[Aiwendil]

Being rather a strong proponent of HoMe, I feel I should try to say something in answer to Littlemanpoet. But I am afraid that to a significant extent, this issue is really one of personal taste. If someone dislikes HoMe, well, that's that. To each his own. But that goes both ways - and there are many people (like me) who genuinely enjoy HoMe. I am thankful to Christopher Tolkien first of all simply because his efforts gave me many, many hours of great pleasure. I enjoyed his "interruptions".

So perhaps this is a subjective thing. Still, when littlemanpoet writes:

Part of my "beef" is the breaking of the enchantment. I don't want it.

. . . I find myself incredulous. For I can't believe that the enchantment is that brittle. Is it so fragile that a footnote will break it? Is it so fragile that the mere thought that it is not true, that it was in fact written by a real author, chases it away?

It is not so for me. It is something stronger. It is something that holds up under close scrutiny. My experience of Tolkien's creation - and, for that matter, of all my favorite works of art - is that the act of studying it can only enhance my appreciation of it. To have (almost) all of Tolkien's Silmarillion material allows me to enjoy his creation in ways far beyond what a single narrative does. And Christopher's commentary is, in my view, an essential part of that presentaion. As I see it, there are more or less three ways Christopher could have published the Silmarillion:

1. As a single narrative
2. As merely a series of his father's texts, without commentary/interruption
3. As HoMe

We have a grievance against the "interruption" found in 3. But I think the problems with the others are greater. Any single narrative is a contrived narrative, in which Christopher's influence is far greater than in HoMe. If Christopher interrupts the material in HoMe, he disrupts it (necessarily) in the '77. Also, any such narrative necessarily leaves out a vast amount of material. The problem with option 2 is simply that it is incoherent. Without Christopher's information on dates of composition and such, any presentation of all or most of Tolkien's Silmarillion writings would be quite a jumble; a reader would be completely lost.

So though you may fault Christopher's chosen method, someone would fault him no matter what he did. There is no "perfect" presentation of the Silmarillion. Christopher gave us two very good ones, and I for one am very happy with that.

I realize that I am only addressing part of the issue that littlemanpoet raised. In fact, I agree with some of the other points. I think that it would probably would have been best if the Silmarillion had been accepted along with LotR. I don't think that his goal of harmonizing the Silmarillion with LotR was completely "unnecessary" - but I do think that if a deal had actually been struck at this point, he would have brought the Silmarillion into a form he found satisfactory much more quickly.

I also agree in part with the proposition that, as littlemanpoet put it:

Tolkien's latter creative life was misspent.

Specifically, I think that his issue with the scientific unreality of the flat earth mythology was completely misguided. For of course his Legendarium is not scientifically valid.

However, I think that he had some great successes in the post-LotR work on the Legendarium that cannot easily be dismissed. The Narn i Chin Hurin is my favorite thing that he wrote, and I don't know that I'd give it up even for a complete, authoritative Silmarillion. In this as well as the later "Tuor", the later Geste of Beren and Luthien, and "The Wanderings of Hurin" I think we find Tolkien's narrative and descriptive powers at their height. The characters are vividly drawn; the stories are engaging; the mythology is powerful. No, I don't think I could bear to give those things up.