Huan wrote:

I have, 17 The Scouring of the Shire, 17 The Grey Havens. Is that what you meant?

The errata format used here is

What the published book says > the corrected version it should say

So Trotter's post means that The Grey Havens is published as plate 17, but it should in fact be labeled as plate 18 (as you note, 17 is already claimed by The Scouring of the Shire).

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I’ve not actually gone through mine yet, just noticed the plate listings.

Big thanks to LaDonna Barr for spotting this!

In the 2020 hardcover edition of Unfinished Tales (illustrated by Howe, Lee and Nasmith), in footnote 40 in the chapter "Cirion and Eorl" (DigitalTolkien beta citation: UT 3.02.notes.40.001) p. 336

The letters were [  ] ( L ND L) > The letters were [  ] (L ND L)

Note the middle tengwa should be 'ando'  but in this edition was mistakenly changed to 'umbar' .


Checking other editions shows that this error was introduced in the 2020 illustrated hardcover edition, and also now appears in the latest paperback (signature series) as well (thanks to James Tauber for checking recent paperbacks). The 2024 boxed set of The History of Middle-earth does not contain this error, as it was photo reproduced from the first edition rather than using the new setting.

Humorously, I checked my 2022 Portuguese edition out of curiosity, and they appear to have a unicode/font issue!

Thanks for your message Urulókë, because with it, I discover that no French translation has this transcription in tengwar (and I never knew that there was one in the original text).

Aelfwine shared some manuscript pages of The Nature of Middle-earth in the Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference. When I compare them with NoMe I find two tiny differences.

p11. Tolkien then wrote “actual value” and calculated the fractional part of the relation of a minim to solar seconds to approximately 360 decimal places, noting where values started to repeat.

In the manuscript this decimal number actually has about 260 digits.

p95. The Valar send five Guardians (great spirits of the Maiar) – with Melian (the only woman, but the chief) these make six.

The shown manuscript page doesn't seem to have "but the chief", though I guess that's probably from another version, as Carl mentioned in the presentation this is one of the two texts that sent Melian and Istari to Cuivienen.

zionius wrote:

p11. Tolkien then wrote “actual value” and calculated the fractional part of the relation of a minim to solar seconds to approximately 360 decimal places, noting where values started to repeat.

In the manuscript this decimal number actually has about 260 digits.

Yes, for some reason actually counting the digits, rather than making a rough x-by-y estimate, didn’t seem important to me at the time.

zionius wrote:

p95. The Valar send five Guardians (great spirits of the Maiar) – with Melian (the only woman, but the chief) these make six.

The shown manuscript page doesn't seem to have "but the chief", though I guess that's probably from another version, as Carl mentioned in the presentation this is one of the two texts that sent Melian and Istari to Cuivienen.

That would be because the scan of that page that I made for the presentation got slightly cropped at the top. You can however see the line with an arrow descending from the cropped top margin, indicating that the words that are in fact written there in the original, “but the chief”, were to be inserted.

My intention was to illustrate the great care Christopher took in providing relevant information that would otherwise not be readily apparent in the (mostly) black-and-white photocopies he sent, not to invite others to edit the texts themselves.

Carl

Thank you for clarification, Carl. Somehow I took the arrow for a slash! I just find it enjoyable trying to decipher (the easily recognizable parts of) Tolkien's writings.