[davem]

Maybe it would be helpful to quote from the introduction to the new edition

That the printer had quietly reset The Fellowship of the Ring, & that copies had been issued without proof having been read by the author, never became known to Tolkien; while his publisher, Rayner Unwin, learned of it only thirty eight years after the fact. Tolkien found a few of the unauthorised changes introduced in the second printing.

In 1992 Eric Thompson.. noticed small differences between the first & second impressions of FotR.

The observations of Dainis Biseniecks, Yuval Kfir, Charles Noad & other readers, sent to us directly or posted in public forums, have also been of service.

Efforts such as these follow the example of the author of LotR during his lifetime. His concern for the textual accuracy & coherence of his work is evident from the many emendations he made in later printings, & from notes he made for other emendations which for one reason or another have not previously (or have only partly) been put into effect.

The fiftieth anniversary of LotR seemed an ideal opportunity to consider the latest (1992) text in the light of information gathered in the course of decades of work in Tolkien studies...with an electronic copy of LotR searchable by keyword or phrase....Christopher Tolkien even observed to us that some apparent inconsistencies of form in his father’s work may have been deliberate: for instance, although Tolkien carefully distinguished house[ ‘dwelling’ from House ‘noble family or dynasty[/i]’

Many of the emendations in the present text are to marks of punctuation....

[/i]Most of the demonstrable errors noted by Christopher Tolkien in HoME also have been corrected, such as the distance from the Brandywine Bridge to the Ferry (ten miles rather than twenty) & the number of Merry’s ponies (Five rather than six), shadows of earlier drafts. But those errors of content, such as Gimli’s famous (& erronious) statement in Book III, ch 7, ‘Till now I have hewn naught but wood since I left Moria’, which would require rewriting to emend rather than simple correction, remain unchanged.

So many new emendations to LotR,& such an extensive review of its text, deserve to be fully documented. ,,,To this end, & to illuminate the work in other respects, we are preparing a volume of annotations to LotR for publication in 2005.[/i]

(Wayne Hammond & Christina Scull)

This may give the impression that CT was not responsible for the changes, but the real point is, many have been made as a result of his work & all have been authorised by him, so he had the final say in what happened.