[Galin]

Originally Posted by blantyr

To me, LotR is canon, but consistency was not and ought not to have been the highest priority in creating the tale. The story is the thing. The level of nitpicking and band aiding of flaws one sees among die hard fans seems misspent energy.

I can appreciate the effort Christopher Tolkien put into attempting consistency, but I consider Silmarillion something slightly less than canon with respect to LotR. Middle Earth is an extremely complex creation. Each piece was written for itself, taking depth from what came before, but not rigidly bound to be consistent with what came before. Attempts to pretend otherwise, or to reinterpret everything in vain search of conformity, would be misguided.

Sorry to collect 'em here, but other recent comments concerning consistency include...

Tolkien grew as an author and a scholar. He did not retain the same perspective and values in his art over his entire life. As he grew, his highest priority was not to go back and rewrite his older stuff so that all his works are nitpick consistent. His newer works borrowed depth and flavor from the older, but fans expecting all the works to be entirely in agreement with one another are… Hmm. In the interests of keeping things friendly, I guess I’ll not say explicitly what they are.

And...

Others seem to believe all of Tolkien's works ought to be consistent, and find themselves hacking away at bits and pieces of various stories in an attempt to remove conflict with other stories. I would rather let each work stand on its own.

While I agree that consistency is not the highest priority, I would still say that it was both very important to Tolkien and a fundamentally important part of Secondary World building. In a sense I think naturally important to Tolkien, who was naturally concerned with a believable subcreated world -- not a perfect world however, as that in itself might undermine the Secondary World; but still, when I think about the art of subcreation, to me the intended inconsistencies and confusions are more like the dashes of flavoring -- yet dashes that only add flavorful reality if the much larger meal has a sound measure of internal consistency.


Tolkien himself noted that the task before him, from the 1950s onward, included that the Silmarillion legends had to be rewritten and made consistent with The Lord of the Rings -- and he appears to have, at least at first, desired to make The Hobbit notably more consistent too, considering the 1960 Hobbit (at least before he abandoned this on someone's advice -- here arguably putting a higher priority on the character of the original, but also because the changes 'necessary' were too destructive).


We also have examples of Tolkien himself seemingly doing a bit of creative dancing in order to preserve consistency when faced with readers observations and questions -- to my mind fans who engage in this sort of thing, engaging their imaginations, are doing much the same thing, although this probably has a collective effect if so many are trying to smooth out even the smallest of bumps that JRRT himself might not have noticed, or intended.

Even where Tolkien chose to change the perception of his readership (altering something already in print) he might go to imaginative lengths to preserve a consistency in the sense of 'internal explanations' -- for instance, Bilbo's version of how he came by the Ring -- or in other words: to explain inconsistency in a story internal way is, in a sense, a way to avoid a 'true' inconsistency. Christopher Tolkien even noted his father's intense concern to avoid discrepancy, although even Tolkien arguably had a line that he didn't feel the need to cross.


But all that said, I'm not really sure what you mean, at least specifically. Shirly there are measures here, as some of your phrasing above speaks to of course, but maybe you can provide a few examples of what you feel represents misspent energy?