Aha. Rebuke duly accepted, William.
to me for forgetting the context of the next page: I swear I read it. So the problem, essentially, was that LotR readers had fabricated their own histories of ME, having only ever caught glimpses of the past, and Tolkien was worried that by publishing
the Silmarillion, his account of the history of ME might clash with what readers had imagined. Not the same argument: similar, but not the same.
In all honesty, that
is a worrisome concept. Beren and Luthien were different in the Silm than I'd imagined them after hearing Aragorn's song in FotR.
Still, even if Tolkien never said that himself (about readers not
wanting to know the history of ME), it is a valid question, is it not? Many readers of "The Hobbit" are perfectly content to lay back and never read further. Even more readers of LotR are content to quit with Aragorn's coronation, and go no further back than the bare details of the First Age coupled with the events of the Third Age--all those people who say, "Sure, I saw the movies and read the book, but I don't think I could read all those historical contexts."
I think I've rambled off the thread subject. Ugh.