‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Welcome to the discussion Child, nice to have you around it.

But there's one thing: the question you quote above and respond to (so eloquently and touchingly) was not posed by me, but by Saucepan Man.

I don't have time to respond at length but I would like to raise one point: you write

It was clear that some interpretations were right and some were wrong.

I couldn't disagree more with the absoluteness of this statement -- at least, not in the context you give it. Sure there are wrong interpretations (LotR is not a fascist text in support of genocidal murder, for example), but that does not mean that there are a set of absolutely "right" interpretations to be gleaned from the Legendarium. For all the reasons I've already ranted about above, I don't think we can start to think this way ("Tolkien is a privileged source for the 'truth' or 'meaning' of the book") without both making Tolkien into a Sauron-like figure (the 'eye/I' is the only source of vision into the text) and, ironically, forsaking the ethical obligations that Tolkien has put on us to interpret for ourselves.

The different interpretations that are possible, the different 'ways' of taking the text are there, to allow us as readers the freedom to develop our own responses and generate our own meaning(s). It just gets tricky because that freedom is not unrestrained -- we can't just overlay whatever interpretation we want, because there are things we can get wrong (another popular wrong example: LotR is a pro-war novel).