"Canonicity II": Has Yours Changed?

[Galin]

You [William Hicklin] are of course fully right that there can not be a 'canon' since there is no true story behind - it's all fiction.

Why not canon with respect to fiction? As in "material considered to be part of a fictional universe" (American Heritage Dictionary)

That is why I do not like the name canon and canonicity for discussions like this one, but as yet nothing better had come up.

Agreed here. And I feel as if -- whether or not it's true -- that when I say "not canon" with respect to a given work, folks are possibly attaching some "negative" meaning to the characterization that I don't intend.

[Mithadan]

If there is not some negative connotation to "not canon," (triple negative, woo hoo!) then we are about to enter the Twilight Zone. The LoTR and Hobbit movies did enough violence to the Tolkien "canon" (if anyone can suggest another word for it, I'm open to considering it; but it's been used in discussions here since around 2001). Now we will soon have one or more series that are, at best, loosely based upon the mythos.

Try visiting even the most "reputable" wikis for Star Trek, Harry Potter and Star Wars and you will find entries for video game storylines, fan-produced movies, etc. In a short time, we will see at least one Middle Earth series set in the Second Age and possibly some version of the Silmarillion as well. I am hoping they will be well-crafted. I will not refuse to watch them (until I cannot bring myself to do so, as is generally the case with the Hobbit movies). But will their interpretations someday be part of a future canon (maybe the word is legitimate or faithful?) debate? Will people someday read Tolkien's actual writings and be disappointed that they differ from the Hollywood depictions?

In my mind, this is why a discussion of "canon" is an abundantly appropriate topic for discussion here.

[Galin]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

If there is not some negative connotation to "not canon," (triple negative, woo hoo!) then we are about to enter the Twilight Zone.

Fair enough. Emphasis on "negative" characterization that I don't intend, I guess. And granted, that's hard or even impossible to know (unless I explain what I intend, and explain it well enough), but that's why I agree that "canon"
is perhaps not the best word here.

Like WCH, I too can look at the whole corpus and find it fascinating in various ways. And as a reader imaginatively engaging with "the story" as true, being under the intended spell of the writer, I can also know (to take an oft-cited case) which version of Celeborn's history is true -- and why paint that idea -- the idea the author chose for a once and future readership -- with the same colour as every other idea about Celeborn that happened to pass through Tolkien's mind at some point?

I've seen plenty of threads that begin with questions about something within Tolkien's world. To borrow the Gil-galad question: who is Gil-galad's father?

Since Tolkien didn't himself publish the answer, let the debate begin. Personally I take JRRT's last known thoughts on the matter -- as I think "the arrow of time" is the best I can do to try and follow where the Subcreator is going. But if Tolkien himself had published Fingon, what would the "canonical" answer be? Fingon, or a list of every idea Tolkien ever had about Gil-galad's parentage?

And obviously there are posthumously published texts that contain plenty of things that don't conflict with already published text. That said, however great or interesting these texts might be, however fascinating and worthy of attention they are, in my opinion they still haven't passed the same test as the author-published material has.

Will people someday read Tolkien's actual writings and be disappointed that they differ from the Hollywood depictions?

Maybe so.

For myself, I wouldn't consider a wiki "reputable enough" if it can't, or doesn't, distinguish Hollywood depictions, for example, from Tolkien's books.

[Mithadan]

For myself, I wouldn't consider a wiki "reputable enough" if it can't, or doesn't, distinguish Hollywood depictions, for example, from Tolkien's books.

I would generally not advocate considering a wiki to be "trustworthy." I was merely observing a fact; that on the internet generally, and in many "sources" in particular, the lines between original work and later "interpretations" are becoming increasingly blurred.

For those of us that cherish the original works, there is a value to defining (or attempting to define) a "canon" for our own appreciation and also for the reference of others.

[Huinesoron]

Findegil's discussion of LIT and FAN views, along with the release of NoME, have helped me crystalise my own view of canon, which is: it depends on context!

In some contexts, I hold to the LIT view that everything JRRT wrote is the Tolkien Canon. I have a document somewhere with all his statements on the nature of the Halls of Mandos - not to try and find 'the truth', but to see how his views evolved over time. NoME has made it clear to me that the "Myths Transformed" material, for instance, formed a major part of Tolkien's thinking in his last decade and a half, so this has to be considered in any view of the "Tolkien Canon" as a whole.

