Who Wrote the Silmarillion?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Reluctantly, in thinking about how to approach this project, I have come to the same conclusion, scirocco.

My thought would be that we would each read and compare the various texts to the published Sil and comment here without posting the actual texts, but I also think it would get muddled and confused fairly quickly.

Let's give it some more thought. In any event, there is plenty of other things that we can discuss.

Edited to add: Looking at that thread, it seems that Johnboy's goal was a little different - to create a more complete Silmarillion, rather then to simply trace the origin of the various parts of the published text and determine what was added/changed by Christopher and Guy. A comment by Eluchíl in that thread parallels my own thinking about why this project might be possible without posting large tracts of texts (even though I don't fully agree with it):

In one of the HOME Volumes (XI) I think CJRT finally does discuss the construction of the published "Of the Ruin of Doriath" chapter. There was no good version availible, and he felt that the stories outlined in Q (1930) and the late Tale of Years had intractable problems, so after discussing the matter with Guy Kay he simply rewrote the story as best he could. While we may disagree with this procedure, it is defensible, and it should be noted that only in this one chapter did he adopt it. Most of the other editorial decisions boil down to discarding a single sentence or changing one word.

As you yourself point out in that thread, Scirocco, that is not really fully true; I believe there are some other point in the text where fairly extensive liberties were necessary, but I believe that Eluchíl is largely correct that most of the editorial changes are relatively small edits, which we could point out with printing large tracts of text. Much of what I would be interested in tracing-- beyond those edits -- are what parts were grafted into the latest draft of the Quenta itself from other texts - the Annals, previous versions of the Quenta, and other sources. But at certain points (Túrin's story, the ruin of Doriath, the War of Wrath) that might get too confusing. I don't know.

[scirocco]

Mmm, good point, Vononwe, I may being too pessimistic. I think Eluchíl was understating the extent of the problem, though; there are indeed many instances where it's not clear how the published text was arrived at (just look at CT's comment I posted about the story of Húrin at Nargothrond, for example). But perhaps these are really just chunks in the overall soup, and there are lots of long stretches where only a word or two was changed. Certainly, phrases you recognise from the published version frequently jump out when reading Annals and Quenta.

If there were only a few chunks to analyse, that might be a viable project. It might even be possible to post the texts and still stay under the 10% rule-of-thumb for copyright. We need a feasibility study!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

One potential problem, of course, is that we all probably have different editions of the Sil, so that if (for instance), I point to a change on the second full paragraph of page 223, that might not mean anything to someone who has a different edition. But I'm pretty sure we could work around that type of thing.

[MithLuin]

One easy way around that is to refer to the published Silmarillion by chapter and paragraph number.

Thus the sons of Fëanor under Maedhros were the Lords of East Beleriand

would be "Chapter 14, 'Of Beleriand and its Realms:' paragraph 19"

It should be easy enough, and an error of a paragraph or so shouldn't mess anyone up. I do agree that page numbers would, in fact, be easiest, but probably not all that feasible.

Another issue would be to deal with the evolving nomenclature as opposed to the text. In the example I chose, the name is 'Maedhros' - but it is possible that the passage could be taken from a text that used 'Maidros' - after all, CJRT picked one version of each name and stuck to it, for consistency. I think the evolving language runs parallel to the evolving story, so the choices are separate (though related). Just sayin'

[Voronwë the Faithful]

One easy way around that is to refer to the published Silmarillion by chapter and paragraph number.

Thus the sons of Fëanor under Maedhros were the Lords of East Beleriand

would be "Chapter 14, 'Of Beleriand and its Realms:' paragraph 19"

It should be easy enough, and an error of a paragraph or so shouldn't mess anyone up. I do agree that page numbers would, in fact, be easiest, but probably not all that feasible.

That's just what I was going to suggest.

Another issue would be to deal with the evolving nomenclature as opposed to the text. In the example I chose, the name is 'Maedhros' - but it is possible that the passage could be taken from a text that used 'Maidros' - after all, CJRT picked one version of each name and stuck to it, for consistency. I think the evolving language runs parallel to the evolving story, so the choices are separate (though related). Just sayin'

Yes, I agree that that would be a big part of what we would need to track.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Note: I'm going to start a separate thread for this, and we'll see where it goes.

Edited to add: Here's the new thread: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion