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Old 07-28-2003, 10:11 PM   #13
Aiwendil
Late Istar
 
Join Date: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,224
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Sting

Novnarwen, you bring up an interesting point. For The Fall of Gondolin, we freely used nearly the whole of the Lost Tales version, for no reason other than that it provided a more full story than all later versions. For the Ainulindale (and thus far for the Valaquenta) we have not even considered the Lost Tales. Of course, one could say that we simply do not need the Lost Tales material for these early sections in the same way that we needed it for the Fall of Gondolin. But one could also argue that if we used Lost Tales material in FoG simply in the interest of retaining certain virtues of that account, why not use the Lost Tales in a similarly liberal manner throughout?

There are two related questions here:

1. Is the Valaquenta we are creating intended to be the Valaquenta - that is, does it purport to be the actual document within Arda called "Valaquenta"? Or is the text we are creating something else - a disembodied narrative with no fictional existence within Arda itself? We faced the same decision long ago with the Quenta Silmarillion and decided upon the latter - if we were creating the Quenta Silmarillion, we could not, of course, include the full versions of 'Turin' or 'Tuor'. But so far it has been, I believe, generally assumed that the Ainulindale and Valaquenta texts we are creating are meant to be the actual within-Arda texts. At least, I've been operating with that assumption (though it may be unwarranted). Certainly the Ainulindale discussions centering around authorship and such seem to assume a within-Arda Ainulindale.

If this is a within-Arda Valaquenta, then there is no way Lost Tales material can be incorporated, since it is certain that they were not part of Tolkien's later thoughts on the actual words used in that document. Otherwise, we at least remain open to the possibility of Lost Tales material being included.

2. Is there any Lost Tales material for this part of the story that we can (or should) use? We're looking for details that we can be fairly certain were not rejected later, but were merely omitted from the later, compressed versions. Moreover, we need details that can be easily and logically inserted into the later Valaquenta. Here we face a difficulty that we did not have in dealing with FoG - there, we adopted not only the details of the old Tale but also it's structure. Here we must retain the structure of the new Valaquenta, and any details we adopt must be made to fit into it.

So we have those two questions to think about. Allowing ourselves to pick through the Lost Tales and add details certainly would introduce a lot of new possibilities - but with them would come the potential for a lot more problems.
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