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SeanF

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12 hours ago, SeanF said:

Galadriel's rejection of the One Ring requires a much greater degree of self-sacrifice if she thinks she's still banned from returning West due to past sins, than if she is not.

Perhaps I'm misremembering, but didn't Galadriel not only ever defend her Teleri kin against the Feanorians? I'm not sure how that would justify a continuous ban on her after the War of Wrath (assuming it did before which I'm not sure is justified). Sure, her remaining behind can be seen as an act of defiance, but the idea that she was still not allowed to return at the end of the TA never made much sense to me.

The temptation of the Ring for her is also, rather obviously, that the Ring actually would give her the means to not only get what she wanted when she set out, but also to keep it in perpetuity and to a degree Nenya and the other Rings of Power could not grant her.

That is pretty big never mind why exactly she originally left and was not allowed to come back.

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8 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Perhaps I'm misremembering, but didn't Galadriel not only ever defend her Teleri kin against the Feanorians? I'm not sure how that would justify a continuous ban on her after the War of Wrath (assuming it did before which I'm not sure is justified). Sure, her remaining behind can be seen as an act of defiance, but the idea that she was still not allowed to return at the end of the TA never made much sense to me.

The temptation of the Ring for her is also, rather obviously, that the Ring actually would give her the means to not only get what she wanted when she set out, but also to keep it in perpetuity and to a degree Nenya and the other Rings of Power could not grant her.

That is pretty big never mind why exactly she originally left and was not allowed to come back.

I could also be misremembering, but I do think that the time Tolkien wrote LOTR, he envisaged Galadriel being barred from  returning

Your second paragraph is quite correct.  She would also get to preserve Lorien as it was, although in time it would become a different type of Mordor.

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3 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I could also be misremembering, but I do think that the time Tolkien wrote LOTR, he envisaged Galadriel being barred from  returning.

There is something like that in The Road goes ever on, but I'm not recalling right now that this extended to a ban on her even in the SA and TA.

And in the Silmarillion texts Tolkien never made Galadriel a follower of Feanor at all. She had the same desire, sure, and she spilled some blood, but she never swore any vows and was thus only cursed by extension. That was never much pretext for a ban.

Especially since we actually learn that a lot of the Noldor returned to Valinor after the War of Wrath, and the destruction of Eregion, and after the end of the SA. How likely is that Galadriel was basically the only one who was not allowed to return?

3 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Your second paragraph is quite correct.  She would also get to preserve Lorien as it was, although in time it would become a different type of Mordor.

Oh, I think she would have been able to do more than just that. She had already preserved Lórien for over 5,000 years thanks to Nenya. But that wasn't all that much. In the TA Imladris and Lórien are basically reservations for the native people, little islands in the wilderness surrounded by Men who already rule Middle-earth.

With the One Ring she could have changed that, too. She could have gotten what she wanted in the beginning. Or rather: a twisted version of that. She didn't set out to become an obscure fairy-queen in some forest reservation.

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8 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I could also be misremembering, but I do think that the time Tolkien wrote LOTR, he envisaged Galadriel being barred from  returning

In Letter #297, Tolkien wrote:

 

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The Exiles were allowed to return — save for a few chief actors in the rebellion of whom at the time of the L. R. only Galadriel remained.

CT then provides a note making it explicit that this means that in LotR Galadriel believed her exile to be "perennial", hence her song in which she thinks no ship will ever bear her to the West.

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On 3/12/2019 at 5:35 PM, Lord Varys said:

The Silmarillion as published by Christopher is a travesty because it merges older and newer versions of the text, completely ignoring a lot of crucial aspects to the narrative framework like the fictional narrators and the fact that those texts were handed down to later generations in the fictional world. Not to mention arbitrary decisions on the correct spelling of names, etc.

The fictional authors presents a problem in that LotR and The Hobbit (and possibly some of the UT texts) were attributed to Bilbo and Frodo, and it appears that there was also some discussion about attributing The Silmarillion to Bilbo as well (since he spent 18-odd years in Rivendell with full access to both elven records and Elrond's personal account of events).

