Fordim, Davem and others,
Unlike several of you, I do indeed think it is worthwhile to "chase the Tolkien fox", as
Davem so cleverly put it....
I agree that this thread should focus on something other than a definition of canon. I also concur we should be "looking at all available texts and evaluating, thinking about and arguing about each of them on their own merits (as well as how they relate to one another).." Just as
Fordim and
Bethberry have suggested, the whole exercise becomes dead and pedantic unless we grapple with the living text.
What I find harder to accept is
Fordim's suggestion that, under
any circumstances, discussing canon -- the attempt to define the body of writings that most closely represent Tolkien's vision of Middle-earth -- is "futile at best, misleading at worst". Those are strong words! We're not talking about relative merit which I will freely concede, but essentially saying the task is without any merit.
This represents a more extreme position than I'm willing to adopt. Before we charge forward with our individual interpretations, don't we need to try and puzzle out what Tolkien regarded as the heart of Middle-earth? If parts of the Silmarillion are more representative of Christopher than his father, I would like to be aware of that.
Discussions of canon are admittedly just one tiny piece of a much larger picture. And I don't believe the end product of such discussions should be a single list set in granite or a series of will-of-the wisps based on nothing more than "truth-as-imagined-by-the-person-putting-forward-the-canon".
Frankly, I'm not interested in anyone's final list. I'm more interested in the process which they went through to create that list: what criteria were used, whether they measured entire texts or particular tales, what goals they had in mind, how they dealt with thorny issues like chronology. A recent essay by Steuard Jenson makes an attempt to do this by defining at least some common assumptions and goals from which we may proceed, while still allowing for personal variations. See
here.
The minute you go beyond The Hobbit and LotR (even sometimes when going back and forth between the two!), you are struck by the many ambiguities and seeming contradictions that exist in such works at HoMe, UT, Tom Bombadil, and the Road Goes Ever On. Many readers feel no need to sort out the relationship of these different variants. They simply want to enjoy and understand Tolkien's process of creation in and of itself, and that is a totally legitimate stance.
Yet others are curious about the relationship and nature of these texts, especially since we often have an editorial hand involved. Since Middle-earth feels "real", at least in the sense of sub-creation, it seems natural to want to sort out some of the ambiguities as best we can. I agree that what we can do is limited. Since JRRT's world was never "completed", any discussions of canon or the weight assigned to different texts or stories can only be partially realized. But I think it's a worthwhile effort, at least on the part of those who are interested.
Canon can only be a beginning or springboard for any discussions. And I will readily admit there are many situations where we're better off disregarding it entirely. Yet I can not agree that considerations of canon are always futile or misleading. I would similarly maintain that searching for the author's intent in a given passage or work is not inherently "boring" as
Fordim suggested earlier in the thread.
It is certainly a productive thing to search inside our own heads and come up with interesting interpretations that ring "true" to Middle-earth. But is it not also worthwhile to try to get a glimpse of what was in the author's mind, perhaps not so much in terms of some fixed end product but in understanding an evolving process, especially since Tollkien had such a wonderfully creative soul?
Sharon, the curmudgeon
P.S. Has anyone here ever been to Marquette and seen Tolkien's papers, or at least a catalog of what is supposed to be there? Are these strictly drafts of already published writings, or are any of the things that
Davem obliquely referred to included in this collection?