Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

[davem]

’For the Elves the world moves, & it moves both very swift & very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, & all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last’.

The phrase as my father wrote it was ‘because they need not count the running years’, but in copying I missed out the word need. Looking through my copy, but without consulting his own manuscript, he wrote in do; & do survives in FR.(CT, The Treason of Isengard)

Ok, now, the obvious response would be that the published version is correct - ‘the Elves do not count the running years’, but in the 50th Anniversary edition, just published, the original version is reinstated, & in that edition the Elves are back to not needing to count the years.

Based on the assumption that this is to stand as the ‘official’ version of the text from now on - the changes have been authorised by CT himself, & the new HB edition of LotR, out in December, will carry the 50th anniversary text (& we can assume that all subsequent HB & PB version will do the same) - what effect does this have?

First, I suppose we have to ask whether Tolkien saw do & need as meaning the same thing. Almost certainly he didn’t: he was a Professor of English, & would have known the two words have completely different connotations. To say the Elves do not do ‘X’ is not the same as saying they need not do ‘X’’. ‘Do not’ is emphatic, it implies that they never count the running years. Why? Because of some agreement (tacit or otherwise) among them? Because their brains function differently from those of other races, & they ‘can’t’ count the running years? Because they’ve lost the knack?

Whatever, Legolas, for the last fifty years, has been telling us that ‘the Elves do not count the running years’. From now on, because of a change not authorised by Tolkien, he will tell us that ‘the Elves do not need to count the running years’.

Not needing to do something implies a choice in the matter - the individual Elf is free to decide whether he or she will count the running years or not.

Ok, you may argue, this is not as great a change as replacing do with need in other situations - Gandalf’s letter to Frodo, for instance, if :

PS. Do NOT use It again, not for any reason whatever! Do not travel by night!

was replaced by: ‘You need not use it again. You need not travel by night’?

But is it that simple?

Yet, if Tolkien, in reading over CT’s fair copy of the manuscript, wrote in do rather than need, why would he do that? Had he had second thoughts, & decided that do expressed his understanding of the Elves’ experience of time better than the original need did - the chapter was still in flux after all? Or was he simply in a rush & didn’t bother to check the original notes (this is CT’s explanation).

For myself, not only do I think that the ‘original’ version sounds better in the context of Legolas’ explanation (need sounds too ‘speculative’ - not really much of an ‘explanation’ at all - he seems effectively to be saying ‘This might be the reason or it might not’), but it also goes against my own understanding of the position the Elves are in at the end of the Third Age - basically, it gives them too much control over their situation, by implying that they can make choices over their ‘perceptions’, which really implies they can choose the way they think about the world, & that to a great degree they could fit in & adapt - they need not be isolated, they need not leave Middle-earth.

Its this increased implication of having a choice in the matter which makes me uncomfortable in this change from [‘i]do[/i] not’ to ‘need not’. My own sense is that even if it was a choice originally not to count the running years, by the end of the Third Age it was a matter of choice no longer - the Elves did not count the running years any longer’

(Whatever Christopher Tolkien may say.)