Oversight, or changing conceptions?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I don't really disgree with anything you are saying, aside from the general comment that I dislike bright lines and pigeonholes, which often create an artificial impression of definition where there is none, rather like a blurry picture digitally "sharpened". The best we can do is evaluate and compare unpublished material on a case by case basis, and giving some pieces great weight and others little to none.

I don't think personally that "Finarfin" in Appendix F was a mistake, no matter whether it was the father's intended revision or the son's alone: clearly in his work on the First Age Tolkien had changed his mind about the character's name, as he did on many, many other occasions; and it's explicit that Finarfin is a Sindarization of Arafinwe which was the form used in Middle-earth when referring to him, even if he never used it himself.* One can't really see the compiler of QS writing "The sons of Finwe were Feanor, Fingolfin and Finwe Arafinwe."

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*We talk about Christopher Columbus, a man who as far as he was concerned was named Cristoforo Colombo.