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Gil-galad was an Elven-king...

© Michael Martinez

And that is where we all agree. Gil-galad's ancestry hasn't yet become a nuclear topic among Tolkien fans, but time will tell if it does. As little information as we have on Tolkien's most famous Noldorin king, people have found reason to write huge editorials about him (and I'm no exception). Who was Gil-galad's father, Fingon or Orodreth? J.R.R. Tolkien says Orodreth, but millions of fans seem to disagree with him. After all, The Silmarillion says it was Fingon. "That Gil-galad was the son of Fingon (The Silmarillion p. 154) derives from the late note pencilled on the manuscript of [Grey Annals] ($157)," Christopher Tolkien tells us in The War of the Jewels (p. 243 of my Houghton Mifflin edition), "stating that when Fingon became King of the Noldor on the death of Fingolfin 'his young son (?Findor) [sic] Gilgalad he sent to the Havens.' But this, adopted after much hesitation, was not in fact by any means the last of my father's speculations." This tantalizing hint fired the first of the Gil-galad debates. If Fingon wasn't his father, and Finrod Felagund couldn't be (earlier discussion showed that idea had been abandoned), then who was the father of Gil-galad? Some people stood squarely by The Silmarillion, stating it must be canon, as it was faithfully produced by Christopher Tolkien according to his father's wishes. But this is not true. Elsewhere in The War of the Jewels, and in several other volumes of The History of Middle-earth, Christopher points out where he departed from his father's vision (mostly through inadequate research, given that he was working under pressure and didn't have access to all of his father's papers). In particular, he says of "The Ruin of Doriath" that:

To have included ["The Wanderings of Hurin" in The Silmarillion], as it seemed to me, would have entailed a huge reduction, indeed an entire re-telling of a kind that I did not wish to undertake; and since the story is intricate I was afraid that this would produce a dense tangle of narrative statement with all the subtlety gone, and abobe all that it would diminish the fearful figure of the old man, the great hero, Thalion the Steadfast, furthering still the purposes of Morgoth, as he was doomed to do. But it seems to me now, many years later, to have been an excessive tampering with my father's actual thought and intention: thus raising the question, whether the attempt to make a 'unified' Silmarillion should have been embarked on.

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