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Originally Posted by Galin
Which letter please? I need some context here.
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I am sorry I don't remember. It was something I briefly noticed whilst looking for something else, but I can find it during the weekend.
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But that means that the 'truth' of the Two Trees is now questionable as a Mannish myth.
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I don't think there is much doubt that Tolkien wanted to remove the 'Two Trees' as a Mannish myth. His problem was how to translate it, into the 'true history.'
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Well, but I don't see how this, or a few examples, necessarily supports the great shift in thinking that you appear to be referencing.
It seems to me that there are always going to be arguable examples of Tolkien working out what he wants to present as 'true' in the sense of 'it exists in the legendarium', but the general scenario -- from older to later as far as The Silmarillion goes -- appears to be a move away from directness of transmission so that the story of the Two Trees can be preserved...
... not the absolute truth that that's how the Sun and Moon really came to be, however.
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Except he didn't seem particularly keen on preserving the 'Two Trees'. Others urged him to do it, but he described such a cosmology story as absurd and ridiculous for intelligent elves to believe. He sought out ways to write 'true accounts' but in my opinion and others he let read them, they lack the beauty of the 'Two Trees'.
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You see, here you refer to the 'bias' of Rumil, but I brought that up only as a sheer possibility when we had two variant traditions written at the same time [early 1950s], and within the scenario of the later transmission too, since that allows for more error.
What texts are you talking about with 'originally' here? According to this...
... I assume it is before the late 1950s.
Maybe I'm confused at this point, but you seem to be saying that Tolkien moved away from 'mistranslation' about the time he began to recharacterize the Silmarillion as largely Mannish, which to my mind allows for more mistranslation and variation that within the Elfwine scenario, Elfwine himself receiving the tales direct from Eressean speakers and putting them into Old English...
... to Tolkien's doorstep I guess.
Still generally speaking.
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My point is when he started to disregard previous drafts as Mannish myths, he went about trying to write 'accurate accounts' of the myths.
For example explaining how when the elves were created Morgoth had the world created in a smog, but Manwe blew away the smog during the night and the elves first saw the stars and loved them ever since.
It's around this time he refocuses on things like the Children of Hurin and begins to hammer out things like makeup of orcs.