[Mithalwen]

Very hard to say. Yes JRRT wanted The Silmarillion published but I don't think at an emotional level he would he would have ever let it go..too much of a Niggle. I went to a readers' day last year and one of thecauthorsxwas asked about what happened to certain characters in her latest novel and would she wrire a sequel and she said that she thought x would happen, that she had hinted at and she had finished with the characters.

Now Christopher has admitted he made wrong choices...Gil-galad's parentage being notable and no doubt the process of producing home might have meant that a SilmArillion edited after that epic analysis and sifting might be closer to what Tolkien pere would have wanted but without the publication of the arguably flawed and incomplete Silmarillion we wouldn't have had the Unfinished Tales etc. I think I would rather have the vast wealth of maybes than a tiny number of certainties especially since with Tolkien the last version was not necessarily the definitive version. I often wonder if he had had a wordprocessor able to make changes without laborious retyping whether hecwould have got closer. I really doubt it..I think he would have just found more not to finish and we would have lost the audit trail of his creation.