Rings of Power talk!

[blantyr]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

What you offer is a mistake in editing in unpublished material causing an immense plot hole which obviously was not in the published story.

I wouldn't think of it an editor's mistake, but a preliminary draft.

I forget which fantasy author told this tale, but one women entered a trivia contest at a science fiction convention where the questions were about the books she had written herself. She lost the contest. Badly. The many writes, rewrites, edits and changes got so confused in her head that her fans -- exposed only to the finished product -- remembered the final released version of her own world better than she did.

I suspect Tolkien knew his world better than most, but he rewrote and fine tuned to no small degree.