Two Gandalfs

[davem]

It is a difficult question. But it can be extended - as happened in the part of the Canonicity thread to which H-I has directed us. What about Galadriel? The 'later' Galadriel, is not the one we meet in LotR. Many of the characters in the Legendarium change - not just 'develop' but acually change in fundamental ways. This was why I feel that any hope of producing a 'definitive' Sil is doomed to failure. There are multiple 'Gandalfs', multiple 'Galadriels', multiple 'Elronds' (& of course a couple of 'Glorfindels' )scattered through the works. Come to that there are multiple 'Gondolins' - the Fall of Gondolin we have in BoLT is not the same as the account we find in the published Sil.

We have all this just in Tolkien's own writings - when we come to the versions of the texts which were 'edited' by CT we find ourselves in even greater difficulties. As Child says, these are basically insurmountable difficulties - if we wish to look at them in that way.

But these aren't 'problems' unless we demand some kind of consistency across all Tolkien's writings. We have internal consistency within each work, which is all we really need to enter in & be convinced by the 'reality' of the 'secondary world'. To demand any more would be unfair. Probably it would have been impossible for Tolkien to write LotR if he had stuck too closely to TH. He had to break free of the style & mood of TH before he could produce LotR.

Yet its a trap Tolkien himself falls into.The changes he made to TH later, to bring it line with LotR - principally the change in Riddles in the Dark - don't really fit the mood of the rest of the book. And they weren't actually necessary, as the original version of that chapter is accounted for in the story of Bilbo's 'lie' about how he came by the Ring which we're given in LotR.

Its also quite likely that one reason Tolkien was never able to complete the Sil to his satisfaction was because he felt it had to fit as perfectly as possible with LotR.

Clearly he had a desire to produce a coherent secondary world with as few internal inconsistencies as possible, but i can't help feeling that HoME is a better reflection of his mind, & his genius, than either CT's Sil or his own 'completed' Sil, if he'd managed to achieve it. Each character, each story is a product of who he was at the time he wrote it, & should really be seen in that way, rather than as the scattered pieces of a jigsaw, which if put together in the 'right' way will produce a coherent picture.