Oversight, or changing conceptions?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Last bit on Finrod: Tolkien changed his mind. Why? Not entirely sure, but probably related to his development of the family's Quenya names and the notion that Finwe would have given all his sons similar -finwe ones. "Findarato" just didn't fit the pattern, so it was moved down a generation. Tolkien's prerogative. Who are we to tell him no? While he had never planned a 2d Ed, the necessity fell on his head and he decided to take advantage of the opportunity to bring LR into line with post-1953 developments in the First Age material. Note also that the following year in The Road Goes Ever On, what he has to say about Galadriel doesn't really square with the LR at all points, either, unless you use a shoehorn and a hammer.

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Back to Mithrellas- it seems the best explanation to force a fit is to say, yes, used loosely "Eldar" just means those who made it to Beleriand. Maybe not even the Laiquendi. But I still suspect that when Tolkien wrote Appendix A he had simply forgotten what he said about Imrahil's ancestry almost as a throwaway line ("At length they came to the Prince Imrahil, and Legolas looked at him and bowed low; for he saw that here indeed was one who had elven-blood in his veins.") Remember, the full Mithrellas legend was written much later.

[Galin]

Erg. My bad. Turns out the H&S reference I posted above relates to the specific passage of the golden house of Finrod, while another Appendix F reference changed to Finarphir.

Ballantine Books 1965: "Noblest of all was the Lady Galadriel, of the royal house of Finarphir and sister of Finrod Felagund, King of Nargothrond."

Yikes.

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

( . . . ) Tolkien's prerogative. Who are we to tell him no? While he had never planned a 2d Ed, the necessity fell on his head and he decided to take advantage of the opportunity to bring LR into line with post-1953 developments in the First Age material.

We are Tolkien's readership and can say "no" by way of criticism anyway, just as if he'd kept changing the colour of the Dwarf hoods in The Hobbit. And Tolkien told himself no regarding inconsistency with already published work, so why not here as well?

In any case, I think JRRT was creative enough to work his Silmarillion material around what was said in LOTR about Finrod. And in general there wasn't that much already in print to "constrain" him concerning the First Age, relatively speaking.

Note also that the following year in The Road Goes Ever On, what he has to say about Galadriel doesn't really square with the LR at all points, either, unless you use a shoehorn and a hammer.

And so I get out shoehorn and hammer where (arguably) necessary, with respect to author-published works.

But why should I tire my arm with respect to Mithrellas when Appendix F defines Eldar as " . . . the name of the Three Kindreds that sought for the Undying Lands and came there at the beginning of Days (save the Sindar only)."

Thus, even if the legend is true, Mithrellas was not one of the Eldar with respect to the Three Unions.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

You are in effect saying "God can too create a boulder so heavy He Himself can't lift it."

[Galin]

If that boulder is making ros a Beorian word, for example, Tolkien can "lift" it, but doesn't. And he goes on with a note concerning the word wing: "noting that the name Wingelote of Earendil's ship had not appeared in print." A few pages later [POME] Tolkien muses whether or not he can make Glorfindel a Sindarin prince -- but no, this would entirely contradict what is said of him in The Fellowship of the Ring.

It's art. And it's for a readership at large (including future readers), and up for criticism; and yes, this reader (me) sees no great reason to alter Finrod, and thinks Tolkien should have created around it.

Anyway, it's not like I throw my books into a swamp when I read Finarfin in Appendix F!

Not anymore at least. That got costly

[William Cloud Hicklin]

And other times he did otherwise. Eru Iluvatar can change the rules at will

[Galin]

I get the God metaphor, and the word "rule" is perhaps only a shorthand stand-in for something more complex here, but anyway, here's a bit of the reality for writers and storytellers.

"Last time, you said Bilbo's front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a gold tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin’s hood was silver"; at which point my father muttered "Damn the boy," and then "strode across the room" to his desk to make a note."

Christopher Tolkien

Deus ex machina is another, and the eagles can be a dangerous machine, as Tolkien notes in letter 210. Of course, as the "god" of his story, Tolkien can use the eagles whenever he wants, but can he change the perception in the minds of readers that gives rise to the literary problem of God from the Machine, or the reason for Christopher Tolkien's criticism above, which can stand for more than "petty" unwanted inconsistencies.

