[Galin]

Originally Posted by cellurdur

Not reading all the source material does not make things more complicated. It just means that you don't have the full information.

I said it makes the discussion more complicated. And obviously it does when one reader is looking at or raising a quote that he or she is not aware has been edited.

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.

Did Tolkien explicitly state in his will that if CJRT chose to publish a single volume version of the Silmarillion [which was not what CJRT originally intended incidentally] that he [JRRT] would consider it 'canon'? Does CJRT ever claim the constructed version is intended to be the 'canonical' version?

Not that I'm aware of, to both questions.

But now you're just complicating matters here, with 'canon'

Galin wrote: 'Still it's a fact [and not that you said otherwise] that after Tolkien wrote the Moria passage he still imagined very many Balrogs existing in Middle-earth in the First Age.'

Cellurdur responded: Where is the proof in this? As he made the Balrog more powerful he was probably considering the change at that point. It's quite apparent that a host of Balrogs does not work. One Balrog alone was enough to defeat Gandalf.

The proof is in the dating: the early 1950s Silmarillion passages [in which many Balrogs still exist] post date the Moria encounter with Gandalf, as [obviously] do those references to very many Balrogs that survive the later 1950s revisions.

So the proof is in The History of Middle-Earth series, basically.