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I've been waiting for you to cite Barthes...
And allow me to say it again briefly -- whether or not Tolkien "wanted" it, or would have "accepted" it, or "condemned" it and whether or not the estate would legally accept it is really all moot. Middle-Earth stories are being written and disseminated and read. Movies are being made, pictures painted, songs written, musicals, puppet-shows, plays...everything Tolkien anticipated (with dread or without it). My point is simply this: each individual reader gets to decide:
a) which of these new stories or revisionings of the "originals" he or she will consume, and
b) whether or not to 'accept' it as part of the 'total experience' of Middle-Earth as constructed by that individual reader.
As there is nothing anyone can do to change this fact, it seems to me rather pointless getting into a froth over it.
But this is rather beside the points now being made. Back to Barthesian hermeneutics... (I am so tempted her to bring up the word simulacra but shall forgo...for the time being).
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Scribbling scrabbling.
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