How close is the published The Silmarillion to JRRT's Silmarillion?

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

As to statements by CT or the Estate, note that on the dust jacket of Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur it is stated: “The Fall of Arthur, the only venture by J.R.R. Tolkien into the legends of Arthur King of Britain ...”. This entirely ignores “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Pearl: Sir Orfeo.

Jacket blurbs come from the publisher, not the author; and Tolkien's Gawain was just a translation of a 14th-c poem, not an original work.

I am quite aware of that. But often the author of the book, or in this case the editor, in involved in discussing them before they are finally printed. But in this case someone slipped. The blurb might have said something like

The Fall of Arthur, the only venture by J.R.R. Tolkien into the legends of Arthur King of Britain (save for his translation of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’) ...

or like

The Fall of Arthur, by J.R.R. Tolkien; not a translation, but a verse venture into the legends of Arthur King of Britain mostly from his own imagination ...

As it reads now, it is inaccurate.

It might be relevant to hear what Guy Kay had to say about the process of constructing the Silmarillion, and CT's intentions. When GK came aboard, CT's plan had been to present the Silmarillion material in keeping with the sentiment he expressed in the excerpt given above from "The War of the Jewels"- that the work is its history, in a way, and what CT envisioned at that time was something like UT:

"The initial idea had been to produce a scholarly text rather than a single narrative. Such a book would have been some 1300 pages long, and would have consisted of chapters which had as their main text the latest version of the passage concerned, followed by appendices giving variant readings from other, earlier versions, complete with an editorial apparatus of footnotes and comments on dates and inconsistencies, and so on. The first two chapters had already been drafted by Christopher Tolkien in this academic style when Kay started work. However, Kay felt strongly that such an approach was the wrong one ..."

It was in great part Kay who convinced him to make a "synthetic" Silmarillion for publication, and I get the feeling that CT has always had nagging doubts about having agreed to do so.

Quite so. I think Guy Kay was quite right in this, but that the other treatment was also required. Now Christopher Tolkien has provided both to us.