Celebrimbor

[Galin]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

It's very interesting how many different versions of Celebrimbor's descent there are. In The Sil, it says that he's Curufin's son. That would make him Feanorian. But maybe his mother was of Teleri origin? I doubt that his mother could have been from Gondolin, since hardly anyone was allowed to go out.

But we really only have one in my opinion, in a sense. The Gondolin detail arguably reflects an earlier but rejected draft idea -- rejected when Celebrimbor became a Feanorean as published in The Lord of the Rings. (Christopher Tolkien reflected this in his choice for the 1977 Silmarillion). The Telerin idea is but a later, unpublished musing that even Christopher Tolkien thinks arose because Tolkien forgot what he had already published.


For all we know, at some point Tolkien remembered and rejected the Telerin idea. He has no real reason to write 'most of this fails' on anything (if he later remembered) -- he did note this on an essay concerning the word ros (an idea which failed because of something already published), but again, when all we have is the 'unpublished' text, it's hard to say...

A) if Tolkien remembered at some point, but the Celebrimbor text was not at hand to correct (or read his own book and 'remembered' but still the text wasn't at hand).

B) if Tolkien remebered and the Celebrimbor text was at hand, but there being no real need to correct it (as the public didn't know about it), he simply didn't write 'most of this fails' or similar.

C) maybe Tolkien never remembered

D) If the simple act of writing might show Tolkien 'intended' to alter Celebrimbor the Feanorean to a Telerin Elf (in some imagined, revised edition of the future). But in any case, IIRC no where in the late 'Telerin version' does JRRT show that he knew he had already published this character as Feanorian, which would go a long way to illustrating that despite realizing what was already in print, he wanted to alter it (and even still, we can never certainly know he really would have altered this, until he did alter this).

Tolkien wrote more than he published