The very act of writing disconnects the author from the work.

In RGEO, there is the translation of the Lament into English (which, as far as I'm aware, is exactly the same as the translation in LotR); that is Tolkien the translator. The note is Tolkien the author explaining the meaning behind the Lament - a meaning that was not in LotR.

The original finished work (LotR) only deals with the specific time and events it covers. An author can write a prequel or a sequel to their book, that won't touch on what they already wrote.

Much of Tolkien's supplemental writing falls under that category. One of my favorite pieces is Laws and Customs of the Eldar. It gives a lot of information that wasn't hinted at or mentioned in LotR. However, it does have one line which contradicts the internal structure in LotR - that to be a warrior/kill lessens the ability to heal, and so a warrior is not a healer. This is contradicted by the fact that Elrond, Elladan, Elrohir, and Glorfindel all play crucial healing roles in LotR.

The original published work comes first. A prequel or sequel cannot contradict what is in the original. Therefore, the original piece is the first tier, and all else is the second tier.

You said earlier that RGEO has more weight than SoF because Tolkien published it himself. That is what I disagree with - to say it has more weight means adding in his personal thoughts and actions. It means we're looking at his later intent - the note in RGEO - and saying that it should take precedence over the words in LotR (as you said it should be Galadriel's line to Frodo that we dismiss).

I didn't know about the issue with Galadriel's brother's name. The Hobbit is frankly a messy case, as authors should not publish a revised version of an earlier work...

(as you said it should be Galadriel's line to Frodo that we dismiss).

It cannot help having some meaning; if it have proportion and harmony it has vitality, and vitality is truth. The beauty may be plainer in it than the truth, but without the truth the beauty could not be, and the fairytale would give no delight. Everyone, however, who feels the story, will read its meaning after his own nature and development: one man will read one meaning in it, another will read another.

"If so, how am I to assure myself that I am not reading my own meaning into it, but yours out of it?"

Why should you be so assured? It may be better that you should read your meaning into it. That may be a higher operation of your intellect than the mere reading of mine out of it: your meaning may be superior to mine.

"Suppose my child ask me what the fairytale means, what am I to say?"

If you do not know what it means, what is easier than to say so? If you do see a meaning in it, there it is for you to give him. A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.

But indeed your children are not likely to trouble you about the meaning. They find what they are capable of finding, and more would be too much. For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.

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I will go farther.--The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is--not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself. The best Nature does for us is to work in us such moods in which thoughts of high import arise. Does any aspect of Nature wake but one thought? Does she ever suggest only one definite thing? Does she make any two men in the same place at the same moment think the same thing? Is she therefore a failure, because she is not definite? Is it nothing that she rouses the something deeper than the understanding--the power that underlies thoughts? Does she not set feeling, and so thinking at work? Would it be better that she did this after one fashion and not after many fashions? Nature is mood-engendering, thought-provoking: such ought the sonata, such ought the fairytale to be.

"But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"

Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things; what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is a layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time things that came from thoughts beyond his own.

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If a writer's aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood, but to escape being misunderstood; where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.

I can watch a film, and be fundamentally moved by a scene - and then listen to the commentary and find out that the director and writer had an entirely different intent. Does that change how I felt, seeing that scene? No. I have my own interpretation of the scene and the film, and it's not 'wrong' because it's not what the director consciously intended.

The question Sí man i yulma nin enquantuva? and the question at the end of her song (Vol. I, p. 389), What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?, refer to the special position of Galadriel. She was the last survivor of the princes and queens who had led the revolting Noldor to exile in Middle-earth. After the overthrow of Morgoth at the end of the First Age a ban was set upon her return, and she had replied proudly that she had no wish to do so. She passed over the Mountains of Eredluin with her husband Celeborn (one of the Sindar) and went to Eregion. But it was impossible for one of the High-Elves to overcome the yearning for the Sea, and the longing to pass over it again to the land of their former bliss. She was now burdened with this desire. In the event, after the fall of Sauron, in reward for all that she had done to oppose him, but above all for her rejection of the Ring when it came within her power, the ban was lifted, and she returned over the Sea, as is told at the end of The Lord of the Rings.

Not only is this written in the much more relaxed style that we see in his Letters,...

... but he says that 'those lines refer to this' and 'as is told' in LotR. The 'this', however, was not in LotR. He is, as the author, later stating the meaning of part of his text, a meaning that was not in the book.

Also, told means, "to give a detailed account of." It's to tell a story. It's essentially saying, 'a detailed account is found in LotR.' LotR, not the Red book. Celeborn's origin is delegated to mere parentheses, as well. The inherent structure of the paragraph is much more 'personal' than the internal narrator.

