Works of Tolkien scholarship

There's lots of things in life that you'll regret if you don't try, regretted once you did try, but at least you don't have to wonder anymore.

No, seriously, this is appallingly sloppy. I was thinking it had to have been self-published but apparently it's not, though it might be close to it. The publisher is Oloris, which appears to have been set up exclusively to publish stuff by Tolkien fans. Clearly a good deal of time and organization went into this so I would think they'd want to invest in an editor or peer reviewers, but if they did, those people didn't know their Tolkien. It's all the more baffling because the book has hundreds and hundreds of endnotes but the errors, omissions, and baffling assumptions just keep coming.

Edit: simul with halfy. That's true, I suppose. At least I know not to pay for the second volume next year.

It did get better towards the end. He clearly was most interested in talking about the military stuff, making comparisons to real world ideas, etc. and that was far and away the best part. He did have some genuinely interesting and thought-provoking things to say about how the different characteristics of Elves and Men might have impacted their military tactics. Apparently the second volume will be all about this, since the first one resulted from an increasingly long prelude trying to set the stage with historical background information. Unfortunately, that section was horrendously sloppy and undermined the good parts that came later.

I think the worst part was his continual flip-flopping on orcs. Like, every time he mentioned orcs it seemed he went out of his way to call them "vile" and horrible and stuff but he couldn't quite make up his mind what part of "Myths Transformed" he wanted to rely on so he ended up saying a bunch of contradictory things all the while ignoring the first-hand accounts of orcs given in The Lord of the Rings which are way more detailed and informative. Though strangely enough he did block quote a description of orcs from The Hobbit which contradicted half the MT stuff he had been relying on previously.

Honestly though the orc stuff is not even scratching the surface in terms of errors. And most of them are much more straightforwardly wrong than the complex Myths Transformed situation where you have a ton of different ideas you have to sift through. My favorite part was when he said that King Ondoher of Gondor was killed by his own general, Eärnil, though I think that was a failure of sentence construction rather than a failure of research.

This thread reminded me about an upcoming book on The Hobbit films vs the book:

http://sacnoths.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/jan-bogstads-call-for-papers-hobbit.html

Sounds interesting...

I've read a couple essay collections about the films before but I'm pretty sure it was before 2011 so it can't have been this lady's previous one. Might be interesting but I'm not sure if I'm ready to read much more about The Hobbit movies just yet.

Also, I did end up writing a review of High Towers and Strong Places. This is the first time I've written a book review since ... I guess the 100 level English lit course I took ten years ago? Anyway, I had in the back of my mind something that I heard once on another forum: that the best reviews are the ones where you learn more about the subject of the book by reading the review. For some reason I thought I should try my hand at that (I guess since the book is similar to how I like to approach the legendarium) so ... here goes nothing

https://nolondil.tumblr.com/post/144990433286/book-review-high-towers-and-strong-places

I read Tolkien and the Great War for the first time this week as part of my broader research and it's gotta be one of the best books about Tolkien I've ever read. Fantastic both in the wealth of biographical detail, Garth's narrative ability, and as an analysis of Tolkien's early writing. While I don't agree with all of Garth's editorial comments (mainly, that he likes "The Silmarillion" substantially less than The Book of Lost Tales), those are few and I don't think they impact the quality of the analysis. Reading this just days before the start of the centenary of the Somme (which is today) made it all the more resonant.

Eldorion wrote:I read Tolkien and the Great War for the first time this week as part of my broader research and it's gotta be one of the best books about Tolkien I've ever read. Fantastic both in the wealth of biographical detail, Garth's narrative ability, and as an analysis of Tolkien's early writing. While I don't agree with all of Garth's editorial comments (mainly, that he likes "The Silmarillion" substantially less than The Book of Lost Tales), those are few and I don't think they impact the quality of the analysis. Reading this just days before the start of the centenary of the Somme (which is today) made it all the more resonant.

Glad you enjoyed it as well Eldo, it's easily one of the most interesting biographies I've read, it's remarkable than over 120 years since Tolkien's birth (and more than 40 since his death) scholars and critics are still finding new things to publish by him and talk about, and yes, on the centenary of the battle its sobering to realize just how far the odds were stacked against his survival (19,240 British and Empire soldiers were killed on the first day alone) even today I think WW1 still leaves a powerful mark on the UK's psyche.

