Quote:
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
It's also the case that he rather had the stuffing knocked out of his ambitions when it became apparent that Waldman's vague suggestion of publishing them both was not really serious, and all Collins really wanted was an abridged Rings and no Silmarillion. When he went crawling back to Unwins Silmarillion wasn't even on the table; and this coincides in date (late 1952) with the cessation of new Silmarillion work, until several years later.
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Oh wow, I'd missed that. Yeah, it looks like the last "New Silmarillion" text was the "end of the Narn" found in
Children of Hurin, and dates to 1951. So if we exclude the philosophical essays, he actually got to that 'halfway point' in under two years, and could plausibly have finished the book in five.
I commented on the Lay before... checking HoME III now, the Lay of Leithian's original rejection was answered by Tolkien with "... in spite of certain virtuous passages [it] has grave defects, for it is only for me the rough material". It certainly seems like his 1950 rewrite was an attempt to resolve those defects.
The original Lay takes 4175 lines to reach the end of Canto XIII. Tolkien predicted about three more cantos, so maybe 5100 lines overall. A quick check suggests the average line length is about 7 words, so call it 36K words. If the rewrite of Canto II from 300 to 500 lines was extended across the whole poem, we'd expect a "1950 Lay" at about 60K words. (The minor revisions to the later Cantos are post-1955, so not relevant to the "1950 Silmarillion".) Given that he specifically namechecked the poem in Letter 131, I think it entirely likely that he wanted to see it published as part of the 600K "Silmarillion".
hS