‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[davem]

(Risks the wrath of 'Bethberry uncloaked' )

I don't see how we can completely divorce the teller from the tale. The tale (even if we believe in such outlandish things as 'mediumship' & the phenomenon of 'recieved texts') is told by someone for some reason. Garth in T&TGW suggests that, in the early tales (Fall of Gondolin, Beren & Luthien, etc) Tolkien is 'mytholgising' his own life experiences - 'Gondolin' with its 'mechanical dragons' destroying the ancient Elven city, Beren & Luthien's mythologised 'retelling' of his & Edith's own love story.

Of course, these tales, & the Legendarium as a whole, take on their own 'life', but the seed from which they grew was Tolkien's own life experience. The Legendarium originated in his desire to give England back its lost mythological heritage. To seperate Tolkien from the Legendarium is to treat it as having arisen out of nowhere, or as a 'recieved text', dictated from 'on high'. Middle Earth didn't arise from a vacuum, it arose from the mind of a man, & took root in the 'leaf mould' of that man's imagination.

The Legendarium is Tolkien, Tolkien is the Legendarium. For this reason, I cannot agree with Maedhros approach. Why should the latest versions of any of Tolkien's stories have priority? The pre-LotR Silmarillion is all but complete, & is self contained, & works in its own right. In fact, one could argue that it is a more finished work than the post LotR Sil, which for me starts to come apart quite seriously, & is in some parts a mess. Maedhros' approach seems to be 'evolutionary' in its approach, in that it sees the later work as 'superior' simply because it came later. When the Hobbit was written, Gollum would have willingly handed over the Ring to Bilbo. It was only changed because LotR required it to be, not because the original was in any way 'bad'. For this reason, we can question Tolkien's motivation in changing the Sil stories from their pre- to post LotR forms. Were the changes made because Tolkien came up with what he thought were better, or 'truer' versions in every case, or were some (at least) of them changed in order to make them fit with other stories which he had changed. This is the problem with a collection of interlinked stories - if you change one story you may simply be forced to accomodate those changes in other stories, whether you want to or not. How many of the later changes would Tolkien have made if the stories were seperate enitities?

This is the problem with trying to construct a definitve Silmarillion by simply accepting the latest version of every story as Tolkien's 'best' version. There is no evidence to support this approach. Perhaps the reason he never re-wrote the Fall of Gondolin was because, however full of anachronisms the original may have been, however out of 'synch' it was with the later form of the mythology, it expressed something of his own personal experience in the best way, & he needed it to be left as it was, saying what it said. When we seperate the teller from the tale, & see the legendarium as a kind of 'real world' history, we inevitably run into this problem. We will, consciously or unconsciously, start to remove any difficult aspects (ie 'personal' to the author aspects) in order to create an (illusory) 'perfect' version. Perhaps the Fall of Gondolin with its tanks & troop carriers & Flamethrowers is the 'perfect' version - divorce it from the 'Legendarium' & look at it as a stand alone work - as some do with LotR & Hobbit - & ask yourself whether it needs a final 'perfect' form ('perfect' in this context seemingly only meaning a form which doesn't contradict the other stories Tolkien wrote).

This search for 'perfection' which is persued solely to produce a Legendarium which doesn't contradict itself, doesn't seem to me likely to produce anything other than an idiosyncratic version, which we have no reason to believe Tolkien would have had any time for. If Tolkien had lived another 20 years, & devoted every moment to working on the Legendarium we have no idea what he would have come up with - if we look at 'Myths Transformed' then we could speculate that one by one most, if not all, the 'primitive' or mythological aspects would have been whittled away & we would have ended up with a factual history of this world.

What most of us do is take as much as we like from the Legendarium, & leave the rest, because it doesn't speak to us. Most of us don't take such an analytical approach to an author's work, classifying some as 'canonical' & some as 'uncanonical'. The Storyteller tells us his story & we listen to it, & respond in our own way.

Some lines from David Jones' Anathemata spring to mind: 'It was a dark & stormy night, we sat by the calcined wall. It was said to the Tale Teller, 'Tell us a Tale'. And the Tale ran thus: 'It was a dark & stormy night....'

Tales grow out of the storyteller's own experience, & we respond out of our own. And in the end questions of 'canonicty' don't arise, because when we're 'enchanted' by the tale, those kind of questions are irrelevant. We can be moved by LotR even if we know nothing of the rest of the Legendarium. We can also be moved by the Fall of Gondolin in the Book of Lost Tales without having any context. If the spell is cast sufficiently well the tale will work on its own. If we change it simply to make it fit with other tales the same author wrote, we may only succeed in breaking the spell altogether - & for what result? To say we have a definitive version, we have produced the 'canon' & consigned the 'uncanonical' versions to the flames with the Heretics?

So, Maedhros, I can't accept your approach. I can't even accept the idea of 'casual readers' needing to be helped. There are readers who are 'enchanted' & readers who aren't. No-one who is 'enchanted' into Middle Earth feels 'casual' about it in any way. And pointing a 'canon' (am I the first one to make that joke? sorry if not ) at a new reader won't enchant them. It may drive them away, though, through feelings of inadequacy. That said, I wish you luck with your endevour, because you may well prove me wrong!

[mark12_30]

Maedhros, many thanks for those guidelines; I'm sure they'll travel back to the 'canon' thread in a little while.

davem, canon vs enchantment I think has a lot of answers.

It's true that 'canon' means little or nothing to the new or casual reader.

It seems to mean a great deal to some scholars-- I don't count myself as one (on this board anyway) so I'll leave that where it is.

It can mean a great deal to the writer, and reader, of fan-fiction. After I had read and re-read LOTR, I began began looking for "more". What I wanted was more enchantment. "The Sword of Shanarra" didn't exactly give me what I was looking for. Precious little did.

But there are some fanfics that do. By and large, they are the canonically-friendly ones. These are the works that I read with delight, imagining that perhaps a long-lost manuscript of Tolkien's (and hence, Bilbo's, or even Ælfwine's) has been found in some dusty corner. Mithadan's Tales of Tol Eressea, chapter one, had that effect on me. So did "The Grey Ship" from TORn's greenbooks. Why? Because they were "gap fillers". They attempted to answer, in a canonically-friendly way, the heartfelt cry "but what happened afterwards?"

The sense of enchantment is lost quickly when -- 'scuse me, folks-- canon is violated. When the punchline is, "And then Frodo got married, moved back to the Shire and lived happily ever after", the enchantment is gone. So's the real Frodo.

How many promising writers wrote fanfics after having seen the first movie or read only the first book, that began well and ended "Alternate Universe"? If you wanted AU, that's OK; if you don't-- bleah.


As a fanfic writer, canon becomes a basic threshold for not disappointing the reader. If one is going to attempt to write gap-fillers, then they have to be woven in as seamlessly as possible. And to do that, you've got to define *some* sort of arena for playing in, for weaving into. LotR? Hobbit? Sil? Lost Tales? And it should be clear to the reader too, if you can do it. Otherwise the reader is susprised by that distressing "AU" aftertaste.

Case in point: Mith *never* gave me an AU with his "Tales." His Frodo was entirely plausible from start to finish.

So... canon may not be a big issue for Hobbit/LotR readers. And ask the scholars whether it is for them. But for a writer, it's critical. And once a reader ventures into fanfic, they might want to know, too.

edit: ps-- davem, I can't separate Tolkien from his writings either. Nor do I want to. And if I trust him enough to let him 'enchant' me, I'm not worried about whether his letters are trustworthy.