Tolkien's intentions are unclear in this regard: Aelfwine and Pengolodh are key figures in the Lost Tales tradition, but seem to disappear later on as Tolkien developed the first Quenta (although Pengolodh is still credited as the author of the various timelines and Lays of Beleriand/Aman). That suggests that Tolkien had decided to lowball or abandon the framing device. Later references to Aelfwine in post-LotR writings are spotty and could be interpreted that either the framing device was going to be reinstated (probably massively changed) or that Tolkien was including those references only for his own amusement, and a fully-published, JRRT-approved version of the Silmarillion would have rejected them and instead relied on the existing, reader-familiar idea of Bilbo and the Red Book being the source of all the records. Without JRRT's input, it is impossible to say.

I also find the idea that CT should be criticised for not incorporating material he did not have access to at the time to be curious. As CT has said, when assembling The Silmarillion in 1974-77, he had access to some of his father's material but not all of it, much of which had been sent off to America. It was getting access to that material again which helped provide the impetus for HoME

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One can certainly be of the opinion that Celeborn should actually be more the guy he is hinted at being in LotR considering that's what JRRT himself published and he should have stuck with, but apparently he did not in his later writings. He also reinvented Gandalf as some sort of angelic being, so changes such as this have to dealt with. It makes little sense to insist that published texts must be sacrosanct if we have evidence the author didn't consider them as such. He even messed with the Hobbit for the sake of his sequel and his 'Rings of Power' (which people usually don't even know because the majority of people doesn't know the original version of the Hobbit).

 

Tolkien was certainly open to revision, so if he changed things for The Silmarillion we would have no doubt seen a Third Edition of LotR and possibly The Hobbit incorporating these changes. Since he did not live long enough to complete the changes to the Sil, let alone incorporating them into the previous books, then we must indeed consider The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (2nd Editions) to be fixed points in the canon for lack of any viable alternatives.

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Well, there certainly are texts in there that are difficult to reconcile with the Hobbit-LotR tradition, but so what? There is the LT tradition which is canon in its own right, and the Lays do work perfectly fine as in-universe artistic and poetic expressions. The only complete Silmarillion we have is the one written and finished prior to the sequel of the Hobbit fused the universe of a children's book with the Silmarillion and Númenor complex. As such, it constitutes a canon, too, if you want to call it that.

 

Earlier, rejected and aborted revisions cannot constitute part of the formal canon, as such, just as GRRM's 1993 outline for A Song of Ice and Fire is not remotely canon, or his deleted scenes of Tyrion's sojourn in Chroyane and meeting the Shrouded Lord. They are curiosities and certainly fascinating as part of the process of Tolkien's development as a writer, but they are are not (and cannot be) part of the formal canon.

Given the editorial hand in the published Sil and UT, I agree that accepting them as part of the formal canon at the same level as The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is problematic, but also disregarding them in favour of outdated and obsolete drafts or never-completed later material is silly.

To massively over-simplify things, Tolkien seems to have gone through three broad creative periods of The Sil: Revision A, 1917-c. 1925 which was the Book of Lost Tales tradition, which was (more or less) completed but only in a highly archaic form. The broad strokes of the story are the same as later (meaning that Revision A can be looked at for Tolkien's ideas where later revisions did not touch on, particularly the ending of the story) but many details are different and certainly the whole thing is incompatible with The Hobbit and LotR.

Revision B seems to have run from roughly 1930 (about when Tolkien adopted the name Silmarillion and wrote the first version of the Quenta) to c. 1952 and consists of material that Tolkien was developing alongside the Hobbit and LotR and is much more compatible with it. This material is a hodgepodge of complete summaries, timelines and semi-complete narratives. Tolkien rushed through this especially in 1950-52 when he was trying to get Collins to publish LotR and The Silmarillion together, but could not complete the work and was discouraged by Collins' clear antipathy towards the project (later confirmed when they asked him to cut LotR massively).

Revision C, what CT calles the Later Quenta Silmarillion, runs from after LotR's publication until Tolkien's death in 1973 and consists of a significant effort to revise and update The Silmarillion in line with LotR and The Hobbit, possibly with an eye to revising those books if necessary. The results of this period were patchy, at best, and the revisions were not completed sufficiently to allow a workable, complete manuscript to be developed.

The Silmarillion as published seems to have mostly been based on Revision B, falling back to Revision A (with minor prose upgrades courtesy of Guy Gavriel Kay) where necessary, but unable to incorporate a lot of Revision C material due to its lack of completion or in some cases availability.

