‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[The Saucepan Man]

... how carefully one has to choose one's words on this thread.

Originally Posted by mark12_30

It may be so; see Letter 328.

OK, I'll allow you the possibility. But the fact that Tolkien felt the need to identify the man's pre-existing state of belief would seem to confirm its relevance to the issue.

Originally Posted by HerenIstarion

1. Free questions re: Talking to a person with a large hairy wart on his/her nose, am I free to ask where s/he acquired such an adorment, however curious about the issue I may find myself?

2 Development re: Can I bend conversation to [insert the subject of your choice here], however big my desire, if the person I'm talking to A) was never interested/never heard about [subject of aforesaid choice] in the first place and B) is inclined to talk about flowers in pots?

The fact that the scope of a conversation may be limited by social conventions (or any number of other factors) still does not render it analagous to the act of reading, where the involvement of the two 'actors' is restricted to the point where they both play entirely different roles.

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

It isn't any consensus which does that, nor is it sense or judgement, it is the Author who tells me that this meaning I am constructing is wrong.

But what of a reader whose whose honest reaction to the story is to see it as an allegory? Is that reader wrong? Should they deny their genuine reaction to the story simply because the author tells them that it is not his intention that they should react in this way? What of the reader is unaware of the author's intention in this regard?

Surely a reader should be entitled to take the story as an allegory if that is their honest reaction to it, even if they acknowledge and accept that the author did not intend it as such.

Of course, most of us (possibly influenced by authorial intention, possibly relying on our own interpretation, but in most cases probably a combination of both) do not take LotR to be an allegory. So, on a 'near-as-we-can-get-to-an-objective-basis', it is not an allegory.

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

Like Tony Blair and Saruman before him I'm sticking with the 'third way'.

Personally, I relish the company of neither.