Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by ArcusCalion

This is a pretty straightforward question, but I am very curious. Where is the textual history of this chapter of the Silmarillion given? Wikipedia says it is given in the Treason of Isengard but I can find only references to one or two passages from it in that book. Is the textual history of the chapter ever given? Or is Christopher Tolkien's version the only one we have available? If the latter is the case, to what extent did he make it up from scratch?

I'd love to know as well. Even Douglas Kane's Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion, which is a pretty thorough account of where Christopher Tolkien sourced his texts, and where he had to invent things himself, offers little insight. My instinct might be totally wrong, but the passage at the end of "Of the Rings of Power" about Frodo destroying the Ring has always felt out of place to me, because the specific events of The Lord of the Rings are so rarely mentioned in the context of the wider history of Arda in anything else Professor Tolkien wrote.

When I revised my PhD thesis, one of my examiners told me to reference the drafts found in The History of Middle-earth rather than the published Silmarillion so that I could accurately cite Professor Tolkien's own writing. I ended up eliminating any reference to "Of the Rings of Power" and using alternative sources because I simply couldn't find any version of it other than the one Christopher Tolkien published in The Silmarillion.