Christopher Tolkiens "editing"

[Catz]

ok......well this isnt about the professor per se, but it is about his son.............what id like to know is..........does Christopher Tolkiens "editing" as seen in HoME, annoy anyone else as much as it does me?
i would have far preferred that they had let me make up my own mind about whether or not a particular thread in the story was his "fathers intent".........cos lets be honest..........he really didnt know either, and what you get after all his "clarifications" is just what Christopher thought......NOT what his father did
thoughts?
:catz:

[Lalaith]

Interesting discussion... :)

I think that, if anyone was to edit it, Christopher Tolkien was the only man for the job! Now, I know that you are referring to the HoME series, but when I consider what a great job he did with the Silmarillion (which was, admittedly, JRRT's most complete unpublished book) I have a great deal of admiration for him.

I suppose, as well, that my high opinion of CT is based on the fact that he was so much in his father's confidence that he would receive extracts of LoTR as it was being written. He was the person who saw it evolving...

I would think that a great deal of care would have to have been put into editing such an enormous volume of work, a great deal of which needed a lot of cleaning up...

So, while I would love to know for sure exactly what JRRT's own opinions were, I am quite happy to accept his son's opinions - especially cos they never stop me forming my own (vocal!) opinion! lol

[Catz]

thats the trouble tho.......they DO stop you from forming your own opinions on it because in the welter of information that he presents, instead of just giving you the various options, he tried to follow a narrative path, favouring the direction HE believed the story should take........and most people , given the path of a narrative, will follow it.......its human nature.........but narrative is all but impossible with so much material......id rather that hed simply presented the material.
and its the cleaning up that i object to........if i read something like HoME, i would expect it to be disjointed and messy.........thats fine........what i want is a taste of the author............not the editor.
basically.........reading HoME tells you a lot about the opinions of CT and very little about JRR.
and he was sent chapters to read.........i dont think he was "in his fathers confidance" mainly cos i dont think that JRR knew where he was going with it most of the time........Christopher really didnt see it evolve as such.........he merely saw completed chapters a bit earlier than the rest of us ;) lol
:catz:

[Lalaith]

And I am so jealous of the fact (and I'm also conveniently overlooking the fact that I wasn't born at the time, so it's kinda irrelevant!! lol )

I think, though, that the works were so fragmented that CT probably felt that he had to provide his own commentary... When I read UT and the Books of Lost Tales for the first time, I read only JRRT's narrative and then I checked out the countless footnotes and additions... Maybe I'm still in the 'eternally-thankful-that-all-of-these-works-were-published-at-all' phase!! lol

[Lady Ashley]

I tried to read some of the HOME series but it was just plain confusing. I couldn't tell what was the solid story. It went back and forth between the different versions. That's why I can't get through them.