Canon: what ARE we babbling about?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by mark12_30

In the meantime, Bethberry-- you did request the "Works published during the author's lifetime". I wait with baited breath wondering which selection you will choose.

Ah, Helen, I made the request in reference to all the logical possibilities that our various Downers might wish for--witness SpM's concurrence--and not out of preference to see my personal choice 'pollarised', you might say.

I'm notoriously bad at polls and multiple choice questions. I drive telephone pollsters mad asking them what their questions mean and if a really off base interpretation is the one intended because then, well, I wouldn't really have the faintest clue how to procede. Or I offer my own off base interpretation which clearly shows how my answers are going to skew the data collection.

And so, in short, I've steered clear of actually voting on many of our recent polls. I have trouble deciding which side of my toast to butter too.

I find arguments like davem's to be really rather interesting, for they tend to shatter old assumptions and offer new ways of seeing things. What indeed is 'canon'. However, I also find that the most fruitful of this sort of iconoclastic approaches are those which result in some postive understanding, something which opens up new ideas. Something which simply excludes or diminishes our understanding becomes, imho, little more than an intellectual exercise, which of course is the game that academics play.

So, I would ask two questins. How does davem's argument open up the Legendarium to a greater understanding? What does it add so we can appreciate the mythology better? And, second, how does this approach help us understand TH better? Does it break the thing in the analysis?

Originally Posted by davem

Its only when TH is taken as part of the Legendarium that it feels 'out of place'.

Well, TH gave the world hobbits. And one hobbit in particular plays rather a special role in the Legendarium as explained in LotR. There might be some differences of degree between TH hobbits and LotR hobbits, but I don't think there is a difference in kind.