So Christopher Tolkien, posthumously as it seems, changed Appendix F II to match Appendix F I -- for consistency I'm guessing (along with getting the "Finarfins" to match, after Finarphir in 1965). And on the other hand, some readers still wonder about the description "House of Finrod" from The Fellowship of the Ring.

I'll put it this way: I can think of an easy solution that could have avoided all this

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Tolkien was driven by a few impulses, often contradictory, and the vector arithmetic depending on small shifts could lead to different outcomes. Tolkien was a complex and inconsistent man!

On the one hand, we have the Patience (Solitaire) player. He favored a form called Forty Thieves (or Napoleon at St Helena), which is a very strategic game, one in which one has to plan several moves ahead as in chess. He also was fond of the Times crossword (which, for non-Brits, is one where every clue is itself a small word-puzzle to be teased out). In short, Tolkien's mind delighted in working out puzzles according to set Rules - even where the Rules were those he had made himself. This is especially the case with his languages, which can be said to be enormous puzzles, modified by aesthetic taste.

But then, as we can see with the languages, he was perfectly capable of changing the Rules if he felt like it. It wasn't Calvinball anarchy, but he still wasn't disposed to make himself a complete prisoner. The Problem of Ros was a voluntary submission to Rules he could change at will.*

Then we have Tolkien the fiddler, the reviser, the niggler, as reflected in Christopher's comment in the OP. He had almost a compulsion to tinker with things, from a little -mo/-vo alteration of the grammar, to the massive uprooting of Noldorin from its elaborate historio-cultural context and its recasting as Sindarin, to the gargantuan destruction and re-constitution of the fundamental cosmological myth, never actually carried out.

Into this add Complexity: everything was so interlaced and interdependent that pulling on a thread, without extreme care, could lead to a large unraveling. This did not mean never to to it, but did incline towards circumspection.

Into this we intrude the apparent, but only apparent, Immovable Object, the vector of inverse magnitude and direction to any intersecting vector: publication. This is really the intrusion of the pragmatic external world: novelists don't get revised editions (not usually). Once it's in type it's too late to change anything. But this isn't to say that Tolkien didn't chafe under that externally-imposed Rule, and wish he could change some printed material anyway: this is exemplified by the "sample" Riddles in the Dark which he sent to A&U on a wing and a prayer and which, much to his amazement, was incorporated in a new edition. And the same applies to the 2d Ed. LR: he wasn't expecting it, but when the opportunity presented itself, well, then shackles were loosed and he felt free to implement changes he had wanted to make. Among these changes were the names of Finwe's third son, and his son.

Add to this the fact that Tolkien was a very imperfect editor, and often missed things he should have revised to fit changes but overlooked Hammond and Scull are full of these, such as Aragorn's "three nights" which escaped correction to "four" in The Riders of Rohan; as well as the Company's "previous" night in the flets which was no longer "previous" after the night spent on the ground had been inserted. (Many of these were caught later by Christopher, still paying attention to Dwarf hood colors. CT was rather more meticulous than his Da.)

And so I don't think publication forms the Iron Curtain of 'canonicity': it may, or it may not, represent Tolkien's ultimate intention; what it represents is an externally-imposed pragmatic limit, which Tolkien sometimes, but not always, believed he had to surrender to, as with -ros. He had got a 2nd edition, but had no reason to expect a 3rd.

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*I have long felt that he could have worked his way around it by postulating that vernacular Gondorian Sindarin wasn't the pure book-form, but contained a gaggle of loan-words collected over the millennia from Adunaic, pre-Numenorean local languages, Rhovanic/Rohirric and probably even the Haradrim. Just like the vernacular Latins that became French,** Spanish and Italian. The element -ros was a surviving loanword from Beorian via Adunaic into demotic Sindarin, preserved probably due to the name of the first King- and probably assumed by the nonlearned to have always been Sindarin.

**Roughly 10% even of modern French vocabulary derives from Frankish