[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by jallanite

All of them from the first printing and onward.

Good to know--I have no resources before the 1st Edition.

It doesn't really add anything to the discussion, but I find it interesting, and for the sake of completeness, let me add the original draft:

Originally Posted by The History of the Hobbit I: "Rivendell"

The master of the house was an elf-friend - one of those people whose fathers came into the strange stories of the beginning of history and the wars of the Elves and goblins, and the brave men of North. There were still some people in those day [who were>] who had both elves and heroes of the North for ancestors, and Elrond the master of the house was one.

Mind you, even if this only pushes the use of the word "chief" forward to the polishing that created the 1st Edition, that still predates The Lord of the Rings and thus antedates the first conception of the Ranger Trotter, who was the placeholder that prefigured Aragorn and the Rangers of the North. Thus, as far as this passage goes, it is pretty much impossible to say that what it still means in the 3rd Edition (the last one Tolkien touched, in a post-LotR world) is the same as what it meant in the 1st Edition, before the LotR had been conceived.

Originally Posted by jallanite

It is not easy for me since the word chief does not mean the same as eldest, though often (but not always) the eldest living male of a clan would also be the chief.

Of course not--I am not claiming the two words are synonyms; only that they are being used in a way that suggests a contextual relationship.

Originally Posted by jallanite

This compatibility of text only exists if one plays somewhat dubious games with the meaning of chief. In that case the text is only dubiously compatible.

I will grant that if the sentence ran "...was the chief," my argument would be unassailably stronger than the actual text of "was their chief." In that respect, your preferred definition has the grammatical high ground. Nonetheless, "dubious" seems like an overly-strong condemnation of my interpretation. After all, Tolkien uses the word "Chieftain" himself--and uses it for the very formal position about which we are debating. To use "Chief" formally either invokes black-and-white westerns with "Red Indian" chiefs or else the incongruous image of Lotho Pimple, who was called the chief.

Originally Posted by jallanite

Or one might take chief to be used loosely to mean not the actual ruling chief but a person of great authority and power among the Dúnedain of the North.

Tolkien never indicates who was the actual chief of the Dúnedain of the North during Aragorn’s minority. The passage I cite from The Hobbit suggests it was Elrond, but no more than suggests it.

The first of these two options, "one of great authority and power," is what I have been arguing for. Aragorn himself was the actual (that is to say, de jure) Chieftain of the Dúnedain during his minority. During his majority, he was similarly incapable of ruling his people while on his great journeys south and east, but there is nothing said of who ruled in his stead then. It seems more likely to me that some analogue of Halbarad ruled then--and during Aragorn's minority. Of course, this Acting Chieftain must have had great respect for Elrond and may well have sought his advice--but Aragorn himself does that.

This passage in The Hobbit does, I agree, suggest that Elrond was a formal chief, but if we read it with a hermeneutic of consistency with The Lord of the Rings, the evidence--as I read it--is against any such formality. More than any other reason, I would argue that you can't equate the Dúnedain of the North with half-Elves, even though I make the connection that many of them, in fact, had dilute Elven blood. It is an informal group of people to whom Elrond is their chief--and thus this line seems to be slender evidence for him possessing a formal leadership over another, not-quite-contiguous, group.