dawnfelagund:

[Crossposted to the Heretic Loremaster]

I hate to be the person who comes with a hot pin to pop the happy balloon of this theory but that’s what I’m about to be. I’m going to start out by clarifying that I take no issue with using this (or any!) theory for writing fan fiction or as a personal head canon. One of the points of fan fiction is to fit pieces together, to invent and create in such a way to develop and extend the texts beyond what Tolkien gave us, and I can certainly see the appeal of the Arkenstone stitching the seemingly microcosmic events of The Hobbit to the expansive mythology of The Silmarillion. I am troubled, though, that the theory that the Arkenstone was in fact a Silmaril is starting to be discussed as though this was a connection that Tolkien wrote into the text and that it is a fact that should be presented as such.

Here I come with my hot pin: It was not.

I am contending two posts here. The original post by Gwaihir the Windlord on the Barrow Downs (New evidence for the Arkenstone-Silmaril case) uses flawed reasoning and omits some very necessary context from the discussion of this question. A second post on Ask Middle-earth (Was the Arkenstone a Silmaril?) then borrows the same arguments, and despite purporting to present “any holes in such arguments,” does so without a lot of critical examination of them. Unfortunately, both posts are now being linked on wikis and other sources that fans use when trying to locate information about the texts as evidence that the Arkenstone is a Silmaril, so through a process that possibly neither writer intended, flawed arguments have been elevated to the level of fact.

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