‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

319 posts and 5 175+ views on this thread, and today marks exactly one month since I opened Pandora’s Box with it. As has been noted by many in the last few days we have covered a lot of territory in that time and moved around, through, over, away-and-back, past and perhaps even under my initial question (quite a humbling experience, actually).

Some quick thread facts:

25 posters have posted to the thread

SaucepanMan and Mark 12_30 are tied for the most posts at 49 each

By my rough calculation, we’ve put up somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 000 words (or about 800 typed, double-spaced pages)

But at any event, that’s not why I’m posting. I thought that now might be a good moment to bring forward my initial post and address how I think it might be regarded given the thread’s evolution:

I’ve been noticing that most of the questions and debates that take place in this forum tend to turn on the idea of what Tolkien ‘intended’ when he wrote the books. That is, when it comes to something like the origin of orcs, or whether a particular character is a Maia or not, everyone goes scrambling to the various reference works to piece together the ‘truth’. More often than not, what happens is we find that Tolkien’s own writings are far from definitive and, even worse for those who desire absolute clarity, they sometimes are even contradictory (the origin of orcs being a good example; or, my personal fave and a perennial topic for heated discussion in these parts: do/can balrogs fly?).

It seems to me that this kind of an approach, while entertaining and extremely informative, tends to miss the point somewhat. Tolkien himself wrote in the Introduction to LotR that he “much prefers history, real or imagined.” Throughout his career as a creative writer, Tolkien saw himself as a historian who was ‘recovering’ these tales from a distant past. The historian can shape the narrative of history, but he or she cannot make that history. This only makes sense, I suppose, given that Tolkien was by training and temperament a philologist. He believed that the truth of any tale lies in its historical origins – more specifically, the historical origins of the words that have given rise to the tale.

Given this idea (which, again, was Tolkien’s own) of the writer-as-historian, then does this not mean that we – the readers – are not only able, but compelled, to seek always to reinterpret the tales from our own standpoint rather than continually try to figure out what the ‘first’ historian made of them? Tolkien can give us important clues and hints into the history and – more significantly – the moral fabric of Middle-Earth, as he was the world’s greatest expert on the material. But in the end, it’s up to the reader to really figure it out for him or herself. That’s, I think, the real strength of Middle-Earth over other imagined worlds: it’s open-ended and incomplete; it’s contradictory; it doesn’t make sense – it’s just like our own (primary) world.

The question that comes up out of all this (and if you’re still reading: thanks) is – how far can we go with our own re-interpretations of the works before we’re working ‘against’ them rather than ‘within’ them. I think it’s pretty fair to say that everyone here would agree that it’s at acceptable (even desirable) to interpret the women characters from a point of view that is more contemporary than Tolkien’s own. I think it’s also safe to say that we would all want to adopt an interpretation of the Dwarves that is radically different from Tolkien’s own (in a BBC broadcast recorded in 1971 he said that the Dwarves are “clearly the Jews”). But can we do something like criticize Gondor for maintaining an autocratic form of government (the King)? Are we allowed to re-interpret the Scouring of the Shire as the re-establishment of upper-class power (Frodo) after a successful revolution by the underclasses (albeit it supported by foreign insurgents)?

In a book that doesn’t really conclude, where does its truth end and our own begin?

From my perspective, I think that at the moment we have become a bit stuck on the horns of this sticky dilemma. davem has become the voice par excellence in celebration of the intensely personal nature of the reading experience – perhaps, the uniquely personal reading experience when encountering Middle-Earth (insofar as the story exists within the ‘frames’ both of fiction itself – the ‘not true but meaningful’ – and of its status as a subcreated world – ‘not true but meaningful within itself and according to its own internal rules and laws’.

I think that we all agree that this is an entirely valid and useful response, but it is a response that is itself too internalised to the reader to be shared in any kind of critically useful way with other readers. We might each have our own visionary/intuitive/religious/psychological/etc encounters with the work, but unless we can find another person who has precisely the same kind of reaction (which will never happen, insofar as we are all different people) then that encounter will forever remain personal and unique. This is good, and right and proper and, I daresay, the final and ultimate function of fantasy.

But this still does not get us anywhere down the difficult road toward the matter of reinterpretation of the text. I am not saying that personal encounters with the text – personal interpretations, say – aren’t valid (quite the opposite, see paragraph above), but that interpretation of a text as a critical act takes place only within a community. Sharing our personal experiences of the text (how it made us ‘feel’, the rightness of it all, the truth/Truth we gather from it) is an important part of a reading community, but not – I hope – the sum total of such a community. Or, at least, there are other kinds of communities possible.

I do think that we have gone just about as far as we can go with the debate that is currently going back and forth between davem and SpM (I feel kind of like a spectator at a tennis match as I read through their posts above – uh oh: I mean, a non-competitive tennis match!). Where I think we can refocus our efforts here is to ask, how can we begin to move beyond our personal and individual encounters with Middle-Earth and work toward some new reinterpretations of the text? The point of this is not, I think, to reach consensus or agreement, but to work through our own interpretations in response to other peoples’.

I suppose the tweaking I would like to give my initial post is this. I began by asking what claim or authority does the author have on the interpretative act of the reader in our encounters with Middle-Earth. Now, I think I would like to find out what claim or authority does the reading community have on the interpretative act of the reader in this encounter? Or/and: what claim or authority does the interpretative act of the reader have on the reading community?

(Special Note to Mister Underhill: note my total lack of reference to Nazgûl or Fellowship-readers! )

(Second Special Note to Mister Underhill: there’s no room left for any other kind of reader insofar as I see these two ‘types’ as existing at either end of a very long spectrum upon which every reader moves as we encounter the text.)