"Canonicity II": Has Yours Changed?

[Galin]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Personally I think it would have been very hard to pull off, even if he had been younger and more vigorous in the 1960s. Somehow he would have had to come up with some sort of really creative "garbling of the traditions" to suture over certain great big fat hairy problems, like Venus = a boat with a guy wearing bling,* and a very physical Frodo in an apparently material ship arriving in a seemingly concrete Eressea.

Is there anything in (G)NOME where Tolkien considers the matter of Earendil problematic? I'm just asking,
I've only read a few sections of the book so far.


Anyway, I'd say publish the Awakening of the Quendi as written in WJ -- pre-existing sun.
And publish The Drowing of Anadune as written in Sauron Defeated -- always round world.

You didn't say otherwise, but Quenta Silmarillion doesn't have to be the vehicle for Western Elvish tradition. In my opinion DA is a creative garbling, and contains the "needed" -- if briefly stated -- Western Elvish perspective of the original shape of the world.

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

*The easy solution doesn't work- "Venus is just a hunk of gas-wrapped rock, and later garbled legend equated it with Earendil." The problem with that is that it rose for the first time as a brand new star within the living memory of certain persons still alive at the end of the Third Age, like Galadriel, Celeborn, Elrond and Cirdan, not to mention the Wizards.

But none of these people wrote Quenta Silmarillion. And why would Bilbo's translation of a Numenorean, or largely "Mannish" Silmarillion, need not be "corrected" by the Noldor of Rivendell, or Cirdan, or Gandalf, and so on?

It wasn't Tolkien's job as translator to correct the poem about a troll baking bread for a Hobbit


In Morgoth's Ring, Myths Transformed, Christopher Tolkien writes concerning his father: "It is remarkable that he never at this time seems to have felt that what he said in this present note provided a resolution of the problem that he believed to exist:"

The present note here is text I of Myths Transformed.

And I agree it is "remarkable", but with emphasis on "at this time" as well.

And later . . .