I haven't read the entire thread, it being quite long and I rather new to the board, but here's my two cents:
From what I can glean from all my reading of Tolkien's works (that being the finished stories, unfinished stories, notes, letters, etc.), his intent was to ultimately create a mythology for England, along the lines of other mythic cycles he loved so well. His ultimate intent does not appear to be his original intent, for he certainly did not have anything so complex in mind when he began writing "a Hobbit sequel," nor when he jotted down the line, "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit." From what I recall, at that time, he was more engaged with language and with faery, but they provided seeds from which his greater works grew. He did not set out with the intent of making this subcreation reflect his Catholic beliefs, but he did admit that it unconsciously reflected them as all writing reflects its author, and later consciously reflected them when he did revisions (some of which, we have seen, he was never able to fully reconcile; witness his problems with orcs, where they came from, whether or not they have souls, what happens to them after death if they do, etc.)
"Meaning" is not as objective a word as one would like it to be. A word can have many meanings, depending on context. And I have found that, whatever the author's intended meaning, readers are going to find their own, no matter how much the author might protest to the contrary. As an example (pardon the digression, but I think it's relevant): in one of my own novels, I have a female character who calls her father "Daddy." I wrote her that way because I have known a number of women, well up in years, who called their father "Daddy" until the day he died. Their relationship was not at all juvenile, nor in any way warped, but most of these women were the only daughters in the family, and "Daddy" was for them a term of endearment, a nickname that reflected a special bond they shared. I considered this a very minor matter in the story, a small idiosyncrasy that was intended to show a bit of the relationship between the two characters without expounding at length about all its details. Yet one reader latched onto this and sent me a several-thousand word analysis, telling me that I must have some issues with my own father, that I was revealing a childish attachment to him in my writing, that no one who isn't messed up and doesn't have an unhealthy relationship with their father would EVER call him "Daddy" into adulthood. Never mind that this person knew zilch about me (I stopped calling my father "daddy" around age 8; it was always "Dad" thereafter). Her immense diatribe had nothing to do with me or my authorial intent, it had nothing to do with the characters in the story; it had everything to do with her own personal baggage (which I know since she kindly told me all about her own life and past abuse so that I would know how very well she understood everyone else in the world).
Everyone brings baggage to what they read and what they write; I don't see how it can be avoided. If as you write, you do not allow your own voice to somehow flow into the words, they tend to become meaningless. If as you read, you don't allow yourself to resonate with what you're reading, it's all just words, style without substance. I know that when I write, I do so for myself, not with the express intent of pushing buttons, so to speak, with the readers. It has meaning for me, but I know it may wind up having very different meaning to some readers. It does not offend me when people tell me they felt something I hadn't put there. Their lives are not mine, so they may not react to things I wrote that had great meaning for me, and yet may have a powerful reaction to something in the same story that for me had no great import. The person who tried to psychoanalyze me was not offensive until she kept insisting that I must have suffered the same abuse as she, and if I did not intend to put that into the story, there was something wrong with me and I was in deep denial (my therapist would beg to differ
). I don't know why she couldn't accept that this was not an intended and deliberate subtext.
I have seen similar attitudes in some Tolkien fans and scholars. They see meaning in his work that is important to them. All well and good. But then, they insist that because they see this, and find it important, it must somehow have been intended by the author, and (worst of all, to my mind) is the only "correct" interpretation of the work. That's where head-butting and shouting matches begin. All of this is probably why, though I've found the HoME books interesting, I often think they just muddied the waters. They present a lot of JRRT's thinking about what he had created and was still in the process of creating when he died; they present his son's feelings and interpretations. They show alternatives, things under consideration, a lot of food for thought -- but not as much in terms of definitive answers. The only person who could have provided that is long dead (bless his soul), and even he was undecided about many things.
So what does all this rambling mean? I tend to think "canon" is what people are pointing at when they say "canon." One person will accept only what was in LotR and the Hobbit before JRRT died. Another will accept that and The Silmarillion (without revisions). One will allow for the various revisions to all works done by CT, and the more complete hitherto unpublished works, like those in Unfinished Tales. And still others will try to find a way to incorporate much of what's in the HoME books, or even try to reconcile absolutely everything (including things that contradict). It's all very personal, because we all react differently to information that is given to us. When we are presented with contradictory information, we tend to give greater credence to one or the other, but it isn't always because one provided more factual information or made a better argument for their position; it can simply be because one "feels" right and the other doesn't. I'm sort of in this camp on the question of Gil-galad's parentage, and I think I tend to prefer one over the other because to me, it seems more as I would have written it myself, and thus feels more "logical" to my way of thinking (I also rather think that neither version is superior; they're merely different). I may be completely wrong, but since the jury's still out, I feel free to choose the side I prefer, for whatever reasons I might have. And others are free to do the same. Which might very well mean we're either both wrong or both right, or in this case, right and wrong do not exist.
Okay, now I know for a fact I'm rambling. What was the original topic...?