This is the fourth in a series of posts about the textual variants I’ve found in printings of The Silmarillion. In this post, I’ll try to put together a broad textual history up to and including the Second Edition Hardcovers, based on all the variants we’ve looked at.

In the previous posts we looked at nineteen printed versions of the Silmarillion. We grouped them in to five different paginations and identified what text they used based on which variant that had at each of twenty-three loci.

This resulted in ten distinct texts which we’ve been identifying with lowercase Greek letters. In this post we’ll look at the apparent relationship between six of them.

Origin

α — 1977 First Edition Hardcover

UK (George Allen & Unwin) and US (Houghton Mifflin) Hardcovers have the same text, following the pagination we’ve called A.

In the variant listings below, the first time a change is made to a particular locus, it’s marked like this rather than this.

Unwin Paperbacks

The Unwin Paperbacks in 1979, 1983, and 1990 followed a new pagination we’ve called B.

α > δ — 1979 Unwin Paperback

α > δ

Three punctuation changes, three typos corrected, the introduction of the Haldor error, and the inexplicable Forest of Brethil > forest of Brethil change.

  • Locus 1. in harmony; and he said,: ‘These too in their
  • Locus 6. from the bridge of Menegroth:; far and yet all

  • Locus 10. had at first two branches;: Little Gelion that came

  • Locus 20. Noldor of Hithlum were asssembledassembled
  • Locus 35. stronger thenthan they

  • Locus 37. splendour of the NúmeróreansNúmenóreans

  • Locus 21. the house of HadorHaldor stood firm
  • Locus 24. looked, and descried the Forestforest of Brethil climbing green

δ > ε — 1983 Unwin “2nd Edition” Paperback

δ > ε

Two of the king-number errors fixed as well as another typo fixed.

  • Locus 31. And the nineteenthtwentieth king took the sceptre

  • Locus 33. foundation of Númenor; and threefour and twenty Kings and

  • Locus 30. three mariners who had sailed all the seas besidesbeside him

The 1990 Unwin Paperback has the same text.

First Houghton Mifflin Paperbacks

The 1983 and 1991 Houghton Mifflin Paperbacks used the same pagination as the original hardcover, what we’ve called pagination A.

α > β — 1983 Houghton Mifflin Paperback

α > β
  • Locus 31. And the nineteenthtwentieth king took the sceptre

  • Locus 33. foundation of Númenor; and threefour and twenty Kings and

  • Locus 30. three mariners who had sailed all the seas besidesbeside him

  • Locus 18. the Lay of LeithienLeithian

The 1991 Houghton Mifflin Paperback has the same text.

These changes are intriguing because three of them are the same as the changes made between the 1979 (δ) and 1983 (ε) Unwin paperbacks but the Houghton Mifflin paperbacks do not include any of the changes made earlier for the 1979 Unwin paperback. It is as if Houghton Mifflin started from the original 1977 text (α) and were told about the second lot of Unwin corrections (δ > ε) but were not told about the first lot (α > δ). In addition, a new error was found (Leithien for Leithian) and fixed that had not been found in the Unwin paperbacks.

First Illustrated Hardcover Edition

The First Illustrated Edition from HarperCollins uses the original hardcover pagination A.

α > ι — 1998 HarperCollins Illustrated Edition

α > ι
  • Locus 35. stronger thenthan they

This edition had just a single change from the 1977 original so clearly must have been based on that text. No other corrections made for the paperbacks in the intervening twenty-one years were incorporated so the correction was independent.

Second Edition Hardcover

The 1999 Second Edition Hardcover and versions with the same text use the original hardcover pagination A.

α > γ — 1999 HarperCollins Second Edition Hardcover

α > γ
  • Locus 31. And the nineteenthtwentieth king took the sceptre

  • Locus 33. foundation of Númenor; and threefour and twenty Kings and

  • Locus 32. For Ar-Gimilzôr the twenty-secondtwenty-third king was the greatest

  • Locus 20. Noldor of Hithlum were asssembledassembled
  • Locus 30. three mariners who had sailed all the seas besidesbeside him

  • Locus 35. stronger thenthan they

  • Locus 22. Smiths and miners and makersmasters of fire they brought

The 2001 Houghton Mifflin Second Edition Hardcover and all subsequent Houghton Mifflin / Mariner Books paperbacks use this text.

This text is almost certainly not based directly on the Unwin Paperbacks. It’s possible the Illustrated Edition was used as starting point as it has the same single fix but we cannot be certain.

The king-number errors were fixed, including one not fixed in the Unwin paperbacks. Three other corrections were applied that had been found before (possibly independently as not the same combination of fixes is found anywhere else). One new change was made (makers to masters).

It is worth noting that this Second Edition still had the locus 18 (Leithien for Leithian) mistake that had been fixed in the Houghton Mifflin Paperbacks and the locus 37 (Númeróreans for Númenóreans) mistake that had been fixed as far back as the very earliest Unwin Paperbacks.

What happened next is a little harder to follow and so in the next post I’ll summarise what information we have and some possible alternative explanations.