If we limit ourselves only to what could be called 'canonical' as far as Middle Earth is concerned,(& take 'canonical' to mean an 'officially accepted' version of the stories - as in the biblical example) we are still on difficult ground, due to Tolkien's changing intentions. Either everything he wrote should be considered to have equal value, including his own interpretations of his writings, or we should simply take what 'speaks' to us personally. There is no way to agree upon any definitive version of many of the stories, & to include completely contradictory versions of stories as both being 'canonical' is to say that everything he wrote regarding ME is 'canonical'. But we don't have 'everything' he wrote. And if he rejected something which has been published susequently, shall we accept it as 'canonical', because he wrote it, or reject it because he had decided against it?. If a final note turned up from him saying 'I reject everything I wrote after the Lost Tales' would everything he published about ME suddenly cease to be canonical?
Letters
First, we only have the letters Christopher Tolkien permitted to be published. These apparently are the ones relating to the Legendarium, but we don't know what the other's contain (we don't have his diaries, either)
Second, we don't have the letters he was replying to, so we have no sense of 'context'. We don't even know to what extent he was making up the 'facts' about ME contained in the letters as he went. Picking & choosing which parts of the Letters to accept could be extended.
So, taking HoME as an example, & looking at the evolution of ideas, changes in characters & storyline, especially as regards the development of LotR (Trotter, Giant Treebeard, Theoden's daughter, etc), we can certainly ask whether, if he knew that the letters would be published, he wouldn't have amended them, or even not written them.
He clearly was not writing them as part of a 'canon' - which is the point. Tolkien probably wouldn't have thought of some (any?) of his writings as 'canonical' & others as not. I would say that he wouldn't consider any of the letters in that way. We can't even know if he was being serious in all of them.
Second, on some level everything he wrote can be linked into the Legendarium, so, do we, for instance, include Roverandom?
Quote: (note 73)
"The earliest text has:'It was the whale who took them to the Bay of Fairyland beyond the Magic Isles, & they saw far off in the West the Shores of Fairyland, & the Mountains of the Last Land & the light of fairyland upon the waves.' In Tolkien's mythology the Shadowy Seas & the Magic Isles hide & guard Aman (Elvenhome, & the home of the Valar or Gods) from the rest of the world. A good illustration of this geography, from the 1930's, is in Tolkien's Ambakanta."
So, is Roverandom part of the ME 'canon'? Well, it makes use of the mythology in the same way the Hobbit did - which was not ''canon' when it was first written. The Hobbit only became part of the 'canon' when Tolkien decided to tie its sequel to the Silmarillion. Are the poems 'Kortirion among the Trees' & 'Habbanan beneath the Stars' to be included? Kortirion is related to the early mythology, but not to its later form. 'Habbanan' is included in the Qenya Lexicon ('a region on the borders of Valinor'). Yet this poem 'was peopled by the figures of
men' ('Tolkien & the Great War'). Incidentally, the Qenya Lexicon contains words for 'saint', 'monastery'', 'crucifixion', 'nun', 'gospel' & 'Christian Mmsssionary'. It also gives the qenya words for many of the things tolkien would have experienced in the trenches - 'londa - to boom, bang, 'qonda' - choking smoke, 'pusulpe' - gas bag, balloon. the quenya name for Germany is Kalimbarie, or 'barbarity' & Kalimbardi is glossed 'the Germans'. Hence, the Gnomes thought the Germans of WW1 were barbarians. They also knew enough about Catholicism to have translated not only some Catholic terms into their own language, but even produced the aphorism:
perilme metto aimaktur perperienta (or 'We indeed endure things but the Martyrs endured & to the End'). (All examples from T&TGW by John Garth)
So, is the Qenya Lexicon 'canon' or not, or are only parts of it 'canonical'? What about 'You & Me & the Cottage of Lost Play' - must be 'canonical' if the Lost Tales are. Or how about 'Goblin Feet', which Tolkien came to loathe - yet are the fairies depicted in it so different from the Elves we first meet at Rivendell in Hobbit ('How delicious, my dear!'). Are those Elves 'canonical', or shall we exclude them? Which of the versions of Riddles in the Dark shall we keep?
Obviously, we have to make a clear distinction between what Tolkien himself produced (to the extent that we can separate it from Christopher's contributions), but once we start trying to pigeonhole certain of Tolkien's writings as 'canonical' & other writings as not, we will not find any clear demarcation lines to help us, because Tolkien didn't think about his writings in that way. He was writing at different times, in different circumstances, with different aims. He began wanting to give England its own Mythology, he ended having created a 'secondary' world, which
no-one, including Tolkien himself thought of as being anything of the sort. If anything, it became in the end, as Christopher Tolkien said, a depository for some of his profoundest thoughts (sorry, don't have the exact wording of that quote to hand). But it was an evolving thing, a process, in which he was attempting to actualise, give form to, something like his own equivalent of 'Music of the Ainur'.
So, I side with those who feel 'uncomfortable' with the whole idea of a Tolkien 'canon'. As CS Lewis said, its like 'chasing a fox that isn't there'.
Unless that particular 'fox' is Tolkien himself
