Douglas Charles Kane’s “Arda Reconstucted: The Creation of the Published Simarillion”

[Galin]

I don't agree I have been evasive; but to Voronwe: if you're still reading, sorry if my comments seem to criticize your book merely in light of what I think you could or 'should' have done; but again, you criticize CJRT enough times with personal opinions of what you think he should have done, as is your right. Onward.

Looking as the matter of the daughters of Indis (FM = Finwe And Miriel):

In FM1 the daughters Findis, Irime and Faniel are noted, with the order altered to > Faniel and Irime. Laws and Customs version A agrees: Findis, Faniel and Irime. FM2 agrees again with Findis, Faniel Irime, and the footnote points out the order of birth here, which agrees with the order noted in Laws and Customs A.

'Three daughters and two sons, in this order: Findis, Nolofinwe, Faniel, Arafinwe, and Irime.'

FM3: as in FM4, so Findis Finvain, Faniel FM4: Findis, Finvain, Faniel with the seeming order being: Findis, Fingolfin, Finvain, Finarfin, and Faniel.

All these names and their order arise in the same general time frame, but we can see that one of the names changes form, and that Faniel again becomes the last female as opposed to the second female born, and she is the last child born after Finarfin.

Jumping ahead to The Shibboleth of Feanor, note 26 and note 28. In note 26 Christopher Tolkien refers to a number of genealogical tables dated to around 1959, where in all these tables there are still three daughters: Findis, Faniel, and Irime.

Obviously these tables agree with some, but not all, of the work from the Later Quenta Silmarillion phase II described earlier.

So later, Faniel has disappeared and now Indis has only two daughters, and the younger daughter appears both as Irime and Irien. And here Irime/Irien would appear to be the third child of Indis, not the last child, as she was in the old number and order. CJRT notes that while writing the Shibboleth of Feanor his father clearly had these older tables in front of him 'and alterations made to the latest of the four agree with statements made in it.' But despite the drop to two daughters in the text, CJRT also notes that no correction was made to any of the tables with three daughters. And:

'It is strange that my father should give the name of the second daughter of Finwe as both Irime and Irien within the space of a few lines. Possibly he intended Irien at the first occurrence but inadvertently wrote Irime, the name found in all the genealogies (note 26).'

True enough, but not the name found in all the texts, considering where Finvain appears twice for Irime.

This is the presentation as found in Arda Reconstructed:

Finally, a reference to the 'five children' of Indis and Finwe is removed. A footnote lists three daughters in addition to the sons Fingolfin and finarfin (whose names are actually spelled that way): Findis, Finvain, and Faniel.* However, there is no mention of any of these daughters anywhere in the published Silmarillion (even in the genealogical table in the back). This is another small detail that shows how Christopher lessened the female presence in the tale.'

*footnote (back of book) In a later text, Tolkien appears to have dropped Finvain and changed Faniel's name to either 'Irime' of 'Irien' (see Pome, 343, 359 nn. 26 and 28).

And while I don't expect AR to have covered the changes in the detail here or in HME, a descriptive sentence could have conveyed that the matter was a bit more complex -- and in my opinion including the Shibboleth in the text proper instead of a footnote at the end of the book would have illustrated, in a more compelling way to the reader -- that in the last text concerning this matter, the actual name of one of the now two daughters (making four children not five obviously) wasn't even certain.


I think what you chose to present as a footnote at the back of the book would have had more force in the text proper for giving the reader of AR another option as to why these daughters were not included in the table (besides being minor characters). AR does not speculate in the text proper, or in the footnote, that the ambiguity of names in the last version could have been one of the reasons these characters get no mention in the 1977 Silmarillion.