[davem]

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

davem ... please understand that I am not finding any fault or error with Christopher putting together the SIL or finding a publisher for it. I am very glad that he did it. My point is more of a legal question based on the idea that when they bought the film rights to LOTR, everything in the appendicies was part of it. And that includes material that JRRT himself said was from The Silmarallion. When he used the term it was not really as a published book since that would not happen until after his death several years later. He was referring to it as a body of work on the First Age.

No - he drew on material he had already written (& invented a great deal for the Appendices of LotR). The fact that he referred to 'The Silmarillion' is neither here nor there, in that at that time The Silmarillion didn't exist in a completed form. I honestly don't see where you're coming from with all this. Are you saying that if a writer sells the movie rights to one novel of a series that contains references to a previous novel in the series then the buyer of the rights somehow owns all the novels in the series - even the pnes that haven't been written up to that point?

I mean, are you saying that they have the rights to everything Tolkien wrote on M-e that could come under the heading 'The Silmarillion' - because a good part of it was written post LotR. Or should it only include M-e writings written up to the time Tolkien sold the rights? Or should it only include the Quenta Silmarillion proper - thereby excluding the Grey Annals/Annals of Valinor, the Gest of Beren & Luthien, the Narn i Hin Hurin, Athrabeth, Laws & Customs, the Numenor material, et al? What do you consider to constitute 'The Silmarillion' - everything Tolkien ever wrote on M-e? How much of the Gondolin material is part of The Silmarillion? The Book of Lost Tales material is not 'The Silmarillion' & the Later Tuor was written post LotR & not part of the Quenta Silmarillion proper.

My point is this: is it not possible for a legal department to advocate that since the legally own that information in the Appendicies for the purposes of film, that they have the right to other more detailed information that JRRT had also written up until that time and referred to by name or character or event in LOTR?

No, it isn't - apart from the fact that, as I've pointed out just now, what constitutes 'The Silmarillion' as referred to in LotR could be argued over till the cows come home, & what, exactly, was sold has been accepted by all parties for a long time now.