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Why Christopher never bothered to actually return to the Silmarillion to make it better I don't know. Probably because it is better not to confuse people who are supposed to buy the thing. 

 

Given HoME, UT and other books CT wrote, this seems an unlikely explanation. CT has always been swift to revise texts and publish new information (or repackage old, long-published material with some Alan Lee artwork to make a quick buck), so if he believed that the material he had access to later on - which he didn't during the editing of The Silmarillion - merited a full revision or Second Edition of The Silmarillion, he would not have hesitated to do so. The fact he did not is highly indicative that there was insufficient information and material left behind by his father to mount such a project. The fact that no other self-appointed Tolkien "scholars" have attempted to do so in a credible manner despite having access to the full material in HoME also backs this up.

JRRT's plan for The Silmarillion at the time of his death appears to have been a sweeping revision to strengthen the narrative ties to Lord of the Rings (so more stuff for Galadriel, Celeborn and other elvish characters), and the inclusion of an updated Quenta as the narrative framework surrounding much more detailed, LotR-level prose versions of at least the three Great Tales, only one of which was written to completion or near-completion (the Narn i Hin Hurin, published in UT and later under revision as The Children of Hurin). The other two, Tuor/Gondolin and Beren/Luthien, were much more lightly sketched out (resulting in the somewhat anaemic full book versions). He also planned major family tree changes and name changes, but didn't get very far in either project. On this basis CT revising The Silmarillion to match JRRT's last plans appears to have been impossible: there was wholly insufficient material to mount such an effort and would require the invention of new prose from scratch (something CT has vehemently resisted doing) in huge amounts to complete the project.

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Christopher Tolkien is a god damned saint, as far as I'm concerned.  It's unprecedented that a literary giant's heir would have the scholarly training and disposition to spend literally decades sorting through his father's papers and presenting them to the world, errors and false starts and all,  with such a level of clarity. 

I also think he was entirely right to use LotR as a touchstone for internal consistency (insofar as it was possible to achieve it). JRRT in his old age got stuck on a number of trivial things, such as the notion of making the setting "scientifically" viable or things like greatly softening up Galadriel and other figures. Those would have been mistakes had Tolkien ever decided to revise everything to fit, but given that he never got anywhere close, who's to say when he didn't himself recognize that some of these things were dead ends at best, detrimental to the effect of the work at worst? 

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Also a correction to an earlier point: JRRT did know that the Necromancer was Sauron prior to starting work on LotR. In his letter to Stanley Unwin of 16 December 1937, he confirms that the Necromancer is Sauron and his entrance to The Hobbit was unexpected. What Unwin made of this is unclear, as Tolkien had sent the incomplete Silmarillion to the publisher but Unwin appears to have not read it, giving it to his staff to sort through instead (so he had no idea who Sauron was), but that was certainly Tolkien's view before he started writing LotR (which he did just three days later).

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  • 2 weeks later...

I personally found the attempt to massively revise the Silmarillion cosmology into a heliocentric, more "cosmic" setting fascinating, even if it was just never going to work with the rest of the Silmarillion (especially the desire to have the Elves awaken to the stars and Men awaken with the first rise of the Sun). Same for his inconclusive attempt to revise the origin of Orcs. 

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On 10/14/2018 at 12:06 PM, Gaston de Foix said:

Out of curiosity, has anyone read the Banewreaker series? Thoughts?

The argument could be made that the perspective on events in the Silmarillion are to a great extent Valarist propaganda.  The facts are that the Valar consistently mishandled Melkor and prevented him from wreaking great harm to the Noldor.  They then abandoned the Noldor to fight a doomed battle against him, wearing down his resources, while failing to permit any Noldor to even seek succour.  Even when they finally intervened, they were sloppy enough to leave a threat like Sauron around. 

 

It’s crap.  Industrialist revisionist crap.

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On 10/23/2018 at 4:56 AM, One-Winged Balrog said:

Well, we could go up a level in the discussion and ask why would the supposedly benevolent Eru create Melkor in the first place. But this also applies to the rest of the Gods in our own world's culture.

