The differences between Elves and Men

[mhagain]

Originally Posted by Galin

<snip>awesome</snip>

Nail on the head.

The key problem is : "which writings do you accept?" You can't accept all of them because they contradict each other. CT acknowledges this and gives ample warning as early as his foreword to the Silmarillion.

A complete consistency (either within the compass of The Silmarillion itself or between The Silmarillion and other published writings of my father's) is not to be looked for, and could only be achieved, if at all at heavy and needless cost.

You can't accept none of them because then you'd have no history and we may as well go back to having fun bad-mouthing Peter Jackson.

So you have to accept some of them, and once again CT puts it best:

Moreover, my father came to conceive The Silmarillion as a compilation, a compendious narrative, made long afterwards from sources of great diversity (poems, and annals, and oral tales) that had survived in agelong tradition; and this conception has indeed its parallel in the actual history of the book, for a great deal of earlier prose and poetry does underlie it, and it is to some extent a compendium in fact and not only in theory.

So you need to work on the basis that you're dealing with writings that are going to contradict each other, that aren't going to give the full story, and that sometimes you're going to have to piece together a story that works for you from multiple different sources.

Reading the Silmarillion is to a large extent like reading a popular history account of ancient Mesopotamia. You know that decades or centuries of work deciphering ancient writings, putting together evidence, and trying to present what in the end only amounts to a current consensus underlies it, but it still has value on it's own and is still worth reading if you want to learn.

Arguing about content in HoME is like arguing over which of the Sumerian Kings List, the Epic of Gilgamesh or some merchants tablets from Nineveh contains the true account. It's fun to do for those of us who have an interest, but we need to do so with a keen awareness that we'll never really know. We're not arguing the case for fact, we're arguing the case for our own interpretation.

Both CT and JRRT this time:

Divergent versions need not indeed always be treated solely as a question of settling the priority of composition; and my father as "author" or "inventor" cannot always in these matters be distinguished from the "recorder" of ancient traditions handed down in diverse forms among different peoples through long ages (when Frodo met Galadriel in Lorien, more than sixty centuries had passed since she went east over the Blue Mountains from the ruin of Beleriand). "Of this two things are said, though which is true only those Wise could say who now are gone."

And I think that sums it up the best.