[Mister Underhill]

Dread Horseman
Posts: 780
Re: Principles of editing the Silmarillion

Sorry for the delay on responding, lindil. Before I begin, I'll reiterate my disclaimer that my HoME/Silmarillion knowledge is woefully inferior and my opinions may be completely uninformed. But so as not to be rude by simply remaining mute, I'll offer them anyway:

lindil : Could you refresh me on the context of my own quote?

Perhaps I was wrong to single you out since this is obviously an issue that the Council is aware of and has wrestled with. I was referring to the idea of allowing a little more leeway where aesthetics are concerned with which you are generally credited in several of the posts above.

My fear is that giving aesthetic considerations the least weight among all other possible considerations may result in a finished product that suffers in terms of readability. I’m not criticizing here. I admire the scholarship that is evident in these threads in wrestling with real-world examples of some prickly questions and issues that any attempt to compile a New Silmarillion must face. Of course strict adherence to these sorts of austere and rigorous principles is probably also required in order to be taken seriously in scholarly circles. But again, this comes back to the idea of a guiding mission statement. Is it the goal of the Council to produce the most scholarly accurate version of the Silmarillion, or the most aesthetically pleasing version, or somewhere in-between?

There’s obviously a bit of push-pull there, and the Council seems to lean towards “somewhere in-between” – i.e., the most scholarly compilation possible that is still readable. Perhaps the distinction is finer than I am aware and I’m concerned about an issue that isn’t really much of an issue at all. However, for my part, as someone in whom the fan and the writer dominate the scholar, I would lean towards “aesthetically pleasing” and accordingly lend greater weight to aesthetic considerations. But then again I’m just an interested observer, not the one doing the nuts-and-bolts work of the thing.

The solution here may be to continue work on the principles and then when complete and agreed upon distill it to something every 5th grader who has just read the Hobbit can understand.

In my humble opinion, this may be putting the cart before the horse, so to speak. If you know what your ultimate goal, simply stated, is, then it guides the definition of your working principles because you know what sort of end result they are meant to produce.

If I may humbly ask your efforts in this area, that would be most appreciated. It seems we are reaching general consensus on principles and hopefully from this can be drawn a mission statement.

I would be happy to chip in with opinions on the ideas of others, but I feel underqualified in every sense of the word to draft a mission statement to guide work that I’m not even participating in!

In terms of it being a Silmarillion. I think we have already moved away from that as CRRT is very clear on the Silm being a sort of Reader's Digest version of the Tales compared to what full and fional versions of B&L, the Narn, FoG, and Earendil, might have looked like had they been finished.

Sorry – this was a poorly expressed thought on my part. I meant that it should look and feel like The Silmarillion as it might have been had JRRT ever completed it. That it should be more a collection of amazing, moving, romantic, thrilling, and tragic stories than a scholarly compilation of harmonized texts. I think that JRRT’s use of the device of writing in the voice of a ‘translator’ of ancient tales, myths, and traditions adds an extra layer between author and story that provides resilience and allows some leeway where inconsistencies are concerned. Slight inconsistencies may in some cases even increase the verisimilitude of the whole. I’ll give an example that’s relevant to some of the Treebeard concerns: in Letters, JRRT says of Treebeard:

Treebeard is a character in my story, not me; and though he has a great memory and some earthy wisdom, he is not one of the Wise, and there is quite a lot he does not know or understand.

Though Tolkien here is referring to some Treebeard statements that are perhaps easier to reconcile with other Silmarillion material than the problem discussed above, I think the principle holds true. Treebeard’s words (or the words of any character, for that matter, including those of the invisible ‘translator(s)’ of the tales) may be accurate without being literally true. Of course, you can’t just use this sort of idea as an excuse for laziness – but I think it gives room to allow the requirements of drama and storytelling to take on the weight they deserve when attempting to resolve difficult problems.

Anyway, my two cents.