I've only read the BOLT once so I can't really remember it in much detail, but I liked the way The Daily Telegraph summed it up:

In these Lost Tales we have the scholar joyously gambolling in the thicket of his imagination… a Commentary and Notes greatly enrich the quest’

The early versions of his Silmarillion legends and the other material is quite rough around the edges, but incredibly atmospheric and interesting to read, I particularly enjoyed the Cottage Of Lost Play material.

(If T.H readthrough stalls, maybe we could try a readthrough of The H.O.M.E?       )

Garth has a blog which he posts Tolkien related articles and reviews on occasionally:

https://johngarth.wordpress.com/

And he later wrote:

http://www.johngarth.co.uk/php/tolkien_at_exeter_college.php

(I haven't read it)

(Going off on a slighty related tangent, according to Tolkien Gateway, Douglas A Anderson is supposedly working on a new edition of G.B Smith's A Spring Harvest)

I hate wars, & wars of the past upset me a lot. Young boys, thats all they were, even lying about their age, getting killed. How the parents didnt crack up when these young lads disappeared IL never know

azriel wrote:I hate wars, & wars of the past upset me a lot. Young boys, thats all they were, even lying about their age, getting killed. How the parents didnt crack up when these young lads disappeared IL never know

Indeed  WW1 was an complete and utter disaster and a tragedy that should have never happened, and it lead to even more suffering only 20 years later, one of the most tragic things about The Battle Of The Somme in particular was the near destruction of so many 'Pals Battalions':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pals_battalion

The hearts of entire towns and villages were wiped out in minutes, thousands of people literally dissapearing without trace:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiepval_Memorial

Even today they are still finding new skeletons and weapons buried in the soil of France and Belgium  

I really wish we could say hummanity had evolved and learnt from its mistakes
Weird to think that as a 24 year old I'd be considered old during WW1...

As a 24yr old youde be considered a bloody miracle ! To get thru that war

malickfan wrote:Glad you enjoyed it as well Eldo, it's easily one of the most interesting biographies I've read, it's remarkable than over 120 years since Tolkien's birth (and more than 40 since his death) scholars and critics are still finding new things to publish by him and talk about

Definitely. I've read and enjoyed a number of Garth's blog posts (they tend to be more in-depth and interesting than "blog post" usually connotes), though Tolkien at Exeter College escaped my attention, other than a vague sense of having heard the title before. It sounds really interesting, but I'm trying to stop buying so many books right now due to my financial situation. I've made enough exceptions as is.

I've only read the BOLT once so I can't really remember it in much detail, but I liked the way The Daily Telegraph summed it up:

In these Lost Tales we have the scholar joyously gambolling in the thicket of his imagination… a Commentary and Notes greatly enrich the quest’

The early versions of his Silmarillion legends and the other material is quite rough around the edges, but incredibly atmospheric and interesting to read, I particularly enjoyed the Cottage Of Lost Play material.

It's been a long time since I've read any substantial portions of the BoLT but I agree with the Telegraph's reviewer (or at least, my interpretation of that quote) regarding the lighter tone in parts. The Tale of Tinúviel is downright goofy at times, especially with the "explanation" for the enmity of dogs and cats. Goofiness has its place but it makes for some jarring shifts next to material like, say, The Fall of Gondolin. I also recall struggling with the prose of BoLT more than most of the later "Silmarillion" texts; I feel like it was written in a more (deliberately) archaic style, though again it's been a long time so I dunno for sure.

I think a lot of Tolkien's ideas were improved and expanded in later years, though the 1977 Silmarillion is not always a great showcase of this since it's such a compressed version. I think Garth's criticism is a little unfair since the Quenta was only one (relatively small) part of The Silmarillion as Tolkien wanted to complete it. He was pretty clear in his intentions about wanting the volume to be a compendium of texts; many more than ended up in the 1977 version. Given the state of composition at his death, though, and in terms of providing an accessible edition for mass consumption (and thereby making the publication of more posthumous texts commercially viable), I think Christopher made the right call.

