Quote:
Originally Posted by Puddleglum
I wonder if you meant to say "coequal", rather than "coeval"?
coeval means "having the same age or date of origin" implying that all these works were written at the same time.
coequal means "equal with one another; having the same rank or importance."
|
As the one who first brought the word up--
Galin was responding to my post--I'll admit I tend to misuse "coëval," but even granting that I did, it's something of an apt mistake in this case, because "having the same age or date of origin" is a relevant matter in this case, because "The Trees of Kortirion" is a revision dating to the 1960s--in other words, its of an age with all the other post-LotR writings, even if the original version was contemporary of the Book of Lost Tales.
(My point of it being coëval with
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and
The Hobbit was, admittedly, more focused on co-equality than contemporaneity, but I was referring to the canonicity of each, and in this I am grounding canonicity in the age of the texts--remember, the final version of
The Hobbit in Tolkien's lifetime was promulgated in the mid-1960s. And depending on the extent to which you give weight to the dating of a text, the assignment of its canonicity is a point where coëval and coëqual can get stickily intertwined.)
((A further aside: I blame Tolkien for both my knowledge and my misuse of the word "coëval"--I am 99.999% certain I learned it in the context of "Manwë was coëval with Melkor in the mind of Ilúvatar" --paraphrasing-- and this is illustrative of the point, perhaps, whereby age and equality intermingle. It gives nuance to the text that I did not pick up on as a teenager to note that Tolkien is saying that Manwë and Melkor are "of the same age" in the mind of their creator, but the reason this is relevant in the text is because Manwë and Melkor are both mightily powerful and important Valar, and while it may be a mistake on teenaged-me's part to read the text as being a direct proof of their co-equality, nonetheless their contemporaneity IS a proof of their similar status--not least because it does not seem to me that there should be time--and thus contemporaneity at all--in the mind of Eru, but also because "coëval" is essentially a synonym of "peer."))