Tolkien's intent for Galadriel as she appears in Lord of the Rings is exactly what appears in Lord of the Rings.

The Silmarillion was his unfinished writings. I don't recall whether he had any intention to ever publish it, but certainly, he did not make strong efforts to do so. His son Christopher had to make a monumental effort to take the various disparate scraps and versions of stories to put them together into what appears to be a coherent whole.

To say that Tolkien "intended" for Galadriel to present, in Lord of the Rings, any of the traits one would associate with a kinslaying ruthless warleader is to completely ignore the context and the manner in which he wrote those two different aspects of her.

> To say that Tolkien "intended" for Galadriel to present, in Lord of the Rings, any of the traits one would associate with a kinslaying ruthless warleader

For the record, I'm not in this camp. I think it's fair to debate whether Galadriel participated and/or was culpable in that (as other threads have).

I'm just arguing (perhaps specifically in Tolkien's case) that LotR sits inside the "legendarium" and can't be properly interpreted in a void. I don't feel that the Silmarillion stories were so unfinished that they don't reveal truths about the characters, that Tolkien must have already held when writing LotR.

But now in retrospect, I'm probably glorifying Tolkien a bit too much. It's normal for authors to change their minds about their characters, and it's normal for people reinterpreting those works to sometimes ignore those changes of mind. (It's also normal for fans to dislike those reinterpretations when it clashes with their understanding of the characters).