‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

To clarify my positing of historia -- by that I merely meant the "meaningful stories" that each reader develops in response to the 'facts' of Middle-Earth as set down in the 'primary' texts (like the Hobbit, LotR, Silmarillion etc). These works are themselves, of course, Tolkien's own historia about those facts: the decision of whether or not to accept those 'versions' as final or absolute rests with the individual. For those who wish to "accept" Tolkien's historia I would suggest that the Letters could very well be 'canonical'; for those of us, such as myself, who prefer to develop our own historia, the Letters are extraordinarily useful.

This definition would, I realise, exclude things like fanfiction and rpgs, insofar as they 'make up' or add 'new facts' to the annals of Middle-Earth. Perhaps the best way to regard fanfic and rpgs is as 'historical fiction' -- containing historical truths about Middle-Earth (ie moral vision) without being historically accurate.

But a note on the word 'canon' now -- I think we are working through something of a shibboleth. A canon is not a group of set or finalised texts: every canon is always in motion, being changed, being reinterpreted, etc. Even the Biblical canon was arrived at in historical time (at the Council of Nicacea) and continues to be reworked to this day (some Bibles have the apocrypha in a separate section, some do not). The 'canon' of American literature didn't use to include writers like Mark Twain (too childish) or Toni Morrison (too black): but as American society changed, so did the canon, and now just try finding any course or program in American Lit anywhere in the world that doesn't include both these writers.

I think the attempt here to determine a final set of 'canonical' texts for Middle-Earth is doomed to failure (as is becoming perfectly clear). I think the list of canon provided by Mark 12:30 above is about as close as we're going to get. The real issue is, I think, what is it do we want to accmplish by the act of making some texts 'canonical' and others not. To recover the initial sense of canonisation: it means to set something aside a sacred. Two questions:

1) by what definition of "sacred" can we set aside anything Tolkien wrote? (He would have considered such an act to be blasphemy, I'm sure!)

2) What do we gain by doing this anyway?

My position, in brief: the search for the 'canon' of Middle-Earth is futile at best, misleading at worst, for it maintains the fiction of an authorially established 'truth' when what we should be doing is looking at all available texts and evaluating, thinking about and arguing about each of them on their own merits (as well as how they relate to one another) without worrying about if they do or do not 'fit' into some idealised (and wholly imaginary) Canon of Truth (which will only ever really be the truth-as-imagined-by-the-person-putting-forward-the-canon).

*Fordim ducks heavy objects slung his way*

[davem]

If we limit ourselves only to what could be called 'canonical' as far as Middle Earth is concerned,(& take 'canonical' to mean an 'officially accepted' version of the stories - as in the biblical example) we are still on difficult ground, due to Tolkien's changing intentions. Either everything he wrote should be considered to have equal value, including his own interpretations of his writings, or we should simply take what 'speaks' to us personally. There is no way to agree upon any definitive version of many of the stories, & to include completely contradictory versions of stories as both being 'canonical' is to say that everything he wrote regarding ME is 'canonical'. But we don't have 'everything' he wrote. And if he rejected something which has been published susequently, shall we accept it as 'canonical', because he wrote it, or reject it because he had decided against it?. If a final note turned up from him saying 'I reject everything I wrote after the Lost Tales' would everything he published about ME suddenly cease to be canonical?

Letters

First, we only have the letters Christopher Tolkien permitted to be published. These apparently are the ones relating to the Legendarium, but we don't know what the other's contain (we don't have his diaries, either)

Second, we don't have the letters he was replying to, so we have no sense of 'context'. We don't even know to what extent he was making up the 'facts' about ME contained in the letters as he went. Picking & choosing which parts of the Letters to accept could be extended.

So, taking HoME as an example, & looking at the evolution of ideas, changes in characters & storyline, especially as regards the development of LotR (Trotter, Giant Treebeard, Theoden's daughter, etc), we can certainly ask whether, if he knew that the letters would be published, he wouldn't have amended them, or even not written them.

He clearly was not writing them as part of a 'canon' - which is the point. Tolkien probably wouldn't have thought of some (any?) of his writings as 'canonical' & others as not. I would say that he wouldn't consider any of the letters in that way. We can't even know if he was being serious in all of them.

Second, on some level everything he wrote can be linked into the Legendarium, so, do we, for instance, include Roverandom?

Quote: (note 73)
"The earliest text has:'It was the whale who took them to the Bay of Fairyland beyond the Magic Isles, & they saw far off in the West the Shores of Fairyland, & the Mountains of the Last Land & the light of fairyland upon the waves.' In Tolkien's mythology the Shadowy Seas & the Magic Isles hide & guard Aman (Elvenhome, & the home of the Valar or Gods) from the rest of the world. A good illustration of this geography, from the 1930's, is in Tolkien's Ambakanta."

