‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Mister Underhill]

At the risk of over-posting today:

davem, you seem to be equating “meaning” and "interpretation" with “allegorical meaning” and "allegorical interpretation". This is certainly not what I’m driving at; I don’t think others are either. You also seem to be expressing the idea that enchantment and meaning are mutually exclusive. Here I disagree strongly. I am with Aiwendil: without plot and characters, where is enchantment? If LotR were a thousand pages of standing around at an Elvish picnic admiring all the otherworldly aspects of Faerie while pixie-dust sprinkled gently down on our heads, we’d be using words like “intensely boring” and “pointless” instead of “enchanting”. The much-referenced “On Fairy Stories”:

Stories that are actually concerned primarily with “fairies,” that is with creatures that might also in modern English be called “elves,” are relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting. Most good “fairy-stories” are about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches. (emphasis Tolkien’s)

The Legendarium is a series of stories, not just a setting.