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I've had a pretty long affair with Tolkiniana.
I personally purchased and own six different editions of LOTR, my favorite is a one volume onion-skin edition. I have several boxed sets and mass market editions. I recited the entire LOTR to my second son who is entering an Ivy this fall. I have purchased the Rob Inglis reading, as well as a BBC dramatization.
My favorite work, perhaps oddly enough, is The Silmarillion.
And, yes, I have referred to non-authorized published versions of the text to read and to study. I am not advocating piracy in any way. But creative literature is not a zero-sum game among those who realize after a lifetime of reading that they "contain multitudes."
If I truly believed that Professor Tolkien would unwelcome that a fraction of my study of his works--which could not be reasonably be done in any other way--is done on unauthorized editions, I would stop immediately out of respect to the creator.
The question is less clear to what I owe the hawkers and crows and intellectual mathoms who pick apart his corpus in the end-cycle of commercial exploitation.
Yes, I am V. vulgaris, a Common Wasp, for sometimes putting knowledge and respect for a creator above this touts-in-due-course. I have learned to live with my imperfections, sabi, that perfect me.
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