The “problem of evil” hinges upon people believing in fully deterministic universes where “God” is limited by our idea of logic.  Those twisted up in “problem of evil” ignore paradox and the fact that paradox is absolutely a feature of our known universe, not a bug in it.  It is literal “sophistry”.  All formal systems will generate paradoxical statements.  See Godel’s incompleteness theorems.

As such and knowing that “Gods” in these Universes can create free will while knowing outcome because they exist outside of time is it unreasonable to believe that their higher order of understanding (an understanting which we are fundamentally incapable of grasping) allows them to understand paradox and use it to further their ends?

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On 4/7/2019 at 7:36 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I may not.  That was my understanding from my limited reading.  I’d be delighted to have it better explained.

:)

I assumed that by "paradoxical statements" you mean statements that are both true and false (self-contradictory). This is not what the Godel’s incompleteness theorem claims.

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incomplete means that every system fulfilling a few rather basic conditions (complex enough to contain standard arithmetic or whatever) contains statements that are undecidable within this system. If with true one means provable within a system, then this means they cannot be shown to be true. So they are, in a way, neither true nor false. As far as I understand these statements can be made provabe within slightly larger systems (or they can simply be added as axioms to the original system). But then new statements will arise that exhibit the feature of being undecidable within the larger system and so on.

Goedel's incompleteness theorem is probably rivalled only by some ideas from quantum mechanics of being taken as a "morale" for totally different fields of thought.  In praxi they are "local" and not readily "importable" into other areas. Roughly, while highly significant in their respective fields, they should not be taken as applicable elsewhere without a lot of caution.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/10/2019 at 12:45 PM, Jo498 said:

incomplete means that every system fulfilling a few rather basic conditions (complex enough to contain standard arithmetic or whatever) contains statements that are undecidable within this system. If with true one means provable within a system, then this means they cannot be shown to be true. So they are, in a way, neither true nor false. As far as I understand these statements can be made provabe within slightly larger systems (or they can simply be added as axioms to the original system). But then new statements will arise that exhibit the feature of being undecidable within the larger system and so on.

Goedel's incompleteness theorem is probably rivalled only by some ideas from quantum mechanics of being taken as a "morale" for totally different fields of thought.  In praxi they are "local" and not readily "importable" into other areas. Roughly, while highly significant in their respective fields, they should not be taken as applicable elsewhere without a lot of caution.

Godel's incompleteness theorem applies to any system of logic complex enough to contain addition. The laws of physics have also recently been shown to be incomplete and unknowable by any observer within our universe. 

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But this is not a problem for the practice of maths or physics. We can still do math. We only cannot automatize theorem-proving in a way some people envisioned. As I said, it mainly shows that this stuff is more "local" than we thought.

To put it simply: Goedel's result does not lead us to doubting most mathematical proofs or make maths as a whole or the very idea of proof problematic. We can keep doing (most) maths, almost like we did before Goedel. It is only/mainly relevant for some special fields and for the philosophy or metamathematical theory of maths.

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6 hours ago, Jo498 said:

But this is not a problem for the practice of maths or physics. We can still do math. We only cannot automatize theorem-proving in a way some people envisioned. As I said, it mainly shows that this stuff is more "local" than we thought.

To put it simply: Goedel's result does not lead us to doubting most mathematical proofs or make maths as a whole or the very idea of proof problematic. We can keep doing (most) maths, almost like we did before Goedel. It is only/mainly relevant for some special fields and for the philosophy or metamathematical theory of maths.

I never said it ment we cannot do math or physics.  I mean it’s interesting that we cannot completely describe either with certainty.

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I've read the story of Aldarion and Erendis, and honestly I'm not that impressed. I'm not really sure what Tolkien was trying to do with this one. The story does show Númenórean society more, and we hear the first news of Sauron stirring in the east, but that's it. And I suppose Erendis starts the tradition of the monarchs wearing a star on their brow.

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6 hours ago, Corvinus said:

I've read the story of Aldarion and Erendis, and honestly I'm not that impressed. I'm not really sure what Tolkien was trying to do with this one. The story does show Númenórean society more, and we hear the first news of Sauron stirring in the east, but that's it. And I suppose Erendis starts the tradition of the monarchs wearing a star on their brow.

It's a detailed exploration of a marriage gone wrong - a domestic drama. More generally, it's a deconstruction of what happens when you extend human lifespan to Numenorean levels.

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