"Canonicity II": Has Yours Changed?

[Kuruharan]

For me, no, my standard of canon has not really changed although my opinions about some things within that canon have changed.

For me the biggest change I've had since my early days is an increasing understanding of what I consider to be flaws in Tolkien's writing, either conceptually or structurally, although in these latter days I tend to worry less about those.

Originally Posted by Boromir88

Here, I've never had the feeling. I mean, to me it's simple Balrog's don't have wings, but there's never been a "community canon" that shouts down opposing opinions.

I don't know about that. I've seen debates in the Tolkien community get pretty consistently heated sometimes.

[Pitchwife]

I don't think it has, in the sense that I don't really care - or, to put it a little less brusquely, the quest for an established canon, the attempt to canonise an authoritative text of Tolkien's legendarium and weed out uncanonical variants, doesn't interest me very much.

The discussion here reminded me of Mnemo's old thread Tolkien and Negative Capability, and revisiting it I found I can still largely subscribe to what I wrote back then. Also I still think the distinction of writing vs worldbuilding is relevant here. Let me try to explain.

If your focus of interest is in Middle-earth as a secondary world to be fleshed out in fan fic or role-playing games, you'll want to keep it coherent and lore-friendly. You'll have to make up your mind whether sentient demonic cats are a thing in this world, or only sentient demonic wolves, and whether the vampire Thuringwethil was a werebat or something more Dracula-like; and if you want to use Tevildo and Oikeroi you can't have Sauron and Draugluin/Carcharoth in the same setting.

If, on the the other hand, your interest is in Tolkien's writings as works of literature, the existence of widely differing versions is in itself not a problem; but there's a further bifurcation. If you approach the Professor's writings as a philologist trying to establish a definitive text of What Tolkien Intended (or at least What Tolkien intended at a given time) you're back at the quest for coherence, sorting canonic wheat from uncanonic chaff.

But if you just read Tolkien for your own aesthetic pleasure (and if you haven't guessed it, this is my preferred approach) all that ceases to be a problem, and you can appreciate each and any stage of the legendarium for its own merits. You can have Tevildo and Carcharoth living happily side by side in your imagination (as far as this is possible for felines and canines); you can have the fairy-tale BoLT story of Melko being chased up the Great Pine of Palúrien (again, much like a cat!), but also the metaphysic speculations of Morgoth's Ring, and I wouldn't want to forego either.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

For me, anyway, my attitude is very process-oriented. Tolkien's corpus, published and un-, is a collective artifact which was the work of one author's lifetime. Sometimes he changed his mind. Sometimes he made mistakes. That is what I find fascinating. I just don't see much point in efforts to rather artificially determine One Truth when there is no underlying truth- it's all fiction.
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Note on 'adaptive canon'- no way. Does not and can not exist, any more than The Ten Commandments is 'adaptive' Scriptural canon.

[R.R.J Tolkien]

My Cannon is Tolkiens published works and i think the published Silmarillion must be or no consensus can be made. I hold post LOTR writings that went unpublished by J.R.R as close to cannon as can be.


For me, I do what J.R.R did in his letters time and again, resolve supposed contradictions and mistakes. And don't hold every word he ever wrote as cannon, only published materials he finished and Christophers published Silmarillion.