Take for instance Charles Noad's suggested outline of what Tolkien was likely going for (he suggests this and explains his reasoning in "On the Construction of 'The Silmarillion'", Tolkien's Legendarium, ed. Flieger and Hostetter):

Quenta Silmarillion

Concerning the Powers
- Ainulindalë
- Valaquenta

The Great Tales
- The Lay of Leithian
- Narn i Chîn Húrin
- The Fall of Gondolin
- Eärendil the Wanderer

The Later Tales
- Akallabêth
- Of the Rings of Power

Appendices
- The Tale of Years
- Of the Laws and Customs among the Eldar
- Dangweth Pengoloð
- Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth
- Quendi and Eldar

NB since Tolkien seemed intent on replacing the Aelfwine/Golden Book transmission with the Bilbo/Red Book one, Noad suggests that Elrond might have taken Pengoloð's place in the Dangweth.

Just sort of elaborating on this, I think the late versions of the Narn and "Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin" are among the best things Tolkien ever wrote, and I would have loved to read an entire book of First Age stuff like that, but given how Tolkien slowed down towards the end and didn't follow through on many of his late conceptions I suppose it's no surprise that a lot of analysis focuses on his earlier writing. I think -- speaking more generally here, not commenting on Garth anymore -- that a lot of people are frustrated or disappointed by the Quenta because they read it expecting a single, coherent story. But of course it isn't; it starts off as remote cosmological myth, includes a lot of detached recounting of history and geography, and occasionally gives all too fleeting glimpses into the characters. Reading through The History of Middle-earth reveals a lot of fascinating aspects of these characters, but they need room to breathe.

If you really break the structure of The Silmarillion down, it's a mythic cycle of sorts, and it does include several clear, character-driven, pretty cohesive stories within it.

1. The Fall of the Noldor (including the family drama of the Finwians)
   
2. Beren and Lúthien
   
3. The Children of Húrin
   
4. Wanderings of Húrin/Ruin of Doriath (left in an especially confused state)
   
5. The Fall of Gondolin
   
6. Eärendil the Wanderer (never written out but always of crucial importance)
   

None of the material from before the Eldar settle down in Aman contains enough detail to really flesh out into a stand-alone story. I mean, you can see hints of one with Thingol and Melian, though it lacks any involvement from Morgoth and is set in a pretty peaceful (and as a result dull) period in Beleriand's history. Of course, another such period occurs right smack dab in the middle of The Silmarillion, during the Siege of Angband, during which important things happen (founding of Nargothrond and Gondolin, arrival of men in Beleriand) but it's all recounted very annallistically and we don't get much insight into any of the characters involved.

But the stories two through six on that list, together with the Dagor Bragollach, Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and War of Wrath create a very tightly integrated story cycle where each major part stands on its own but you have enough cross-over characters and dramatic through-lines to keep everything integrated. Y'know, Morgoth breaks the siege of Angband, as a result Beren flees Dorthonion and arrives in Doriath, leading to the Quest for the Silmaril, inspiring the Union of Maedhros, which ends in the Nirnaeth, which sets Túrin and Tuor on their respective paths. Túrin and Húrin's actions result in the Nauglamír coming to Doriath which, together with the Silmaril already there, leads to the destruction of that realm. Tuor's arrival helps allow people to survive the sack of Gondolin, who join with the refugees from Doriath and are ruled by Eärendil who eventually sails into the West, which triggers the War of Wrath and defeat of Morgoth.

The other thing about these stories is that they're all about humans. Humans are the active ingredient spurring on many of the events in Beleriand, and the main character in all the major stories are human (except technically Eärendil, who chooses to be judged as an elf because of Elwing, despite feeling more like a human himself). Elves obviously still feature prominently, as these stories are about interactions of humans and elves, and the end result is the preservation of not just royal elvish bloodlines in later human rulers but much elvish lore and wisdom as well. Which is very similar to Tolkien's early statements regarding The Book of Lost Tales, that it would explain how the English preserved "the true tradition of the fairies".

Kind of a tangent, but this is my hypothesis for how to better understand The Silmarillion. It's not actually about elves and everything that happens before chapter 18 is just backstory. That's admittedly exaggeration but I think there are good reasons for keeping the Fall of the Noldor more remote. Gotta preserve those "unattainable vistas", and getting a ground-level look at life in Aman doesn't leave a whole lot left to keep in the background to maintain that sense of depth and history.

EDIT: there are obviously texts this doesn't explain, though a lot of them are non-narrative texts that are therefore likely to have a different in-universe history than the mythological stuff, which I would argue it's essential (thematically) to interpret as Númenórean-preserved, whereas stuff like LACE and the Athrabeth could be gotten more directly from the source by Bilbo.

