[mark12_30]

Maedhros, many thanks for those guidelines; I'm sure they'll travel back to the 'canon' thread in a little while.

davem, canon vs enchantment I think has a lot of answers.

It's true that 'canon' means little or nothing to the new or casual reader.

It seems to mean a great deal to some scholars-- I don't count myself as one (on this board anyway) so I'll leave that where it is.

It can mean a great deal to the writer, and reader, of fan-fiction. After I had read and re-read LOTR, I began began looking for "more". What I wanted was more enchantment. "The Sword of Shanarra" didn't exactly give me what I was looking for. Precious little did.

But there are some fanfics that do. By and large, they are the canonically-friendly ones. These are the works that I read with delight, imagining that perhaps a long-lost manuscript of Tolkien's (and hence, Bilbo's, or even Ælfwine's) has been found in some dusty corner. Mithadan's Tales of Tol Eressea, chapter one, had that effect on me. So did "The Grey Ship" from TORn's greenbooks. Why? Because they were "gap fillers". They attempted to answer, in a canonically-friendly way, the heartfelt cry "but what happened afterwards?"

The sense of enchantment is lost quickly when -- 'scuse me, folks-- canon is violated. When the punchline is, "And then Frodo got married, moved back to the Shire and lived happily ever after", the enchantment is gone. So's the real Frodo.

How many promising writers wrote fanfics after having seen the first movie or read only the first book, that began well and ended "Alternate Universe"? If you wanted AU, that's OK; if you don't-- bleah.


As a fanfic writer, canon becomes a basic threshold for not disappointing the reader. If one is going to attempt to write gap-fillers, then they have to be woven in as seamlessly as possible. And to do that, you've got to define *some* sort of arena for playing in, for weaving into. LotR? Hobbit? Sil? Lost Tales? And it should be clear to the reader too, if you can do it. Otherwise the reader is susprised by that distressing "AU" aftertaste.

Case in point: Mith *never* gave me an AU with his "Tales." His Frodo was entirely plausible from start to finish.

So... canon may not be a big issue for Hobbit/LotR readers. And ask the scholars whether it is for them. But for a writer, it's critical. And once a reader ventures into fanfic, they might want to know, too.

edit: ps-- davem, I can't separate Tolkien from his writings either. Nor do I want to. And if I trust him enough to let him 'enchant' me, I'm not worried about whether his letters are trustworthy.