Oversight, or changing conceptions?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

" and I'd rather say that the "mistake" here is Tolkien changing the name of Finrod to Finarfin for the second edition"

Except he didn't. My Second Edition has "Finrod," bold as brass. The correction to "Finarfin" was posthumous, in 1976 (originally only the UK edition; the change wasn't made to the H-M until the Anderson revision in 1987,* and in the Ballantine never). As for the names being "Sindarin"- why shouldn't they have been? Tolkien was very consistent in all the First Age texts in using what were originally Noldorin name-forms, and came up with a nifty ret-con for why the same forms (now "Sindarin") were used in later histories.


And there we have a decent example of things being changed out from under the published text of the LR in the background, and the LR being altered to suit. Another one would be the omentielmo/vo alteration. The primary vehicles of Tolkien's creative thought regarding the Elder Days were always Quenta Silmarillion and the Annals, and the occasional allusion in the LR merely the moon's reflection of the sun's light. I think it's worth drawing distinctions between works that were definite revisions or wholesale replacements of earlier works, that is, the earlier works were definitively rejected; a handful of later writings actually marked "official and final;" later writings which betray inconsistencies with earlier writings, and leave us little to go on as to how (or whether) T would have resolved them; and mere sketches,. notes and jottings. Not all HME/UT texts exist on the same plane! The late sketch of the line of Dol Amroth falls into that last category, I fear: half-baked musings, and subject also to the same issues that apply to all Bournemouth writings.

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*HM used the same plates for twenty years, which is why late 70s and 80s printings look rather blobby. The text remained unchanged from the original 2d edition setting. A&U OTOH continually made changes as suggested by JRRT and then CJRT.