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Re: Silmarillion Question

Subject: Re: Silmarillion Question
by Findegil on 2010/11/18 20:30:29

Sorry, Red, I meant to reply to your question right away, but was sidetracked. Not that I can add much to what Khamul has written. I haven't done a study of later Silmarillion printings, in the various editions, to trace when corrections were made (if they were made), though I'm sure that this is in my future. For now, all I can say is that the Ballantine Silmarillion was based on an uncorrected printing of the Allen & Unwin/Houghton Mifflin hardcover text. I note in the Descriptive Bibliography that Ballantine continued most of the original errors, and I list eighteen of them.

Ballantine Books have never seemed to be overly concerned with the accuracy of their Tolkien books - they sell reasonably well regardless - and I doubt that there was any effort by Ballantine in 1979 to find a corrected copy-text, if they even knew that corrections needed to be made. Ballantine of course are just a tributary of the mainstream of Tolkien textual history, which is represented mainly by British editions. In 1979 Rayner Unwin was still in charge of Allen & Unwin/Unwin Books, had a close relationship with Christopher Tolkien, and was amenable to emendation, particularly as the paperback had to be reset.

Wayne