Q: Is There a Definitive Edition or Printing of The Silmarillion?
ANSWER: The reader who submitted this question has spent time and money collecting the best possible editions he can find of The Lord of the Rings but is not certain if any effort should be made to collect a specific edition or printing of The Silmarillion.
To be honest, I don’t know if anyone has cataloged errors of (in-story) fact in printings of The Silmarillion, or even if there are any such errors. This Website explains what to look for if you want to buy a 1st edition of The Silmarillion (I have owned two but no longer care if I have one that may become valuable in 100 years). The printing flaw on page 229 did not introduce errors into the story; it simply reflected a misaligned printing plate that fell out of position during the first print run (or something like that).
When I bought the second edition of The Silmarillion I think I literally threw it across the room because it didn’t change anything significant that I could tell. What was the point behind it if it wasn’t going to try to fix the flaws of the first edition? Well, I live in my own corner of the universe. If you’re going to buy any edition of The Silmarillion I would get an edition illustrated by Ted Nasmith.
Peter Collier describes various editions of The Silmarillion here (although he implies it was begun in 1917 — The Book of Lost Tales is another book altogether). He tries to cover 60 years of history in 2 short paragraphs so I should probably cut him some slack.
If I were in a collecting mood I would probably want to find copies of the dummy Silmarillion books from 1977. Those are rare and may be worth some money.
As for any minor textual errors that may have been corrected in some edition or printing, I am not enough of a collector to care. I am not even sure of how many copies of The Silmarillion I own any more. Some are in storage. I think I have at least two with me somewhere at home. One needs the patience of a Hammond and Scull, or an Anderson, to document all the little changes in these books and in the end only a very, very small number of them affect the details of the story.
My concern as a researcher is the details of the story, not the details of the printing or edition. And that makes me a poor source of information on this topic. When I interviewed Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull in 2011 they indicated that Wayne was working on a new edition of J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography (1st edition published in 1993) but I have yet to see that a new edition is available. A 21-year-old bibliography, which has some notable errors in it (by Wayne’s own admission), is probably not entirely helpful to the passionate collector but it will give you far better information about Tolkien publications than I think you’ll find on any blog, including this one.
There was a time when I noted precisely which edition of which book I was quoting from when citing a Tolkien book, but that is such a tedious process and — frankly — given all the different editions (and translations) floating around the Tolkienverse I finally gave up because people kept writing to me asking if their printings/editions/translations were bad because they didn’t agree with my citations. Sometimes there were errors in my citations, which I had to type in by hand with the books laid open in my lap.
So, to answer the question directly, I don’t believe there is a definitive edition of The Silmarilion and it may be 100 years before anyone attempts to make one, depending on how long Christopher Tolkien lives (bless his heart). All current versions of the book are, in my opinion, seriously deficient — but that is what comes of having read The History of Middle-earth forwards and backwards an uncountable number of times. Your mileage may vary.
See also:
- Is The Book of Lost Tales an Early Version of The Silmarillion?
- Are There Many Different Middle-earths in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Books?
- Did Christopher Tolkien Write the Silmarillion
- Was Kortirion Supposed to be Part of the Middle-earth Mythology?
- An Interview with Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull
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Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?
I have the Nasmith version too. It’s gorgeous. I love Ted’s work!
Namarie, God bless, Anne Marie 🙂
Publication by a living author is the usual standard for ‘definitive’ – with some authors confusing us by issuing more than one distinct edition of their work. Failing that, editors like CT are forced to come up with alternative criteria which inevitably depend on the material at hand and their knowledge of its development. But in essence, all such criteria remain intellectual workarounds, hence debatable. Unless all we find is a single or complete final version of the text, a decisive milestone in the creative process is missing. The lack of it is irreperable.
In this context, I find it questionable when people dismiss notions of the Book of Lost Tales being an early version of the Silmarillion. Who is to say to which degree two versions of the same material may differ before they become two separate projects? Given the sweeping changes Tolkien was apparently planning for the Silmarillion, the book we actually got to read can only be classed as a predecessor of what he might have published himself… unless you accept that JRR left us a process, rather than a book.
The only errors that I recall are the confused ancestry of Gil-Galad as either son of Fingon or Orodreth (as well as the status of that dude since he is either nephew or brother of Finrod), but that is mentioned by Christopher Tolkien as his mistake. Well whether the History of Middle Earth contain really the final versions of stories are debatable so there’s no point in speculating Christopher tried to order the notes and make from them consistent with each other (but as he says even then there will remain differences with the many variations Tolkien made it’s only the sign of his genius and passion that this great author had enough care for his work to even make different often conflicitn versions of the same story which adds in my opinion to the value of his works since even history of real world is not always consistent 🙂 ).
I have heard about fanmade reconstructions of Silmarillion, based on the 5th, 10th and 11th volumes of HoME. Do you have any informations about such projects.
I don’t know of any finished projects. Frankly, I doubt they would be very interesting to read.