how to take unfinished/lost tales books...

[Gollum]

I've always wondered whats the General level of acceptance for the stuff it says in there. do most people take it as fact or not seeing as it wasn't the finished version of anything

for instance the mention of a certain "Legolas Greenleaf" in the fall of gondolin chapter. we know this can't really be the Legolas we all know and love seeing he was the son of the king of the wood elves and there was no reason for him to be hanging out with all the gays in gondolin.

or all that junk about the cats and huan in the tale of luthien and beren. did that actually happen or was it cut out of the story or is that an add in to the story?

anyway if you get my point gimme an answer :)

[Eruve]

The stories in Unfinished Tales can be pretty much taken as canon. They're in places expansions of tales in Sil, additions to the history, essays on various subjects.

Book of Lost Tales is another thing. These are the original versions of some of the central tales in the mythology. Tolkien wrote them under the format presented in BOLT to create a mythology for England. He abandoned the project, but the stories are interesting from the standpoint that they show us the earliest forms of what became Sil. He changed the stories a lot and dropped things out altogether. So while we see giant cats and Beren as an elf in BOLT Beren and Luthien, the cats become replaced in the narrative by werewolves. It can be interesting to see how some of Tolkien's most powerful stories developped. To answer your question, the cat episode didn't happen in Sil, it was just an early version of the story. The cats were replaced by werewolves.

As for Legolas, you have to remember that when JRRT was writing LOTR, the BOLT stories where what existed of his mythology. He never thought they would be published, he just wrote them for his own enjoyment. So sometimes he borrowed names. The Legolas Greenleaf in BOLT is not the same Legolas Greenleaf in LOTR. Some people claim the Glorfindel in LOTR is another example of a name borrowed from BOLT, while others claim they are the same elf. This is a question which is still open to debate, since Glorfindel actually made it into the published Sil.

[Finduilas]

I believe that the Glorfindel question was answered in Peoples of Middle-Earth (HoME XII), with the answer being that, yes they are the same.

[Eruve]

Thanks, Finduilas. I don't have Vol. XII yet. It's on my list, though. But I have seen people try to argue that LOTR Glorfindel couldn't be the same as the Gondolin Glorfindel. I guess my instincts, such as they are, are good, since I always leaned toward the two actually being the same.