Shouldn't it be realized that the Silmarillion is not in the image of its writer though?

I'm not 100% sure what you mean and I don't want to misrepresent you, but I think "The Silmarillion" should be understood in the context of its in-universe authors, translators, and transmitters/preservers. Tolkien put a lot of effort into developing textual histories for his stories and for other in-universe works that he didn't fully write out. The Book of Lost Tales' framing device ascribes each of its tales to a specific oral storyteller as well as providing a narrative of how all the tales were written down. This faded from prominence in some of the later "Silmarillion" texts (although Tolkien developed a pretty elaborate framing device for LOTR with the Red Book of Westmarch), but it was on his mind later in life too.

In "Myths Transformed" he toyed with the idea that the Great Tales (Beren and Luthien, Túrin, Tuor, and possibly Eärendil) at least must have been human compositions. This was largely in the context of his indecisiveness about cosmology. The earliest versions of the legendarium had purely mythical explanations for the origins and structure of the universe that had nothing to do with modern scientific understanding of such things, but as his conceptions evolved (and after the idea of the World Made Round) he thought that the Elves, being so wise and in tune with the world, couldn't have believed some of the mythological stuff that was really blatantly incompatible with science. So he suggested that at least some parts of The Silmarillion were later constructions by humans of Elvish stories that had been blended and mixed with their own primitive myths and beliefs.

Tom Shippey, on the other hand, takes a comment from "On Fairy-stories" and runs with the suggestion that the later parts of The Silmarillion represent not fairy-stories by humans, but "human-stories" by elves. Tolkien mentioned in OFS that fairy-stories are often about the escape from death, but the elves' human-stories would be about escape from deathlessness. However, other than The Lay of Leithian, which includes escape from both death and deathlessness at different points, but whose very title refers to Lúthien escaping the fate of the elves, I'm not sure how relevant this really is. Both elves and humans die in great numbers in the later parts of The Silmarillion, but for the most part they go to their appointed metaphysical fates without much question.

I tend to think that Flieger's criteria for analyzing a mythology (including "whose myth is it?", which I discussed on the first page of this thread when I was starting to do more research on this) is a better way of understanding The Silmarillion. And I think the evidence is fairly conclusive that Tolkien intended for the Silm to be a late Third Age construction by Bilbo from both elvish and Númenórean sources, but Tolkien never fully followed-through on rewriting the stories after he seems to have come to this conclusion (in the mid-1960s) so a lot of scholars ignore it.

Yeah, but The Silmarillion in its published form is not entierly how Tolkien intended, is it?

I'm just trying to look smart by contributing

I appreciate you commenting.

You're correct of course that the published Silmarillion is not entirely how Tolkien intended it. Christopher Tolkien had the Bilbo transmission in the back of his mind and has commented since that he thinks it was his father's final idea, but he didn't make that explicit in the since he felt at the time that he shouldn't do so if he couldn't prove conclusively that his father intended to. But this is one of the points where he later felt differently, as noted in the Foreword to BoLT 1.

Almost all of the words in The Silmarillion are Tolkien's own, but in some cases single paragraphs were stitched together with sentences and phrases that were written decades apart. Doug Kane's Arda Reconstructed (which I wrote a mini-review of earlier in this thread) is an excellent reference work for seeing where each part of the finished book came from. When reading the individual source texts in their HoMe form, I think it's important to keep in mind Tolkien's intentions and conceptions at the time it was written, but when approaching the 1977 Silmarillion one also has to consider where Christopher was coming from. The alternative is to ignore the 1977 Silm entirely and only analyze the HoMe texts, which seems to be popular with a lot of fan-scholars, or just deliberately ignore all the messy details and try to analyze the 1977 Silm as a single work anyway, which is unfortunately common in some "pop" books about Tolkien for a general audience.

A big part of me wants to argue for ascribing the 1977 Silm a place in the internal textual tradition, but it's hard to do that while also according the same status to the HoMe versions which often give a lot more richness and detail, so I'm not totally sure where I stand. From the external perspective, of course, you can just read everything on its own terms, which is probably the best way to approach the First Age material in terms of general enjoyability, but it's a less effective approach for detailed analysis.

