I am woefully behind in keeping up with the
Unfinished Tales read-through, but fortunately these threads have no best-before date, so I can attempt to catch myself up over the next week or two.
Mind you, there's little enough to say about "The Line of Elros." For the most part, it reads like a more fleshed-out version of the LotR Appendices (A & B), chunks of which we already have fleshed out further in "Aldarion and Erendis" and "The Akallabêth." It's in the middle, between Tar-Anárion and Tar-Palantír that we get the most additional information.
One thing that struck me, though, about "The Line of Elros" was how many times Christopher Tolkien had to put in a footnote noting deviation from the Appendices. In a couple cases, he says that he can't explain the deviation. As he says in the Introduction: "The text introduces some minor chronological puzzles, but also allows clarification of some apparent errors in the Appendices to
The Lord of the Rings."
What I find interesting to think about here is whether Tolkien might have
wanted some discrepancies to stand. Tolkien is obsessed throughout his mythmaking with presenting an historically plausible framework for the transmission of his myths, and the simple fact is that records often don't line up. For example, the accounts of the kings of Judah and Israel in the Bible are rather different from the Book of Kings to the Book of Chronicles, or we often see a range of possible years for the birth of Roman Emperors or medieval monarchs.
This isn't to say that I don't think Christopher Tolkien is right about "The Line of Elros" clarifying some of the Appendices, but in a couple of a cases I wonder if the confusion might be deliberate. There are indications of this, I think, in the content of the text and not just in its implications. Some of the information we're given seems to flat-out contradict other sources. For example, Christopher Tolkien notes that the laws of succession don't seem to be applied consistently across "Aldarion and Erendis" and "The Line of Elros" in notes 5 & 8. What really got me thinking about this, though, was the inclusion of "Tar-Anducal" under the entry for Tar-Vanimeldë, the third ruling queen. In particular, the following line stood out:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Tolkien, "The Line of Elros"
Herucalmo took the sceptre upon his wife's death, calling himself Tar-Anducal, and withholding the rule from his son Alcarin; yet some do not reckon him in the Line of Kings as seventeenth, and pass to Alcarin.
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"Some" clearly includes the author of the Appendices...