Inziladun and
Eönwë are being most unsporting, linking to all those old threads, but... that's what all of the other oldies were thinking about when you, JeffF. said:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by JeffF.
The books are canon ahd the Silmarillion plainly states that Morgoth used Avari, not as one of many theories but clearly. Tolkien's notes published in the HoME series are just story notes, interesting and revealing but NOT canon.
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--so, really, it's only fair that they warned you...
However, although we've been over this battlefield many times before, it's getting to be a few years, and not only are their new members hereabouts, but we've had
The History of the Hobbit come out, which I am inclined to think should be a major factor for
davem to consider regarding his shameful position that
The Hobbit isn't canon (though I think he's still welcome to exclude it, myself, if he really does limit the canon to
The Lord of the Rings, the second edition, exactly as it was last published in Tolkien's lifetime--though that is not, I submit, a canon any of us
really want to consider).
In any case, it's quite the claim around here to assert that ANYTHING is canon in Middle-earth. We've probably got people that will say
The Lord of the Rings itself isn't canon, but
The Book of Lost Tales is--though I grant I can't actually think of anyone who'd take that position.
The difficulty with
The Silmarillion, as already noted, is that it was most definitely not a complete text that Tolkien left behind. The last complete version was the
Quenta Noldorinwa, which was finished circa 1930--before
The Hobbit, before Númenor, and before half of the present Silm was even considered. Most of the published
Silmarillion is directly based on the
Quenta Silmarillion of the late 1930s, and the early 1950s revisions that Tolkien added... but not quite. For the final chapters (Nauglamír and Eärendil), Christopher Tolkien was working off thirty years' worth of inconsistent, rare notes and outlines, and he was tweaking stories by adding later (1960s) names, as well as the late version of the tale of Eöl and Aredhel, while ignoring all other sorts of late work, like the Round Earth cosmology and the idea that Celeborn was Telerin of Valinor--mostly because these were too inconsistent both with the rest of the Silmarillion corpus and the LotR, but also because he had to make editorial calls.
Personally, I think Christopher Tolkien gave us the best
Silmarillion possible, and better than we deserved or could have expected, but. But. But does that make it canon? That is the question this forum has tangled over (and if we get this thread going right, can make it tango over again), and is still not adequately answered. At this point, without checking my past statements for consistency--which brings up a whole question of interior canon issues I'll leave for the snarky commentators to pick up on--I am of the opinion that
The Silmarllion--by which I mean the 1977 published worked edited by Christopher Tolkien with the help of Guy Kay--is NOT a canonical work. It is, in my opinion, a redaction or synthesis of canonical works and is, as such,
canonical but not canon--a fine and feathery philosophical distinction that will no doubt get me roasted. I'm also medieval enough to suggest tiers of canon: Published works (LotR,
The Hobbit,
Tom Bombadil), post-LotR posthumous works (
Unfinished Tales, most of the Silm, "The Wanderings of Húrin--and, actually, CoH), and pre-LotR posthumous works (
Book of Lost Tales, the Ambarkanta), but that's just me.
And... I think I've made enough contentious statements to get the huorns to be a bit less treeish.