Janet Brennan Croft was handing out free back issues of Mythlore at the NY Tolkien Conference this weekend and I spent part of the bus ride back flipping through them. There were some good pieces (including one by Croft herself, from before she became editor, about Tolkien and WWI which I assume was the jumping-off point for her subsequent book, and conference presentation this weekend, on that same topic). However, there were a few eyebrow-raising articles which I have no idea how they through the peer-review process. By far the worst was this one that claimed Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings as an allegory of WWI. It was kinda funny because it was in the same issue as Croft's essay about WWI in which she said LOTR wasn't allegory in the opening paragraph. But this other essay had this hideously tortured comparison that betrayed a lack of understanding of either WWI, LOTR, or both.

Just to pick one example, the author claimed that the Mayor of Michel Delving in the Shire was the allegorical counterpart to the British monarch since both were ceremonial positions, ignoring the existence of the Thain and the fact that elected officials in the British government wielded all the power of the modern state, whereas none of the chief offices of the Shire carried much authority because the whole place was an unrealistically peaceful pastoral idyll (murder had literally never occurred in the Shire according to Frodo in ROTK, VI . He briefly mentioned the British Empire but didn't even try to address the complete lack of anything even remotely resembling an imperial analogue for the Shire.

did this author make any attempt to address Tolkien's flat statement that the LotR was not allegorical or based on WW1?

I think some people enjoy/know the story so well they end up finding excuses for allegory and symbolism wherever they can, jumping to conclusions or misinterpreting the source material just to 'prove' their points correct.

It's incredible how many different interpretations there are of LOTR...

Eldo you should probably consider submitting something to Mythlore etc at some point...

halfwise wrote:did this author make any attempt to address Tolkien's flat statement that the LotR was not allegorical or based on WW1?

He claims that the allegory is "impossible to deny" when you look at LOTR closely and that Tolkien subconsciously disguised the WWI themes as mythology as "his way of escaping a painful truth and easing his suffering and loss". Which doesn't make sense even on the argument's own merits since he elsewhere quotes Tolkien discussing how his WWI experience inspired certain parts of his writing.

malickfan wrote:I think some people enjoy/know the story so well they end up finding excuses for allegory and symbolism wherever they can, jumping to conclusions or misinterpreting the source material just to 'prove' their points correct.

I think you're right. Reading the book with an agenda is basically a recipe for confirmation bias and you're all but guaranteed to find cherry pickable evidence that you can present out of context. Although something that has become increasingly clear over the course of my (re)immersion in academic Tolkien studies over the past several months is that a disturbing number of published "Tolkien scholars" simply do not know the books very well compared to a lot of online, self-taught "fan-scholars". I mean, there are obviously plenty of great published scholars doing important work that is a boon to everyone who wants to learn more about Tolkien, but there are a lot of people who either got into Tolkien via another academic field or just knew somebody involved with publishing or for whatever reason ended up in an academic context while knowing less about the ins and outs of Tolkien's work than many people I know through Tolkien forums. Different publishing houses, journals, and conferences are gonna have different standards of course but I think the border between professional and fan scholarship is a lot more blurry than I used to.

I'm not alone in saying this. Michael Drout (editor of the J. R. R. Tolkien Encylopedia and co-editor of the first nine volumes of Tolkien Studies, and a guy who definitely knows what he's talking about based on his stuff that I've read) has said:

To add one more thing: I am a pretty big Tolkien geek. I have read the History of Middle-earth, all twelve volumes, more than twice. I've read the LotR over 40 times and the Silmarillion about 30 times. I've memorized a lot of the poetry. I understand the logic behind the alphabets. But I know for a fact that there are a lot of people out there who know a lot more about the internal elements of Middle-earth than I do. These people are enormous resources for Tolkien scholarship, and they should be encouraged and listened to, not mocked or derided. I think that my additional training in literary study, ancient languages and linguistics gives me the opportunity to add value and context to the analysis and discovery by people who work only within the materials of Middle-earth, but I don't ever pretend that I know more about Middle-earth than they do.

http://wormtalk.blogspot.com/2003/11/becoming-tolkien-scholarive-been.html (emphasis in the original)

Unfortunately, as Drout mentions in that post, his is something of a minority opinion. Mythlore still refuses to accept "Middle-earth studies" that study the Secondary World as if it was real, despite the Mythopoeic Society also publishing journals that study the languages in that way, and the fact that Tolkien approached his subcreation in a similar fashion in many of his posthumously published essays. I feel that this leaves a major hole in the field of Tolkien scholarship. I was somewhat heartened to hear one of the presenters at the NY Tolkien Conference agree with me on this (though she had started off as an online-only fan, which is probably not a coincidence). I've written at greater length about my feelings regarding this divide in Tolkien studies in the below-linked essay (which masquerades as a book review ).

http://nolondil.tumblr.com/post/144990433286/book-review-high-towers-and-strong-places

Eldo you should probably consider submitting something to Mythlore etc at some point...

