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Tolkien Speaks
Brian McCandliss

While others presume to speak for the great one himself, I will abstain from such pretense of worth and resign myself to merely to quote him directly from the foreword of the trilogy:

'I hope that those who have read "The Lord of the Rings" with pleasure will not think me ungrateful; to please readers was my main objet and  to be assured of this  has been  a great reward. Nonetheless, for all its defects and omission and inclusion, it was the product of long labour, and like a simple-minded hobbit I feel that it is, while I am still alive, my property in justice unaffected by copyright. It seems to me a grave disservice, to say no more, to issue my book without even a polite note informing me of the project; dealings one might expect of Saruman in his decay rather than from the defenders of the West.'

Unlike some, I believe that the rights we extend to those in life, extends also to their works afterward, and it is unforgiveable for one  to take advantage of one's demise to presume to impose, pervert or corrupt another's vision or creation with one's own pretenses of what it "should" have been. Any deviation from the strict narrative of the original text for anything but dramatic effect, and even then only as absolutely necessary, is more in the realm of bastardizations in the manner of Micheal Eisner than John Rankin Reynold.