treated as definitive or that doing so helps us gain a better understanding of Tolkien's First Age works. I'm perfectly happy to use the 1977 Silm as a baseline for discussion and speculation, but I have no compunctions about putting other material above it. This is to some extent a subjective process (Galin has referred to it as assembling one's own "personal Silmarillion", which is a phrase I like), so as far as Lore discussions go, I think it's more worthwhile to pay attention to the full scope of the evolving legendarium. (I've already said my piece about the idea of canon and why I don't think it's useful in one of my essays and in the TORn thread you linked to above, so I won't bore you with it again.
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I'm not sure how much sense any of this makes because I am really behind on sleep and a bit mentally frazzled from grad school plus a large personal project, but this is sorta where I'm coming from. I know a lot of people don't find this level of uncertainty to be satisfying but it actually makes the Silmarillion more like Primary World mythologies which I think is neat. And the Bilbo/Red Book transmission allows for a lot of Silmarillion material from various eras to potentially be retained as in-universe texts (by analogy with the First Edition of The Hobbit, which was replaced on bookshelves but not excised from its place in the internal source tradition of the Red Book), which I think was part of Tolkien's intention towards the end of his life. That's a subject for another (more awake) post, though. But it doesn't necessarily make them "definitive".
There is of course a ton of room for disagreement and debate on the subject of what Tolkien might have done. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm pretty sure that I'm in the minority with my view of Elfwine vs Bilbo, though it's something that I personally think is relatively straightforward as far as Later Silmarillion issues go.