Straddling the middle ground between LIT and FAN is my desire to know what Tolkien's final view of Arda was. His ideas were constantly evolving, but he did have a view of the world when he died. It's not unfair to call that version the "truest" version of the Legendarium - the version that's truest to Tolkien's ideas. The issue, of course, is that he didn't record all his ideas - we have to reconstruct them from notes and scraps. The "Myths Transformed" material is a huge part of this - in his head, Tolkien would have had some concept of what he would do with the Lamps, or the Tale of the Sun and Moon, or the voyage of Earendil into the sky... but he doesn't seem to have written it down. This is a "Canon" we have to search for, like literary archaeology to discover something that is otherwise lost with the death of its creator.

But then there's the FAN view, which is: what was the latest and most complete story? Broadly, this is Hobbit+LotR+Silm+UT, but I'm entirely willing to add details from earlier versions or later notes that don't conflict with/break the story. Gil-Galad can be Orodreth's son, for instance - it changes nothing. But "Myths Transformed" goes right out the window, because it totally shatters several chapters of both the published and latest versions of the Silmarillion.

While the third "canon" is clearly the furthest from what Tolkien ultimately intended... Tolkien's works are fiction. "Myths Transformed" never became fiction; it stopped at worldbuilding, with no clear view on how to integrate it into the fiction. As the canon for Middle-earth as a story, this is the only one that works. (Unless you want to work in the Lost Tales canon, of course...!)

hS

[William Cloud Hicklin]

And then of course there is also the "common-base-of-assumptions" definition, not really the same as FAN above, which would essentially mean the published Silmarillion augmented by UT because that is what the vast majority have actually read. Not all that many, relatively speaking, have read Morgoth's Ring much less Nature of Middle-earth.

After all, generally the Arthurian "canon," at least in the English-speaking world, has come to mean Malory

[Galin]

Originally Posted by Huinesoron

( . . . ) Tolkien's works are fiction. "Myths Transformed" never became fiction; it stopped at worldbuilding, with no clear view on how to integrate it into the fiction.

My opinion here is that MT-ideas were not ultimately intended for the fiction of Quenta Silmarillion, but for works like the Awakening of the Quendi (pre-existing Sun) and The Drowning of Anadune (always round world) -- with "touches" in QS still being possible, like the Dome of Varda in LQSII for example. In other words, the "solution" to JRRT's problem (noted by Christopher Tolkien in MT) ultimately fit well with his "new" Numenorean slash Bilbo transmission, and a multi-perspective legendarium. Or in other, other words, I suggest that Tolkien realized he didn't have to drastically revise QS specifically, as it was now a mostly Mannish text.

That said, I've only read a few short sections of (G)NOME so far -- so I reserve the right to change my mind later!

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

And then of course there is also the "common-base-of-assumptions" definition, not really the same as FAN above, which would essentially mean the published Silmarillion augmented by UT because that is what the vast majority have actually read. Not all that many, relatively speaking, have read Morgoth's Ring much less Nature of Middle-earth.

After all, generally the Arthurian "canon," at least in the English-speaking world, has come to mean Malory

Very true! I think generally (Gil-Galad being an exception) you can add in things from the notes to the "common-base-of-assumptions" without people querying it, eg in fanfic or art. But if you're going with "canon" as "what are people familiar with", then yeah, that's separate. (I'm betraying more about my own way of thinking than I meant to, aren't I? :O)

Originally Posted by Galin

My opinion here is that MT-ideas were not ultimately intended for the fiction of Quenta Silmarillion, but for works like the Awakening of the Quendi (pre-existing Sun) and The Drowning of Anadune (always round world) -- with "touches" in QS still being possible, like the Dome of Varda in LQSII for example. In other words, the "solution" to JRRT's problem (noted by Christopher Tolkien in MT) ultimately fit well with his "new" Numenorean slash Bilbo transmission, and a multi-perspective legendarium. Or in other, other words, I suggest that Tolkien realized he didn't have to drastically revise QS specifically, as it was now a mostly Mannish text.

You may be right! And there's certainly a potential to view "the canon" as being a set of sometimes-contradictory accounts and legends of the same events. LotR, QS, MT, and even Lost Tales and Notion Club can all be in the canon, much like the different contradictory Norse or Greek mythology texts should all be considered.

The question is what you do with that view. In the real world, you can look at the texts and accounts from some culture to see how it evolved over time, but in this case the documents are all written by one hand, and not in the same order as they would "actually" have been. Hmm... I get the feeling Tolkien would have appreciated someone taking all his books, manuscripts, and notes, and treating them as a collection of found texts and received stories. Ignore the date he "copied them out", and just use the text itself to trace the history of the tellers! But I think you'd have to be an expert in literary analysis even to attempt it.

(Given that said analysis wouldn't include the actual existence of Elves, it would be interesting to see whether "round-world" or "flat-world" came out as the earliest, most primitive version...!)

hS