So, is Roverandom part of the ME 'canon'? Well, it makes use of the mythology in the same way the Hobbit did - which was not ''canon' when it was first written. The Hobbit only became part of the 'canon' when Tolkien decided to tie its sequel to the Silmarillion. Are the poems 'Kortirion among the Trees' & 'Habbanan beneath the Stars' to be included? Kortirion is related to the early mythology, but not to its later form. 'Habbanan' is included in the Qenya Lexicon ('a region on the borders of Valinor'). Yet this poem 'was peopled by the figures of men' ('Tolkien & the Great War'). Incidentally, the Qenya Lexicon contains words for 'saint', 'monastery'', 'crucifixion', 'nun', 'gospel' & 'Christian Mmsssionary'. It also gives the qenya words for many of the things tolkien would have experienced in the trenches - 'londa - to boom, bang, 'qonda' - choking smoke, 'pusulpe' - gas bag, balloon. the quenya name for Germany is Kalimbarie, or 'barbarity' & Kalimbardi is glossed 'the Germans'. Hence, the Gnomes thought the Germans of WW1 were barbarians. They also knew enough about Catholicism to have translated not only some Catholic terms into their own language, but even produced the aphorism:perilme metto aimaktur perperienta (or 'We indeed endure things but the Martyrs endured & to the End'). (All examples from T&TGW by John Garth)

So, is the Qenya Lexicon 'canon' or not, or are only parts of it 'canonical'? What about 'You & Me & the Cottage of Lost Play' - must be 'canonical' if the Lost Tales are. Or how about 'Goblin Feet', which Tolkien came to loathe - yet are the fairies depicted in it so different from the Elves we first meet at Rivendell in Hobbit ('How delicious, my dear!'). Are those Elves 'canonical', or shall we exclude them? Which of the versions of Riddles in the Dark shall we keep?

Obviously, we have to make a clear distinction between what Tolkien himself produced (to the extent that we can separate it from Christopher's contributions), but once we start trying to pigeonhole certain of Tolkien's writings as 'canonical' & other writings as not, we will not find any clear demarcation lines to help us, because Tolkien didn't think about his writings in that way. He was writing at different times, in different circumstances, with different aims. He began wanting to give England its own Mythology, he ended having created a 'secondary' world, which no-one, including Tolkien himself thought of as being anything of the sort. If anything, it became in the end, as Christopher Tolkien said, a depository for some of his profoundest thoughts (sorry, don't have the exact wording of that quote to hand). But it was an evolving thing, a process, in which he was attempting to actualise, give form to, something like his own equivalent of 'Music of the Ainur'.

So, I side with those who feel 'uncomfortable' with the whole idea of a Tolkien 'canon'. As CS Lewis said, its like 'chasing a fox that isn't there'.

Unless that particular 'fox' is Tolkien himself

[Child of the 7th Age]

Fordim, Davem and others,

Unlike several of you, I do indeed think it is worthwhile to "chase the Tolkien fox", as Davem so cleverly put it....

I agree that this thread should focus on something other than a definition of canon. I also concur we should be "looking at all available texts and evaluating, thinking about and arguing about each of them on their own merits (as well as how they relate to one another).." Just as Fordim and Bethberry have suggested, the whole exercise becomes dead and pedantic unless we grapple with the living text.

What I find harder to accept is Fordim's suggestion that, under any circumstances, discussing canon -- the attempt to define the body of writings that most closely represent Tolkien's vision of Middle-earth -- is "futile at best, misleading at worst". Those are strong words! We're not talking about relative merit which I will freely concede, but essentially saying the task is without any merit.

This represents a more extreme position than I'm willing to adopt. Before we charge forward with our individual interpretations, don't we need to try and puzzle out what Tolkien regarded as the heart of Middle-earth? If parts of the Silmarillion are more representative of Christopher than his father, I would like to be aware of that.

Discussions of canon are admittedly just one tiny piece of a much larger picture. And I don't believe the end product of such discussions should be a single list set in granite or a series of will-of-the wisps based on nothing more than "truth-as-imagined-by-the-person-putting-forward-the-canon".

Frankly, I'm not interested in anyone's final list. I'm more interested in the process which they went through to create that list: what criteria were used, whether they measured entire texts or particular tales, what goals they had in mind, how they dealt with thorny issues like chronology. A recent essay by Steuard Jenson makes an attempt to do this by defining at least some common assumptions and goals from which we may proceed, while still allowing for personal variations. See here.

The minute you go beyond The Hobbit and LotR (even sometimes when going back and forth between the two!), you are struck by the many ambiguities and seeming contradictions that exist in such works at HoMe, UT, Tom Bombadil, and the Road Goes Ever On. Many readers feel no need to sort out the relationship of these different variants. They simply want to enjoy and understand Tolkien's process of creation in and of itself, and that is a totally legitimate stance.

Yet others are curious about the relationship and nature of these texts, especially since we often have an editorial hand involved. Since Middle-earth feels "real", at least in the sense of sub-creation, it seems natural to want to sort out some of the ambiguities as best we can. I agree that what we can do is limited. Since JRRT's world was never "completed", any discussions of canon or the weight assigned to different texts or stories can only be partially realized. But I think it's a worthwhile effort, at least on the part of those who are interested.

Canon can only be a beginning or springboard for any discussions. And I will readily admit there are many situations where we're better off disregarding it entirely. Yet I can not agree that considerations of canon are always futile or misleading. I would similarly maintain that searching for the author's intent in a given passage or work is not inherently "boring" as Fordim suggested earlier in the thread.

It is certainly a productive thing to search inside our own heads and come up with interesting interpretations that ring "true" to Middle-earth. But is it not also worthwhile to try to get a glimpse of what was in the author's mind, perhaps not so much in terms of some fixed end product but in understanding an evolving process, especially since Tollkien had such a wonderfully creative soul?

Sharon, the curmudgeon

P.S. Has anyone here ever been to Marquette and seen Tolkien's papers, or at least a catalog of what is supposed to be there? Are these strictly drafts of already published writings, or are any of the things that Davem obliquely referred to included in this collection?