I've thought about it quite a bit, to be honest. I had initially hoped to submit the review I just linked to for publication, though it's far longer than journals typically want for reviews and while they sometimes publish reviews of that length I figured since I don't have connections I was unlikely to get an exception like that. The journal I've thought most about submitting to is the Journal of Tolkien Research since they make their articles available for free online, and I'd rather a larger audience be able to read anything I've written (one of my articles on my old Wordpress blog has been viewed over 100,000 times). But I've become increasingly disillusioned with the academic/publishing side of Tolkien scholarship and no longer see it as being as prestigious or validating as I once did. Though in a sense that's because I've received enough validation from other people who I consider Tolkien scholars (and I've become less relentlessly critical of my own writing) that I don't feel I have something to prove as much as I used to.

Though if I'm being honest the prospect of going through the peer review and publication processes stresses me out and I am really not in a good place, mental health wise, to bring more stress into my life. And I'm kinda trying to scale back some of my involvement in Tolkien stuff so I can have more time for other hobbies again.

Unfortunately writing a paper that is up to scholarly standards is no fun. But a review paper is something of a different class, since you are not trying to prove anything. The main danger there is that the reviewers may have read a different set of references, and want you to include all of them.

I was kinda upset when I realized that the ePub version of High Towers and Strong Places that I purchased didn't have the same page numbers as the softcover edition (which is just how ePub works but I didn't think of it beforehand). I managed to use the Adobe Digital Editions pagination though so I had more than 20 references to specific pages in the book. Didn't want to criticize it to the extent that I did without showing my homework.

I want to keep a record of a discussion on the Tolkien Society FB group so that it doesn't get lost in the bottomless pit of Facebook's not-really-an-archive, so Imma drop the link here and quote a couple of my posts. Link won't work if you're not a member but anyone can join. I figure this thread is as good a place as any since it already contains some of my long, rambling Lore posts.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTolkienSociety.EducationalCharity/permalink/10155885256081068/

Interesting topic; thanks for posting this!

"This is obviously requiring quite a stretch of the reader (at least if the reader stops to think about this) – you end up with three Hobbits writing their memoirs in the third person..."

I don't see this as a problem since I don't think that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are anywhere presented as literal translations of Bilbo's and Frodo's personal accounts. This is especially obvious in the case of The Hobbit where the narrator is clearly not Bilbo, but it also crops up in LOTR, such as with the infamous "express train" line which could only have been added by a modern editor/rewriter. In the Foreword to the First Edition of LOTR Tolkien stated (of his conceit) that "I have in this tale adhered more closely to the actual words and narrative of my original than in the previous selection from the Red Book, _The Hobbit_." While Tolkien replaced this Foreword in the Second Edition with one that did not mix the conceit with the actual history of Tolkien's writing process, I think that as a statement of intent regarding the imagined internal source tradition it remains relevant. Relatedly, in the Second Edition the note at the beginning of the Appendices explicitly distinguishes between direct quotations from the Red Book (those printed within quotation marks) and editorial comments by Tolkien himself in the role of ostensible translator and editor.

You raise valid points regarding the plausibility of the Red Book surviving so long but as far as Tolkien's own statements regarding the ostensible sources of TH and LOTR I think the situation is fairly straightforward and internally self-consistent.

That's a good write-up, but I'm not sure how advisable it is to combine the Aelfwine/Golden Book transmission of The Silmarillion with the Bilbo/Red Book one (as is done in the chart in Appendix 3). I think there is fairly solid evidence that Tolkien intended to fully replace the Aelfwine transmission with Bilbo's "Translations from the Elvish", although this decision came late in his life and (like many other things from that era) he never fully followed through on the rewriting that would have been necessary to implement it. I know that this is not the majority opinion so I hope you'll forgive a rather wordy attempt to explain my reasoning here.