(...) 'The tale has been put into its present form in response to the many requests that I have received for further information about the history of the Third Age, and about Hobbits in particular. But since my children and others of their age, who first heard of the finding of the Ring, have grown older with the years, this book speaks more plainly of those darker things which lurked only on the borders of the earlier tale, but which have troubled Middle-earth in all its history. It is, in fact, not a book written for children at all; though many children will, of course, be interested in it, or parts of it, as they still are in the histories and legends of other times (especially in those not specially written for them).

(...)

For if the labour has been long (more than fourteen years), it has been neither orderly nor continuous. But I have not had Bilbo's leisure. Indeed much of that time has contained for me no leisure at all, and more than once for a whole year the dust has gathered on my unfinished pages. I only say this to explain to those who have waited for the book why they have had to wait so long. I have no reason to complain. I am surprised and delighted to find from numerous letters that so many people, both in England and across the Water, share my interest in this almost forgotten history; but it is not yet universally recognized as an important branch of study. It has indeed no obvious practical use, and those who go in for it can hardly expect to be assisted.

Compare this to SoF, which merely says, "It was not until two long ages more had passed, when at last all that she had desired in her youth came to her hand, the Ring of Power and the dominion of Middle-earth which she had dreamed, that her wisdom was full grown and she rejected it, and passing the last test departed from Middle-earth for ever."

This we already knew from LotR - she says she 'passed the test', that she had greatly desired the Ring and thought about what she would do; and we see her take ship. The rest of SoF deals with the First Age; it is a mini prequel of info we didn't get in LotR.

Also note how much more formal the style of the writing is here. It's not an explanation, but a story.

However, let's go with the fictional conceit for a moment. In the conceit, he is merely translating the myths and legends. In that sense, both RGEO and SoF are different versions of the legend.

But when we give RGEO more weight because Tolkien himself published it, or we say that he personally never published Laws and Customs, we have broken the conceit; we're back in our world talking about Tolkien-the-author.

Also, told means, "to give a detailed account of." It's to tell a story. It's essentially saying, 'a detailed account is found in LotR.' LotR, not the Red book.

There is no certainty in myth; that's why it's myth instead of history (I know a lot of 'history' isn't necessarily accurate, but we're talking concept wise). So, it's abolutely possible, within the conceit, that there are variations about Celeborn's origin and Galadriel's motivations. The people in the fourth age (or whenever) would have no way of knowing 'the truth', Galadriel and her kin had already gone West.

It matters because LotR was already written. For someone to have a 'complete' understanding of LotR, they shouldn't have to read something else to get it. It's back to the time frame, again. The time frame of LotR was done. Like I said, DoA is against any later revealing of 'truth'. The 'truth' should be able to be found in the text; to 'clarify' the 'truth' is to go back and meddle with that text. Said text has by then has been disconnected from it's 'author', having gone out to the world and taken on a life of it's own.

... This is a key philosophical part of Galadriel and those chapters. DoA wise, it is absolutely unacceptable to meddle with such a key part of the text.

We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.

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Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it.

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The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.

I would argue, in terms of the conceit, that each is as valid as another - which one is 'true' is unknown.

Yes, you are right about LeGuin, if she wrote a sequel or prequel. But RGEO is not a sequel or prequel. A sequel or a prequel expands on the world that was written, and sometimes the same characters in different times of their lives. It doesn't go back to the same time frame.

DoA shows that the very act of writing destroys the author. The moment the sentence is down on paper, it is no longer connected to the one who wrote it.

So, LotR, being written and published, is done. It stands on its own. It is no longer in any way connected to Tolkien.

For Tolkien to come back later and say, 'this is what Galadriel meant with her songs', he is imposing himself on the text. A text he has no right to touch.

One thing that beginner film makers learn is that you must stick to the rules of your fictional universe. Sure you make those rules up, but once it’s done it’s done. After you’ve established that some people are born with the ability to control the ‘Force’ you can’t turn it all around an start claiming that it’s really a bunch of microscopic organisms in your bloodstream.

Be consistent. Remember all of your characters, including the minor characters, because when you use them again in your sequel you’ll have to depend on those characteristics to figure out how they’ll tie into your new plot! GP Ching, author of The Soulkeepers Series says, “Take notes and write a synopsis even if you hate them. I keep a notebook with details on character eye and hair color, traits, history, family, etc. My only caveat is that characters can and do change. In The Soulkeepers Series, Malini changes significantly in book two. I had to make sure that change followed her into book three and became even more pronounced because of her increased experience level.”

