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anghraineMy icon has grey eyes and black hair just for Tolkien :P
So. I generally dislike Tolkien fandom's "canonicity discourse" (yes, I'm doing it anyway) and the idea of imposing a specific ranking of texts. That said, it's occurred to me that one of the reasons I feel deeply out of step with Tolkien fandom is that The Silmarillion (as in, the published book, not the in-story accounts) is on a drastically different level of canonicity for me than basically everything else with JRR Tolkien's name on it.
I don't dislike The Silmarillion or anything. I quite enjoy it! But for me, it shows its age—not in ~a man of his time~ sense, but in an editorial sense. Christopher Tolkien did an enormous amount of spectacular editorial work over the course of his life and we are deeply indebted to him. But I think he did pretty clearly get better at it over time, and particularly at presenting his father's mass of notes and documents and so on in a way that makes the texts as accessible as possible. At the same time, in later texts, he clearly differentiates between actual words JRRT wrote (whether in the main body or in notes) and his (CT's) own understanding and explanations as JRRT's confidant and literary heir. I do give a lot of credence to Christopher Tolkien's understanding of his father's work, actually, and I deeply respect (and am grateful for) CT's efforts to carefully and clearly explain things like dates of composition (and how this can be determined), direct context, how a given point relates to his father's broader work, etc, throughout these texts.
(Tangent: Facebook keeps recommending defensive Jackson stans griping about how Christopher Tolkien just didn't get his father's work like Jackson did and was so horribly ungrateful to the filmmakers and such an inferior scholar blahblah for the crime of disliking the films. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE!! I am not uncritical of Christopher Tolkien, and neither was Christopher Tolkien, but I think we owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to him. Also, even to me, his response to the films seemed harsh at the time, but at this point, I think he was pretty much right, anyway, and correctly judged the films' impact and reflection of pop culture understanding of JRRT's work.)
So what is my issue with the published Silmarillion?
Well, at the time, I don't think it was immediately apparent that there was a popular appetite for work by Tolkien that had never reached a final form and in some cases never been finished at all. So The Silmarillion, despite being very different from LOTR, is compiled in such a way that the stories can be presented in a more streamlined, coherent, consistent narrative style for people who would only know LOTR and The Hobbit. So, as is, the published Silm does not internally include the level of editorial transparency that marks Christopher Tolkien's later work (or indeed, much editorial transparency at all, as this would distract from the desire for a straightforward narrative). Sometimes in UT/HOME, CT will explain an earlier choice made in the published Silmarillion, but you have to essentially cross-reference this later documentation with The Silmarillion to identify specific places where CT is known to have made an executive decision that may or may not have been the best one according to his own later judgment. And those are just the occasions mentioned in the vast amount of later documentation by him, which it's pretty clear does not reflect all information Christopher Tolkien (and Guy Gavriel Kay!) were working with or every choice they made.
In any case, as far as I'm aware, there is no version of The Silmarillion that includes the the kind of information that CT was so painstaking about in so much of his later publications of JRRT's work. It was The Silmarillion itself that allowed for that later documentation, pragmatically speaking—I'm not denying that or blaming CT and GGK for the absolutely mammoth endeavor they undertook. But to me, the end result is that The Silmarillion as published is fundamentally a more dubious text in terms of JRRT than the material in UT/HOME, and far, far more so than LOTR.
To be clear, Tolkien really wanted material he was working on for the Silm to be included with LOTR in some way and considered it essential to LOTR, and it pretty obviously pained him to contract that vast quantity of material down to what he had room for in LOTR + the Appendices (expansive as they can seem!). But I think Tolkien fandom also tends to overstate this a bit, and also is vague and inconsistent about whether the Silm under discussion is the published Silmarillion or Tolkien's vast collections of eternally unfinished WIPs set in Middle-earth previous to TH/LOTR. And I feel like Silm fandom specifically tends to downplay the importance that JRRT himself placed on LOTR and its unique position within the Middle-earth corpus. It's not perfect by any means and Tolkien definitely acknowledged this, and even mentioned a few errors of phrasing (e.g., Gandalf's description of Denethor's use of the palantír of Minas Tirith should read as more of a speculation on Gandalf's part, not absolute knowledge that he could theoretically possess). But JRRT's general tendency was to defer to the canonicity of LOTR, and we repeatedly see him revise or scrap ideas he came up with later to conform to the canon established by LOTR.
