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Originally Posted by cellurdur
At the end of the day Tolkien never finished his work and after painstakingly going through his notes, Christoper was able to give us a coherent story. This is the only story we are going to get and it's the only story that fits with other published works.
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No, we have already gotten lots of stories. There is no sense in which the published Silmarillion is 'the only story we are going to get'. It was the first one, and it was the only one that was published as a compiled narrative without textual notes or commentary, but those are the only things that set it apart from the texts given in HoMe (which, it's worth noting, Christopher Tolkien also saw fit to publish).
It is also not the only story that fits with other published works. Some of the HoMe texts agree with
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings. Others, to varying degrees, don't. The published Silmarillion is not somehow the unique version of the story that is allowed by the published works.
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The issue at hand is they disagree with the authority of Christopher Tolkien, because I don't see people arguing that Aragorn should really have been a Hobbit named Trotter or any of the countless other ideas that Tolkien dropped.
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There's no 'should' about it. There are only facts about what was written in different texts at different times.
Most people are more interested in the published version of
The Lord of the Rings than in the early drafts, so most discussions about that work are naturally going to be about the published version. On the other hand, many people are more interested in the various HoMe texts than in the published Silmarillion, so it's natural that they will want to discuss them and won't necessarily be that interested in what the published version has to say about the topics they are discussing.
What, after all, does 'authority' mean in this context? Does it mean that the published version is the only one that people should be allowed to discuss? Obviously not. Does it mean that people discussing the HoMe texts must stop their discussion when someone provides an answer from the published version? Again, that would seem ridiculous. Does it mean that people ought to be more interested in the published version than in the other texts? No, because you can't dictate people's interests like that. Does it mean that the published Silmarillion is the 'right' or 'true' version? It can't, because this is a fictional world we're talking about and there is no 'truth' about it. One is forced to conclude that 'authority' is just not a meaningful concept in this context.
Sorry if I'm steering this thread into canonicity territory; but I really think that fundamentally, people are arguing past each other here due to their interests lying in different places.