I am not arguing it in terms of Tolkien's thoughts or the real world. Drafts are just drafts. But, if we put ourselves in the conceit, and say Tolkien is merely the translator, then he never drafted anything - he merely translated an already existing record. So we have two records that state two different things.

Things like 'when did Celeborn sail' or 'were Idril and Tour granted immortality' are questions Tolkien purposefully didn't answer, which is different. Those seem like deliberate mythmaking to me. All of which is decided, again, outside of the conceit.

The very definition of a sequel or prequel means a different time. While there are no "official rules", there are general rules used by the majority of professionals for 'good' writing. One of which is don't contradict yourself. What you published before is set in stone.

A sequel can of course go back and replay events if the narration allows for it. I have read some great stories where one scene is told twice, through two different p.o.v's. However, that usually calls for a first-person narration. LotR has a third-person omniscient narration. (...)

In LotR, Galadriel's statement and her songs are never corrected by the narration. She states that she can go west. A ban is never mentioned by Galadriel, or in an Appendix, or by the all-knowing narrator. The ban is not in LotR.

There are two parts to the problem of RGEO. 1. It is not a sequel or a prequel. As the definitions show, those take place in a different time frame. RGEO says, "'The question Sí man i yulma nin enquantuva? and the question at the end of her song (Vol. I, p. 389), What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?, refer to the special position of Galadriel." It clearly states that it is talking about the songs given in LotR.

2. This is where DoA comes in, and it differs from the Celeborn example. With Celeborn, both statements are in the original published text. They are a contradiction/error that was not caught before publication. It is up to the reader to choose which one they prefer.

DoA happens (realistically) when a novel is published. It has gone through its different drafts and revisions, an editor has gone over it, and it is sent into the world to be read. It stands on it's own. This connects to the earlier 'no contradicting' rule - the rules and the objective narration of that time-frame are set in stone. Once it's published, you're done.

To be able to go back and revise/edit an already published book, the author has to have the right to touch or impose his thoughts on the text. According to DoA, the author doesn't have that right anymore. That belonged to the pre-publication stage.

First I just wanted to say thank you for the continued replies. They have been very thought-provoking.

When I talk about the 'rules' I'm of course talking from subjective opinion. There is no writing rule you will get sued for it you break it (plagiarism and copyrights excepted). You're absolutely right. Legally, Tolkien has the right to publish anything he wants. Including things that have contradictions to earlier things. That's when we get into the subjective 'rules' of 'good' writing. I too think that Tolkien was a great writer, even if he used some of my literary pet-peeves.

No, Trotter was never meant to be part of the conceit. Really, what's in the conceit seems to go back to what is canon in Tolkien. It's completely personal. What Tolkien himself considered in the conceit are the things he published, probably. In that you are right.

DoA can of course be applied to anything - a poem, a short story, a film, even a blog post. All are 'published' and sent out into the world in some way. So DoA says it's published and stripped from it's author. The author is stripped yet again on the next work. I think we can both agree on that.

So if the author has been stripped, how can they go back and change something? It has already been transferred to the hands of the reader.

The author's later opinions about their work are a form of criticism and analysis themselves, and therefore are not necessarily consistent with what's written unless the author or publisher actively goes back and changes it (and even then it can be argued that, since the original work still exists, the author has merely created a different version of it).

A sort of Retcon achieved not by putting out sequels that change the official story, but by actually going back and changing it in the original work, so that subsequent printings of "the same" work are actually different.

Legally they of course have the right, just like they have the right to publish contradictory material and state their own opinion. We're back to subjective 'rules'. DoA and the 'no contradicting' are both part of the same subjective field of literary criticism. It's up to the reader to accept or deny the new piece.

Galadriel's songs could be justifiably argued either way, I think, as vague as they are. If they were the only part in LotR I wouldn't see the ban as contradictory. Galadriel's statement, on the other hand, is explicit and unchallenged by the narrator. In fact, it's the conclusion to her being tempted by the Ring - instead of ruling over Middle-earth she will just be another nis in the West. That's why I give it more weight.

The accept or deny part comes from the 'no contradicting' instead of DoA. Let me give you a different example.

J.K. Rowling published a new essay/story on her website Pottermore a little while ago. However, it (and almost every other "new" piece on there) is contradicted by what she wrote in the original seven books. It's author published, so she intends for it to be "true". Does the reader accept or deny it? Most of the other HP fans I know disregard contradictory things from Pottermore, and go with what was originally published in the series.

Okay you appear to agree that DOA is about reader interpretation free from the author's external interpretations (and free from the author's personal life details necessarily 'intruding' and so on), which is distinct from the act of writing (which of course includes intent), and that there is no 'accepting or denying' a new text based in DOA.