The Canon

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Okay- how would you class the "canonicity" of this very interesting excerpt from a 1965 letter.... not by Tolkien, but by his secretary apparently in consultation with him:

Is there going to be another book? Professor Tolkien is hoping to complete for publication another work, called the Silmarillion, an account of the history and mythology of the First and Second Ages and the early part of the Third Age as it has come down through the Numenoreans, but he is kept from it by other matters....

[Just incidentally, the secretary was the future Mrs. Christopher Tolkien, and the typewriter the same one CT would use for many years including his early letters to me]