[Fordim Hedgethistle]

To clarify my positing of historia -- by that I merely meant the "meaningful stories" that each reader develops in response to the 'facts' of Middle-Earth as set down in the 'primary' texts (like the Hobbit, LotR, Silmarillion etc). These works are themselves, of course, Tolkien's own historia about those facts: the decision of whether or not to accept those 'versions' as final or absolute rests with the individual. For those who wish to "accept" Tolkien's historia I would suggest that the Letters could very well be 'canonical'; for those of us, such as myself, who prefer to develop our own historia, the Letters are extraordinarily useful.

This definition would, I realise, exclude things like fanfiction and rpgs, insofar as they 'make up' or add 'new facts' to the annals of Middle-Earth. Perhaps the best way to regard fanfic and rpgs is as 'historical fiction' -- containing historical truths about Middle-Earth (ie moral vision) without being historically accurate.

But a note on the word 'canon' now -- I think we are working through something of a shibboleth. A canon is not a group of set or finalised texts: every canon is always in motion, being changed, being reinterpreted, etc. Even the Biblical canon was arrived at in historical time (at the Council of Nicacea) and continues to be reworked to this day (some Bibles have the apocrypha in a separate section, some do not). The 'canon' of American literature didn't use to include writers like Mark Twain (too childish) or Toni Morrison (too black): but as American society changed, so did the canon, and now just try finding any course or program in American Lit anywhere in the world that doesn't include both these writers.

I think the attempt here to determine a final set of 'canonical' texts for Middle-Earth is doomed to failure (as is becoming perfectly clear). I think the list of canon provided by Mark 12:30 above is about as close as we're going to get. The real issue is, I think, what is it do we want to accmplish by the act of making some texts 'canonical' and others not. To recover the initial sense of canonisation: it means to set something aside a sacred. Two questions:

1) by what definition of "sacred" can we set aside anything Tolkien wrote? (He would have considered such an act to be blasphemy, I'm sure!)

2) What do we gain by doing this anyway?

My position, in brief: the search for the 'canon' of Middle-Earth is futile at best, misleading at worst, for it maintains the fiction of an authorially established 'truth' when what we should be doing is looking at all available texts and evaluating, thinking about and arguing about each of them on their own merits (as well as how they relate to one another) without worrying about if they do or do not 'fit' into some idealised (and wholly imaginary) Canon of Truth (which will only ever really be the truth-as-imagined-by-the-person-putting-forward-the-canon).

*Fordim ducks heavy objects slung his way*