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Re: Comments on Comments
C01: I agree; we'll all need to come to some kind of a better consensus on the balrog issue. Personally, I also would rather ignore the note on '7'.
C09: My mistake; a quick glance at WotJ was apparently not sufficient review for me. Anyway, my inclination would be, as you said, to go with a closing of the Way and possible reopening from inside, as that's the only reading where BoLT and WotJ can be made to agree.
C10: Ah. Looks good, I just wasn't sure at first what the idea was.
C18: This is tricky. We have, it seems, a simple choice:
1. compress the year of wandering, or 2. change the season of the journey to Sirion. I'd rather not change both, though others may differ. Each has points in its favor:
1. a. If we compress the wandering, we make the arrival at Sirion the next year more plausible, because otherwise we have only at most a few months for them to dwell in Nan-tathren and go to the havens; b. We keep the aesthetic point of their leaving in spring.
2. a. There's nothing specific in later writings that denies a year of wandering; I don't think that the TY material can be considered to do this; b. the passage from which comes the mention of spring is already contradicted by the 'in years after', making me perhaps a little more inclined to cut this.
It's a small but difficult issue, and I think it requires a vote.
C23: I think perhaps if we use it, it would be better not used as a festival song. My reasoning: the poem itself is basically canon, 'true' within the legendarium; it therefore involves no conjecture, no matter of decision (with regard to the canon) on our part to include it. However, it is not a known fact that exactly such a song was sung at the festival; that would be mere speculation on our part, and therefore inadvisable.
C25: It's not that I dislike your changes; it's merely that I'm not sure if we should make changes at all. I would rather like to include as much of the poem as possible, as emended.
C31: Perhaps I'll take a closer look at this later; for now, I'm busy enough already, and I'm also trying to work on some kind of transition between UT and FG.
C33: I suppose you're right, on principle. He never contradicted them later, so they should be kept. However, I really do get the feeling that they were dropped, not merely omitted.
C34: I think we should decide soon whether style changes are permitted. If so, this is fine. If not, we'll either have to simply exclude certain things because we can't fit them in grammatically, or we'll have a very uneven finished product.
Re: the historical present: I'm not debating it's validity; but all traces of it were excised in the later Silmarillions. I think it's a little like the frequent use of 'Gods' to describe the Valar: we should eliminate it based on its omission in later writings. I don't think it'll be hard; all we need do is change present to past.
Lindil: I think that whatever we do with Earendil it's going to be a problem. There will simply be a huge gap in style between Tuor and Earendil; that's unavoidable without a massive creative rewrite. Same thing for the Ruin of Doriath between the Wanderings of Hurin and the Quenta. I think trying to incorporate Bilbo's song might end up being more trouble than it's worth, and in any case it won't solve the problem.
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