The First Edition of LOTR refers to "many annals, genealogies, and traditions of the realms of the South and the North [Gondor and Arnor], derived through Bilbo from the books of lore in Rivendell" without reference to the First Age, but in the Second Edition Prologue this is changed and Bilbo's translations are now "almost entirely concerned with the Elder Days" and therefore not used by Frodo in his account of the War of the Ring. It is these alterations to the Second Edition that led Robert Foster and Christopher Tolkien to conclude that "Translations from the Elvish" was intended to be the main source for The Silmarillion (cf. HoMe I, Foreword). There are of course numerous references to Aelfwine in The Later Silmarillion texts from the 1950s, but he disappears from the (admittedly few) texts written after the Second Edition of LOTR.

Furthermore, Tolkien had already begun to remove references to Aelfwine after he began to put more stock in the Númenórean transmission of the legends of the First Age (detailed in Myths Transformed). For example, the last full version of the Akallabêth from the late 1950s makes reference to Aelfwine in its framing device, but Tolkien later referred to Elendil as the author of the Akallabêth (UT, The Line of Elros). It has been argued that the Númenórean transmission is not compatible with "Translations from the Elvish" since Bilbo would have had direct access to Elvish sources, but I don't think this argument has a strong textual basis. In the preface to The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), Tolkien (writing in his ostensible role as translator and textual historian) speculated that material from Gondor "may have reached Bilbo by way of Rivendell", and that another poem "depend[ed] on the lore of Rivendell, Elvish and Númenorean, concerning the heroic days at the end of the First Age; it seems to contain echoes of the Númenorean tale of Turin and Mim the Dwarf." Thus, we can have both the "blended and confused" Númenórean versions of the Great Tales (HoMe X, MT), presumably translated by Bilbo largely for their cultural/literary value, and more accurate Elvish histories, all within the same transmission.

To be sure, none of this changes the fact that Aelfwine was an important figure in the legendarium and that it is essential to keep him in mind in order to understand many of the tales and annals that Tolkien wrote throughout his life, but I don't think that synthesizing the Aelfwine and Bilbo transmissions is reflective of Tolkien's intentions.

Awesome Eldo. I'm just myself finishing a fun, longish, quote-ridden head-butting thread with someone (elsewhere), with respect to Bilbo and the Silmarillion as a Numenorean compilation.

And now and again, over the years (if I recall correctly), I've been politely butting heads about this with William Cloud Hicklin too. In 2016 he started a thread (in another elsewhere) about transmission... we tangled again of course, and I had help from folks making my point better than I'd ever done, especially with respect to making real world comparisons.

Anyway, nearing the end of the thread, WCH posted:

Actually, I think I'm coming around to the "uncritical translation of old legends" view of Bilbo's work especially in light of T's description of Quenta Silmarillion as a compilation made in Numenor, focused around the Great Tales (all of them about Edain). This is especially appealing in that we know that Bilbo was quite fond of Aragorn and very interested in his lineage. The only (minor) problem there is that "Translations from Numenor" or some such might have been a more accurate title, even though the given one isn't inaccurate (presumably the Numenorean QS was written in Sindarin).

I had something of a small epiphany in this regard brought on by analogies made here to classical mythology. We have all read collections of "Greek" mythology-- except that many of those stories and several of the best known in fact come from Ovid, a Roman; further confusing matters is the fact that often these collections, especially the older ones, use the Latin rather than Greek names of deities (even that reflects Roman "garbling;" with the exception of Apollo, the Roman pantheon were native Latin gods who were subsequently syncretized with the Greek and appropriated their legends).

Coming around to the idea, at least... well, it's not nothing  

In some of my arguments, I'm possibly giving the wrong impression that by re-characterizing some of the Elder Days material within the new transmission scenario, Tolkien had A) solved the problem he believed to exist (set out in MT), and B) could then just wipe his hands clean and say done! While I think A is true enough (and it seems to me that CJRT agrees in MT), I don't mean to say that there was nothing more to do of course -- which would be silly anyway, as Tolkien hadn't even finished revising QS, or parts of it, even during the Elfwine transmission scenario, as we all know.

Well, JRRT finished a "Silmarillion" in 1930. But who wants even one Elder Day without Galadriel? Not me!