The Letter of the Law

[Formendacil]

Over in my other recent thread, Huinesoron (as he is wont to do) said something that struck me as quite accurate:

Originally Posted by Huinesoron

Tolkien is not, by and large, an unreliable narrator, so when he says in a published book that 'everyone thought X', I'm inclined to accept that X is something he wants to tell us is true. But! Also, that line about how the plague came 'with dark winds' out of the East. That's not a natural phenomenon - it reminds me too much of the Shadow over Minas Tirith, or of the Black Breath.

As I said, I think this is quite accurate: Tolkien doesn't generally play games with narration (not that the potential isn't there, since his texts very much mimic historical documents at times and he knew better than most the extent to which those were retellings and reshapings of material handed on and changed by the transmission), but it did make me wonder:

What are the most egregious distortions you can fit into the text of Middle-earth?

I think we're actually going to see a lot of this that gets us all riled up once the Amazon series releases, because the 2nd Age is full of unpainted canvas and they have a whole show to fill, but I'm thinking of things closer to the texts themselves: what odd things would you plug into the cracks that you absolutely know Tolkien wouldn't approve of but he leaves space for?

This is, admittedly, a broad, conceptual topic and I don't have a ready example. The best I can do is point at the inspiration in the other thread, where Huin is arguing that, even though Tolkien doesn't SAY it, he pretty much implies Sauron created/spread the Great Plague. So I'm looking for the opposite examples: where Tolkien heavily infers that Æ happened, but since he didn't SAY it did, you can argue that anti-Æ happened.

I would probably need to comb through the Appendices looking for "the Wise say" or "many believed." The counterarguments to THOSE are what I'm talking about.