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Old 03-27-2001, 08:09 PM   #61
Aiwendil
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Re: Outline

Michael: I hope my words didn't suggest that I'm opposed to a new Silmarillion. I'm rather attracted to the idea, actually (I've been considering it for some time myself and only recently stumbled upon this forum). I'm merely trying to point out the difficulties inherent in this particular approach - not insurmountable, I hope, but worthy of attention.

Lindil: I understand your approach, and was not trying to malign it in any way. I'm simply concerned about the &quot;authenticity&quot; of a Silmarillion constructed using the Narn and so forth. I agree that a great deal of the Silm. does deal with the later tales, but I don't think that the Turin saga should be as long as all that's come before it (particularly other stories that are just as well developed but not extant in such long forms, e.g., Beren and Luthien). I haven't looked at enough of your work so far to know just how long you intend the Turin chapter, for instance, to be.

My main concern regards the end of the Silm.: the Fall of Gondolin, the Ruin of Doriath, and the Voyage of Earendil. The first of these could be fairly well compiled from the later Tuor and the lost tale. This would require a good bit of editorial alteration for consistency of plot as well as of style, but is feasible. The second, the Ruin of Doriath, is where real problems begin to pop up. About the first third of this exists in the long, in depth version, &quot;The Wanderings of Hurin&quot;. From the end of this all the way through the end of the book, though, there is nothing but the old Quenta Noldorinwa of 1930 (and a slightly expanded 1937 version of the end of 'Earendil'). It would be quite a discrepancy to leap from such a fully formed narrative to such a brief summary - I think this is largely why Christopher basically ignored the Wanderings of Hurin and much of the Narn in the 77. The Lost Tales is no help here, as Tolkien didn't even begin drafting the tale of Earendil. The only ways to handle this would be to drastically compress the Narn, Gondolin, etc., or to expand Earendil and parts of the Ruin of Doriath.

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