Charles Noad comments (was Christopher's Masterpiece)

So, Charles Noad had a comment to add to the discussion following my post 'Christopher's Masterpiece'. Rather than have it appear at the end of ten other messages, I decided it'd be better if it were a bit more prominent as a new post all its own. Here's what Charles has to say:

Charles Noad writes

I am a bit puzzled about the matter of my alleged suggestion that Guy Gavriel Kay was mainly responsible for the composition of Chapter 22 of the published Silmarillion, 'Of the Ruin of Doriath'. I heard the same allegation from someone else the other day. Now, having consulted the original text of my combined review for the Tolkien Plaza of Elizabeth A. Whittingham's The Evolution of Tolkien's Mythology, Dimitra Fimi's Tolkien, Race and Cultural History, and Douglas Charles Kane's Arda Reconstructed, I can only find one passage which seems of relevance:-

"[Kane] notes (Kane, p. 216) that in The Road to Middle-earth Tom Shippey cites ‘Thingol’s death in the dark while he looks at the captured Light’ (of the Silmaril) as an example of Tolkien’s genius for creating compelling images. However, ‘Thingol’s death in the dark recesses of Menegroth was completely an invention of the editors’, hence ‘The fact that as renown[ed] a Tolkien scholar as Shippey would have this kind of mistaken impression is a strong indication of the need for a work like the present one.’"

There are a couple of points here. First, unquestionably the passage about Thingol's death is an invention of the editors, but whether one editor had a greater input than the other is something we simply don't know. More widely, this throws little light on the composition of the chapter as a whole. I think it reasonable to suppose that Kay's nascent creativity in the matter of narrative played a part in the published Silmarillion, but, again, we don't know the details. Unless Christopher Tolkien kept some sort of detailed diary of the process of composing the published Silmarillion, or Kay one day breaks his silence on the matter, I doubt if we'll ever know.

So, in the light of the available evidence, I think we'll have to settle on a Scotch verdict for this.

--Charles Noad, January 27th 2020

Many thanks to Charles for the clarification. I'll have to see if I can put down my own thoughts on G. G. Kay and the 1977 SILMARILLION in a post of my own soon.  --John R.