For instance: this is part, though I think only part, of why he concluded that "The Problem of Ros" almost entirely fails. In "The Problem of Ros," JRRT switches his established idea that Sindarin became the House of Bëor's vernacular language very early on, to the idea that they did retain their original, distinct language, and elements of the Bëorian language occur in the names of some of Beren's descendants, like Elwing and Elros. But this conflicts with -ros being clearly represented as Sindarin in a very minor detail in LOTR, and upon reconsideration, Tolkien decided the whole concept mostly wasn't working, and decided that -ros and -wing were Sindarin all along and the Bëorian language was Sindarin, which is why it was a genuine vernacular language and not only a prestige language in the Bëorian-settled Andustar region of Númenor (home to the bulk of the Faithful). The ban on Elvish language by the later kings/King's Men was thus banning the people of the Andustar from speaking their own native language of thousands of years at that point.
There was another issue where Tolkien was thinking that the supernatural qualities of Elves were not shared with mortals at all, but realized this was not compatible with the depiction of the Númenóreans in LOTR, particularly the Third Age Dúnadan who crafted unambiguously enchanted weaponry. This detail is not minor because it is linked to the destruction of the Witch-king, but the specific character in question is incredibly obscure (though I'm a fan!) and we know almost nothing about him. Nevertheless, this reminded Tolkien that in LOTR he did depict "true" Númenóreans as supernatural like Elves and thus his conception of the supernatural in Middle-earth would always have to account for their existence.
The characterization of Tolkien canon as a chaotic, mutually incompatible mishmash of unfinished and perhaps unfinishable ideas that Tolkien nevertheless considered the most important and valuable and merit-worthy parts of his overall work always annoys me a bit for this reason. Tolkien canon is messy, for sure. But the idea that it's in this state of absolute chaos in which no part takes precedence over any other part or imposes any kind of order over other parts seems a bit disingenuous to me when it comes to Lord of the Rings and its towering importance in Tolkien's own mind. In the long letter where he argues for the inseparability of Silm material with Lord of the Rings while trying to negotiate publication issues in 1951, he provides a general account of basically everything in Middle-earth, briefly discusses The Hobbit's place in the big picture, before moving onto a detailed description of LOTR (completed and revised at that point), describing it as "much the largest, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle" (Letter 131). By 1952, he was anxious to publish LOTR for various reasons, even if it meant setting the Silm material aside (though he would have preferred to publish both, which among other things would have allowed him to lighten the burden of exposition carried by the Council of Elrond scenes). Some of those reasons were unabashedly financial (and good for him, lol) but Tolkien also argued, "I am anxious to publish The Lord of the Rings as soon as possible. I believe it to be a great (though not flawless) work..." (Letter 134).
I think the point that a publishing deal for the Silm would have lessened the need for exposition within LOTR is sometimes overlooked! I mean, there's the fact of it, but there's also the indication that at least some material that would have gone into JRRT's own ideal Silm project is already in LOTR as we have it. Silm material placed within LOTR—however awkwardly at times!—is material that was entirely written by JRRT and revised for publication within his lifetime, actually published, checked again for later editions also in his lifetime, and which he himself strongly prioritized over later ideas he was entertaining. In 1952, he only had one fair copy of LOTR due to the expenses and difficulties of typing it up, and was so worried about anything happening to it that he refused to send it in the mail (IIRC he personally met with his publisher so he could turn it over in person). It was a very big deal to him, even in later years when he was still more conscious of its faults and of never being satisfied with his own work.
(This is also one of the reasons that people having conniptions about Rings of Power relying on LOTR canon rather than popular Silm fandom interpretations just seems kind of silly to me. For one, Silm fanon often has a pretty ephemeral basis even when including the published Silmarillion, but that aside, there's actually a lot of Silm material in LOTR very definitely written and approved by Tolkien, and Tolkien actively tried to prioritize the material that made it into LOTR.)
