Which books are canon?

[galpsi]

<font face="Verdana"><table><TR><TD><FONT SIZE="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Shade of Carn Dûm
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<img src="http://www.barrowdowns.com/images/posticons/sting.jpg" align=absmiddle> Re: Which books are canon?

I don't know how many of you clearly remember the seventies first-hand. I think that the Silmarillion was dictated by market as well as by CRRT's desire to complete his father's work. LotR had, perhaps, its biggest commercial breakout in the seventies and the early eighties. There was tons of tie-in. You couldn't go into a mainstream -- much less into an indie -- bookseller without seeing lots and lots of Tolkien merchandise: calendars, poters, totes, etc. Rankin Bass did their lousy Animated Hobbit the same year as the Silmarillion was published. And Smaug marched in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. (Does he still?) I suspect that commercial pressure dictated that CRRT finish Silmarillion during the boom and in a format that wouldn't limit its market-share to the true-believers. Hence the fairly straight-forward narrative strands. Despite which, I recall that reviewers were quite divided on the question of whether this wasn't, perhaps, too much of a good thing. So I doubt that CRRt cold have integrated anymore into it. Before JRRt had made them kaboodles of money, he tried over and over to sell George Allen and Unwin on the Silmarillion and the bottom-line always dictated its refusal. I don't remember that the early volumes of HoME were met with any of the same kind of fanfare that greeted Silmarillion.
None of which are bases for judging the intrinsic merits of the various books, but might at least explain some of the decision making.

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