‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Bêthberry]

Well, I am going to stick my foot in the swiftly running discussion here and hope I won't be swept away!

I too would say with SpM to Helen that I understand this love of the writer for his characters. However, as I was rereading Carpenter yesterday, I found this passage (going to use it to reply to bilbo's thread later this morning).

'Stories tend to get out of hand.' Tolkien wrote to his publisher a few weeks later, and 'this has taken an unpremeditated turn.' He was referring to the appearance, unplanned by him, of a sinister 'Black Rider' who is clearly searching for the hobbits. It was indeed the first of several unpremeditated turns that the story was to take. Unconsciously, and unsually without forethought, Tolkien was bending his tale away from the jolly style of The Hobbit towards something darker and grander, and closer in concept to The Silmarillion.... What indeed? [to a question about what the book would be called]. And, much more important, Tolkien still did not have a clear idea what it was all about.

An absolutely fascinating passage, this. It suggests two things to me. First, the Tolkien's habits of composition were intuitive and unconscious to a good degree. Secondly, the passage also suggests that 'the meaning' was something read back into the story once Tolkien had reached a particular stage in the early writing. According to Carpent, it was at this point, shortly after receiving news of the death of E.V.Gordon, that Tolkien "began to organise his thoughts on the central matter of the Ring."

So, we are left with the fact that Tolkien was like any reader, looking around for threads of ideas and then picking up strands to be developed. (Of course, he wasn't just like any reader in that his creative sense of fairey was so great and grand and fine.) It was in retrospective that Tolkien amassed all his storey elements into the grand vision of the Legendarium. For that reason alone I think it valuable to put aside or hold in abeyance if you will his rather insistent claims in later years about what the text means. I am far more interested in what might have brought those Black Riders riding, riding, riding in the first place. My bet is on an entire panoply of possibilities.

Here's to holding tight to my life perserver!