There is some Tolkien canon that's in a very rough or chaotic or deeply ambiguous state, and there are discrepancies between even fairly mature and developed works and LOTR, flaws in LOTR, etc. But I don't think there's really good evidence that LOTR is seriously at the level of uncertainty that the published Silmarillion is, or even Unfinished Tales etc. And even apart from LOTR itself, I do prefer to give priority to material outside of the published Silmarillion when we have access to it, whether it's in UT, HOME, letters that are more or less contemporaneous with LOTR or later, etc. I don't think anyone is obligated to approach Tolkien in exactly this way, but if we're going to go on about what Tolkien said and did and evidence of his intentions and so on, I do think it makes sense to give weight to material outside the published Silmarillion, especially where there are significant discrepancies.
One issue where this becomes pertinent for me is all the digital ink spilled on how Elrond would or would not deal with Maglor in the Second or Third Ages. I'm okay with the idea of eternally wandering sad war criminal post-First Age Maglor, and I've written Second Age Maglor fic, even—though I'm not interested in wiping out the pathos of how he ends up and making everything fine and healthy. But in any case, I think it's actually pretty clear that Tolkien envisioned him dying at the end of the First Age. You wouldn't know this was a canonical possibility, much less Tolkien's stated preference, from the fandom. I think in large part that's because an older version made it into the published Silmarillion.
There's a similar issue with the confusion around Gil-galad's parentage, even though it's no more ambiguous than other characters' such as Celebrimbor's, and probably less, given that CT pretty openly stated that presenting Gil-galad as Fingon's son in the published Silm was a mistake and JRRT evidently intended him to be Orodreth's son. These aren't huge moral affronts or anything, but I think the flattening of all of Tolkien's work into this realm of absolute chaos in which nothing is finished or finalized and no consistency can be found is a major exaggeration that exists mainly to prop up the preferences of fandom BNFs.
So. I generally dislike Tolkien fandom's "canonicity discourse" (yes, I'm doing it anyway) and the idea of imposing a specific ranking of texts. That said, it's occurred to me that one of the reasons I feel deeply out of step with Tolkien fandom is that The Silmarillion (as in, the published book, not the in-story accounts) is on a drastically different level of canonicity for me than basically everything else with JRR Tolkien's name on it.
I don't dislike The Silmarillion or anything. I quite enjoy it! But for me, it shows its age—not in ~a man of his time~ sense, but in an editorial sense. Christopher Tolkien did an enormous amount of spectacular editorial work over the course of his life and we are deeply indebted to him. But I think he did pretty clearly get better at it over time, and particularly at presenting his father's mass of notes and documents and so on in a way that makes the texts as accessible as possible. At the same time, in later texts, he clearly differentiates between actual words JRRT wrote (whether in the main body or in notes) and his (CT's) own understanding and explanations as JRRT's confidant and literary heir. I do give a lot of credence to Christopher Tolkien's understanding of his father's work, actually, and I deeply respect (and am grateful for) CT's efforts to carefully and clearly explain things like dates of composition (and how this can be determined), direct context, how a given point relates to his father's broader work, etc, throughout these texts.
(Tangent: Facebook keeps recommending defensive Jackson stans griping about how Christopher Tolkien just didn't get his father's work like Jackson did and was so horribly ungrateful to the filmmakers and such an inferior scholar blahblah for the crime of disliking the films. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE!! I am not uncritical of Christopher Tolkien, and neither was Christopher Tolkien, but I think we owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to him. Also, even to me, his response to the films seemed harsh at the time, but at this point, I think he was pretty much right, anyway, and correctly judged the films' impact and reflection of pop culture understanding of JRRT's work.)
So what is my issue with the published Silmarillion?
