[davem]

Though I may be contradicting earlier statements of mine, something occurs:

Accepting 'Faerie' to be a different 'state' of perception, if it is a state that we can all access, it has 'objective' existence. This leads to the question of what, exactly, it is - but we can only theorise about that, & those with a religious bent will offer religious speculations.

A more interesting question in the context of this thread is how we judge the 'canonicity' of Tolkien's Faerie. Do we base our judgements about what is 'correct' in Tolkien's vision, ie, which versions of the stories & which of Tolkien's interpretations of them we include as 'authoritative' & which we reject, on what Tolkien does with what he finds & Faerie & brings back to us & presents as Middle Earth (or Faery), or do we base our judgement on how accurately he reports Faerie to us?

We could decide that everything in LotR is 'canonical' & cannot be questioned, because it is the account Tolkien gave us - but statements about Faerie made in it may conflict with the 'truth' of Faerie - maybe he chose not to accept something he found there because it conflicted with some tenet of Catholicism - was there any self imposed restriction on what he reported to us? And if there was, which side do we come down on.

In other words, are we looking to Tolkien to provide us access to Faerie, & perhaps through Faerie, access to something beyond that - as Niggle's painting could provide a viewer with a glimpse of the 'real' place it depicted, yet that place was seen in the end to be merely 'the best introduction to the 'Mountains', & its over those Mountains, in the end, that we must go. Or is Tolkien's Middle Earth to be taken as Art, a thing in itself, which has a value solely in & of itself? Or, to boil it down, should we see the Legendarium as being 'for' something - either for something in this world (to teach us about this world, our place in it & how we should live) or as a pointer to the Road' out of this world (the way over the Mountains), or should we simply 'experience' it as having no meaning beyond itself?

If the first, then Tolkien could be way wrong, even in LotR, in his statements about Middle Earth - which is not to say he is wrong, merely that we would be reading the story as a kind of 'guide book', or a map which we consult before undertaking a journey somewhere other than Middle Earth, & we could consult other maps & guide books at the same time & try to find where all the different versions agree, & where, if at all, they disagree. So, Faerie is an objective place or state we are seeking to enter into, & possibly pass beyond the writer of the guidebook(s), the drawer of the map(s).

If the second, then the Journey is not to somewhere 'beyond' Middle Earth, but into & through Middle Earth itself - so that the book 'Lord of the Rings' is 'Niggle's painting', & the Mountains & beyond is our experience of Middle Earth as we read it, & it points the way to nothing beyond itself. But then we get stuck, because Tolkien is using ancient symbols, myths, traditions. He is dealing with 'eternal' themes - death, love, sacrifice, beauty & those things are what strike the deepest chord in most of his readers, so we are forced to ask whether what we are responding to is simply Middle Earth itself, or what it points us towards, & requires us to confront - or at least offers us the opportunity to confront.

It leaves us with the question, 'Is Tolkien's Legendarium 'canonical' in terms of Faerie, or isn't it? Should we require it to be? Well, if Faerie is objectively 'real' & a 'state' closer to ultimate 'Truth' than the 'reality', physical & psychological, which we currently inhabit, & if we see Tolkien's work as if not the 'best' then at least a good 'introduction to the Mountains', then it should be as 'canonical', as 'true' a depiction of Faerie as possible, & we should reject anything in it which doesn't correspond to the 'known' of Faerie (known through the original legends, symbols & stories), & hold up to strict scrutiny any 'new' things which Tolkien has introduced. If it is a tower built to enable us to look out on the Sea, then we will require that it has been built within sight of the Sea, not a thousand miles inland, & that it is tall enough, & has windows facing in the right direction. Of course, maybe the Sea doesn't exist, or maybe what we will find when we reach the top of the tower stairs is a painting of the Sea, inspired by the idea of the Sea, not meant to show us the way to the Sea, but simply there to be experienced as a work of art in its own right.

Tolkien can't have it both ways - he can't claim on the one hand that fantasy (including his own creation, presumably) is about seeing 'in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world' - ie, claiming that it points us towards something greater, more 'real', 'truer', & at the same time denounce the 'purposed domination of the Author', & leave it all up to individual interpreatation, or 'applicability', because if the first claim is true, & it is to show 'a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world' then the author is required to do that as accurately as possible, may be wrong, can & should be contradicted, & so Tolkien himself, even in his 'canonical' writings may be completely wrong, & other's may be right. If the second statement is correct - that it is not about the purposed domination of the author, but rather about 'applicability' then whatever the writer of the story says is 'true' for the world he has created, & the story reveals nothing - least of all the 'far off gleam or echo of evangelium' - unless the reader chooses to interpret it in that way - & any reader's interpretation is as valid as any other, & none of them, including the author's, has any more weight, or claim to the 'truth' than any of the others.

As I said, I may have contradicted earlier statements of mine here, but these are my current thoughts, as they've come to me as I've written them.