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Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
I'm not sure Tolkien made up his mind in what order the episodes of LR would be told/experienced. He might have at least considered a temporal jumble, much like the Lost Tales were. This would not at all have been out of keeping with the epic poetry, both classical and Germanic, which inspired him.
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He certainly changed his mind a few times, but Christopher seems to believe he settled on a reverse-chronological structure. HoME V pages 77-79 give two example structures:
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Work backwards to Numenor and make that last... the tales that should intervene between Alboin and Audoin of the twentieth century and Elentil and Herendil in Numenor [are]: 'Lombard story?'; 'a Norse story of ship-burial (Vinland)'; 'an English story - of the man who got onto the Straight Road?'; 'a Tuatha-de-Danaan story, or Tir-nan-Og'; a story concerning 'painted caves'; 'the Ice Age - great figures in ice', and 'before the Ice Age: the Galdor story'; 'post-Beleriand and the Elendil and Gil-galad story of the [battle with Thu'; and finally 'Numenor'].
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... an outline for the structure of the book as he now foresaw it. Chapter III was to be called A Step Backward: Aelfwine and Eadwine - the Anglo-Saxon incarnation of the father and son, and incorporating the legend of King Sheave; Chapter IV 'the Irish legend of Tuatha-de-Danaan - and oldest man in the world'; Chapter V 'Prehistoric North: old kings found buried in the ice'; Chapter VI 'Beleriand'; Chapter [VII] 'Elendil and Herendil in Numenor'.
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The latter was sent to Allen & Unwin. The first structure is
mostly retro-chronological; the big outlier is the Lombards, who should really fall either before or after the English (Vinland was some 400 years after Audoin of Lombardy). But 'the Galdor story' is specifically 'before the Ice Age', which doesn't make sense if it's also before not only the war with Thu, but before Numenor too.
It's possible, looking at these, that Galdor had been dropped entirely: Chapter VI Beleriand could simply be the war against Thu-Sauron. But the fact that two of the 'Chapter' summaries specifically mention older legends does make me feel like Galdor would fit in as a story.
Page 79 gives two versions of 'the Galdor story': one in which Agaldor is 'one of the old folk, and well-nigh the last of the long-lived in these regions', who later fights Thu, while the other has him as a man of Middle-earth at the time that the Numenoreans first land (and kill him). It's just possible that the first version is an "end of the Numenorean legacy" story, while the latter is a legend of the ancient Galdor, carried down into Chapter VI Beleriand. What I
don't think is possible is that Tolkien had one - and only one - chapter dive past Numenor entirely, when he had such a neat 'working backwards' model.
hS