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Originally Posted by cellurdur
Again only if you want to make things difficult. Tolkien was explicit with what he wrote in his will. Whether you or I like it or not does not matter. Christoper Tolkien has actually greatly restrained his hand and could have done far more with the power his father left him.
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Here's the thing. There's no such thing as 'canon'. Some people (including you, I gather) want to talk about the fictional world described in the published Silmarillion. Others want to talk about the fictional world as envisioned by JRRT at some particular point in time. Some want to talk about a hypothetical final form that the Legendarium would have taken if Tolkien had lived longer and prepared the Silmarillion for publication. Still others want to talk about the whole corpus of texts without privileging any one version of the story.
None of these groups is right or wrong, and arguments between them are (it seems obvious) completely pointless. And yet a lot of arguments about Tolkien's work do in fact stem from the (often unrecognized) fact that the participants are taking different approaches. It's the equivalent of those arguments that appear to be about something substantive but are really just semantics, the people involved having different definitions for the terms they are using.
In other words, the issue isn't that Galin or anyone else disagrees about the authority (whatever that might mean) of the published Silmarillion. It's that they are interested in a different question.