Well, at the time, I don't think it was immediately apparent that there was a popular appetite for work by Tolkien that had never reached a final form and in some cases never been finished at all. So The Silmarillion, despite being very different from LOTR, is compiled in such a way that the stories can be presented in a more streamlined, coherent, consistent narrative style for people who would only know LOTR and The Hobbit. So, as is, the published Silm does not internally include the level of editorial transparency that marks Christopher Tolkien's later work (or indeed, much editorial transparency at all, as this would distract from the desire for a straightforward narrative). Sometimes in UT/HOME, CT will explain an earlier choice made in the published Silmarillion, but you have to essentially cross-reference this later documentation with The Silmarillion to identify specific places where CT is known to have made an executive decision that may or may not have been the best one according to his own later judgment. And those are just the occasions mentioned in the vast amount of later documentation by him, which it's pretty clear does not reflect all information Christopher Tolkien (and Guy Gavriel Kay!) were working with or every choice they made.
In any case, as far as I'm aware, there is no version of The Silmarillion that includes the the kind of information that CT was so painstaking about in so much of his later publications of JRRT's work. It was The Silmarillion itself that allowed for that later documentation, pragmatically speaking—I'm not denying that or blaming CT and GGK for the absolutely mammoth endeavor they undertook. But to me, the end result is that The Silmarillion as published is fundamentally a more dubious text in terms of JRRT than the material in UT/HOME, and far, far more so than LOTR.
To be clear, Tolkien really wanted material he was working on for the Silm to be included with LOTR in some way and considered it essential to LOTR, and it pretty obviously pained him to contract that vast quantity of material down to what he had room for in LOTR + the Appendices (expansive as they can seem!). But I think Tolkien fandom also tends to overstate this a bit, and also is vague and inconsistent about whether the Silm under discussion is the published Silmarillion or Tolkien's vast collections of eternally unfinished WIPs set in Middle-earth previous to TH/LOTR. And I feel like Silm fandom specifically tends to downplay the importance that JRRT himself placed on LOTR and its unique position within the Middle-earth corpus. It's not perfect by any means and Tolkien definitely acknowledged this, and even mentioned a few errors of phrasing (e.g., Gandalf's description of Denethor's use of the palantír of Minas Tirith should read as more of a speculation on Gandalf's part, not absolute knowledge that he could theoretically possess). But JRRT's general tendency was to defer to the canonicity of LOTR, and we repeatedly see him revise or scrap ideas he came up with later to conform to the canon established by LOTR.
For instance: this is part, though I think only part, of why he concluded that "The Problem of Ros" almost entirely fails. In "The Problem of Ros," JRRT switches his established idea that Sindarin became the House of Bëor's vernacular language very early on, to the idea that they did retain their original, distinct language, and elements of the Bëorian language occur in the names of some of Beren's descendants, like Elwing and Elros. But this conflicts with -ros being clearly represented as Sindarin in a very minor detail in LOTR, and upon reconsideration, Tolkien decided the whole concept mostly wasn't working, and decided that -ros and -wing were Sindarin all along and the Bëorian language was Sindarin, which is why it was a genuine vernacular language and not only a prestige language in the Bëorian-settled Andustar region of Númenor (home to the bulk of the Faithful). The ban on Elvish language by the later kings/King's Men was thus banning the people of the Andustar from speaking their own native language of thousands of years at that point.
There was another issue where Tolkien was thinking that the supernatural qualities of Elves were not shared with mortals at all, but realized this was not compatible with the depiction of the Númenóreans in LOTR, particularly the Third Age Dúnadan who crafted unambiguously enchanted weaponry. This detail is not minor because it is linked to the destruction of the Witch-king, but the specific character in question is incredibly obscure (though I'm a fan!) and we know almost nothing about him. Nevertheless, this reminded Tolkien that in LOTR he did depict "true" Númenóreans as supernatural like Elves and thus his conception of the supernatural in Middle-earth would always have to account for their existence.
