Do you consider The Silmarillion to be fully "canon"?

[blantyr]

To be entirely canon one would have to be entirely consistent. Tolkien's body of work is too large to be strictly canon, and consistency really wasn't a prime consideration anyway.

But then, I read for fun, don't claim to be academic, and don't claim to care that much about consistency. If I had a voice, I'd have wanted an editor who cared more about telling a good story than consistency or academic strictness.

But we've got what we've got.

[radagastly]

Originally posted by blantyr:

To be entirely canon one would have to be entirely consistent. Tolkien's body of work is too large to be strictly canon, and consistency really wasn't a prime consideration anyway.

I actually like a few minor inconsistencies. Even real-world histories have certain inconsistencies, depending on which historian you read you may get radically different versions of the same events.

As for the Silmarillion being "canon" or not, I suppose it is as close as you can get without J.R.R.Tolkien right there to approve of everything. Chirstopher was, after all, his father's "first reader" and somewhat of a personal editor. The next closest thing to a co-author even while his father was still alive. But, while I cannot at the moment find it, I do recall Christopher saying that his choices when constructing Silmarillion were based on telling a story that was consistent, both internally, as a story, and also consistent with already-published work. I infer from this that he did not necessarily choose the most recently written versions of certain chapters, but selected them because they fit together the best, in tone, style and factual details. At least as best as he could. He did a great job at it, I think. It's actually my favorite Tolkien book lately.