Well, obviously, but the attitude is basically if JRR Tolkien didn't assemble it together then it cannot be regarded as canonical. Same as any other posthumously published works.
That's true for all fandoms. Doctor Who, Star Wars, Star Trek...
To a degree, yes.
As long as they are his words, in something at least relatively close to the order he wrote them in, that would be good enough for me.
The History of Middle-Earth books, especially the latter ones, give you the original texts and you can compare the texts against the published Silmarillion to understand how CJRT constructed it and where its constituent parts came from. (There's a book that does this, though I'm blanking on its name.)
OK, I didn't realize Christopher Tolkien had actually written some material himself, I had just assumed he just put together stuff his father had written.
Damn, everything I just read sounds awesome! Nice to get confirmation on some of the bigger questions, like will Isuldur be involved, and will they condense the timeline, and for anyone who hasn't read the article, the answer to both is yes.
Wow, that's a fantastic article and the photographs are gorgeous. Consider me very excited indeed!
I called it!
