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Originally Posted by Narfforc
To do this I have had to take canonicity out of the argument. I did this by treating Tolkien as translator instead of author. He discovered/translated The Red Book of Westmarch and The Silmarillion, these are mainly a view of how The Elves and the Victorious West saw things (they did not know all things, Tolkien says so).
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Of course, 'canonicity' in the context of Tolkien is more complex than with other writers, a, because the Legendarium never achieved a fixed form & we don't know what form it would have taken had Tolkien had time to complete it &, b, because his wish was for 'other hands' to add to it.
It would be easy to say that 'canon' was what Tolkien wrote & published during his lifetime, but clearly if his intention during his lifetime was that others would contribute to it then he himself possibly had no concept of a strict canon. His desire to dedicate it to his country was in a sense a 'letting go' of it. It seems to me that as long as a work is in the spirit of Tolkien & & doesn't actually contradict the published work it is not going to be a problem to the man himself (CT's opinion, on the other hand, is another matter).
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I agree with Lalwende , in the view that Tolkien was pretty much burnt out at the end of The Third Age, he still had not finished, or had published his great work, The Silmarillion. I believe he neither had the will or strength to start a new story, his continuation of The History of Middle-earth was more important, and he would not be side-tracked again.
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CT says that the reason his father could not finish The Sil was that he was simply too tired - dismissing the theory that some people put forward that Tolkien couldn't bring himself to finish it because he felt that finishing The Sil would be finishing his own life (a theory CT must have come across, though I haven't). It seems that however much Tolkien attempted to set limits on his creativity it didn't work - deciding to forget a Fourth Age story in order to focus on the Elder Days merely resulted in his work on that period flying off at all kinds of tangents.
Unfortunately, we know he could get sidetracked by external stuff - reading Asimov among other things. As CT says, the whole creation had gotten too large & complex & he had gotten too old & too tired. (If you haven't seen the documentary JRRT: a Film Portrait, I can only advise you to try & get hold of it. I reckon the interview with CT takes up a good half an hour or more of film time & its probably the only filmed interview he's likely to do. Watching him read the final section of LotR is an very moving experience. Unfortunately the documentary was only available on VHS for a few years in the mid-late '90's so its difficult to find now & I used to panic when I watched my copy in case the machine chewed it up. Appropos of nothing at all can I just state here & now how cool DVD recorders are
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