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Originally Posted by Mithalwen
You may be right it is some time since I have more than dipped into HoMe. I just recalled mention of stuff which either went to Marquette by mistake or should have gone to Marquette and didn't...
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Insofar as the Marquette papers are LotR-specific, rather than the entire corpus of Middle-earth, I suspect your memory is muddling bits of the History of the LotR with History of the Silm.
That said, I think your basic point about Christopher Tolkien having a greater sense of the Silm corpus after the HoME, and as a result of the HoME, is still valid. Even if he had all the papers, which is a fair assumption, and even if he was familiar with all their contents, it does not follow that he had the perspective on them all necessary to make the most judicious decisions in all cases regarding a collated Silmarillion. You can see just from the notated changes to earlier volumes included at the beginning of most later volumes of the HoME what a huge task it was to keep all the different manuscripts and variants in mind, and it makes sense spending twenty-plus years on the entire corpus of Middle-earth (1973-the mid-1990s) would give Christopher Tolkien a fuller sense of the corpus than the 4 years (from his father's death, 1973, to the publication of the Silmarillion, 1977) he had to bring that entire corpus down to a single publishable text.