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To this person for whom numbers generally have very little "colour" this is surprisingly interesting! 

 Because of the double effect of Tolkien not finalising anything and Christopher inserting his bias/preferences, I'm often wondering how a JRRT-published work might have finally appeared.. (Although even if he lived as long as Elros I'm sure he would have still been changing his mind throughout and would still not have finished!)

That is truly a wonderful compliment if I managed to make dry old dusty numbers come even a little bit alive for you!

I wonder about that a lot too and tend to end up with JRRT never being able to finish a "Silmarillion." His purpose changed so much between the Lost Tales and some of his late writings where he was completely reconsidering the cosmogony and historical transmission. I also wonder if the constant rewrites weren't part of the purpose. Intended or not, he did create a historical tradition right in the drafts of his work ...

Thank you for reading and  commenting! <3

 

It's your extrapolations that make this so interesting. I mean, the way I read, I originally read the whole Silm as an omniscient view, and never even noticed that Turin's chapter might be a different narrator. Just learning about JRRT's narrators and their likely biases changed the Silm dramatically for me. So extending that view by delving into this dialogue aspect is opening my eyes even further. 

I agree that, with the published Silm being cobbled together from various (often incomplete) writings spanning decades of mind-changes, we end up with quite a jumble. And yet I'm also really glad we do, because I love the magic and whimsy of his early ideas as much as his later writing, and I think the Legendarium would be far less rich and engaging without either. 

I'm also wondering how much of the Ainur's dialogue is Aulë and Yavanna having their domestic?