The characterization of Tolkien canon as a chaotic, mutually incompatible mishmash of unfinished and perhaps unfinishable ideas that Tolkien nevertheless considered the most important and valuable and merit-worthy parts of his overall work always annoys me a bit for this reason. Tolkien canon is messy, for sure. But the idea that it's in this state of absolute chaos in which no part takes precedence over any other part or imposes any kind of order over other parts seems a bit disingenuous to me when it comes to Lord of the Rings and its towering importance in Tolkien's own mind. In the long letter where he argues for the inseparability of Silm material with Lord of the Rings while trying to negotiate publication issues in 1951, he provides a general account of basically everything in Middle-earth, briefly discusses The Hobbit's place in the big picture, before moving onto a detailed description of LOTR (completed and revised at that point), describing it as "much the largest, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle" (Letter 131). By 1952, he was anxious to publish LOTR for various reasons, even if it meant setting the Silm material aside (though he would have preferred to publish both, which among other things would have allowed him to lighten the burden of exposition carried by the Council of Elrond scenes). Some of those reasons were unabashedly financial (and good for him, lol) but Tolkien also argued, "I am anxious to publish The Lord of the Rings as soon as possible. I believe it to be a great (though not flawless) work..." (Letter 134).
I think the point that a publishing deal for the Silm would have lessened the need for exposition within LOTR is sometimes overlooked! I mean, there's the fact of it, but there's also the indication that at least some material that would have gone into JRRT's own ideal Silm project is already in LOTR as we have it. Silm material placed within LOTR—however awkwardly at times!—is material that was entirely written by JRRT and revised for publication within his lifetime, actually published, checked again for later editions also in his lifetime, and which he himself strongly prioritized over later ideas he was entertaining. In 1952, he only had one fair copy of LOTR due to the expenses and difficulties of typing it up, and was so worried about anything happening to it that he refused to send it in the mail (IIRC he personally met with his publisher so he could turn it over in person). It was a very big deal to him, even in later years when he was still more conscious of its faults and of never being satisfied with his own work.
(This is also one of the reasons that people having conniptions about Rings of Power relying on LOTR canon rather than popular Silm fandom interpretations just seems kind of silly to me. For one, Silm fanon often has a pretty ephemeral basis even when including the published Silmarillion, but that aside, there's actually a lot of Silm material in LOTR very definitely written and approved by Tolkien, and Tolkien actively tried to prioritize the material that made it into LOTR.)
There is some Tolkien canon that's in a very rough or chaotic or deeply ambiguous state, and there are discrepancies between even fairly mature and developed works and LOTR, flaws in LOTR, etc. But I don't think there's really good evidence that LOTR is seriously at the level of uncertainty that the published Silmarillion is, or even Unfinished Tales etc. And even apart from LOTR itself, I do prefer to give priority to material outside of the published Silmarillion when we have access to it, whether it's in UT, HOME, letters that are more or less contemporaneous with LOTR or later, etc. I don't think anyone is obligated to approach Tolkien in exactly this way, but if we're going to go on about what Tolkien said and did and evidence of his intentions and so on, I do think it makes sense to give weight to material outside the published Silmarillion, especially where there are significant discrepancies.
One issue where this becomes pertinent for me is all the digital ink spilled on how Elrond would or would not deal with Maglor in the Second or Third Ages. I'm okay with the idea of eternally wandering sad war criminal post-First Age Maglor, and I've written Second Age Maglor fic, even—though I'm not interested in wiping out the pathos of how he ends up and making everything fine and healthy. But in any case, I think it's actually pretty clear that Tolkien envisioned him dying at the end of the First Age. You wouldn't know this was a canonical possibility, much less Tolkien's stated preference, from the fandom. I think in large part that's because an older version made it into the published Silmarillion.
There's a similar issue with the confusion around Gil-galad's parentage, even though it's no more ambiguous than other characters' such as Celebrimbor's, and probably less, given that CT pretty openly stated that presenting Gil-galad as Fingon's son in the published Silm was a mistake and JRRT evidently intended him to be Orodreth's son. These aren't huge moral affronts or anything, but I think the flattening of all of Tolkien's work into this realm of absolute chaos in which nothing is finished or finalized and no consistency can be found is a major exaggeration that exists mainly to prop up the preferences of fandom BNFs.