Quote:
Originally Posted by Aiwendil
Here's the thing. There's no such thing as 'canon'. Some people (including you, I gather) want to talk about the fictional world described in the published Silmarillion. Others want to talk about the fictional world as envisioned by JRRT at some particular point in time. Some want to talk about a hypothetical final form that the Legendarium would have taken if Tolkien had lived longer and prepared the Silmarillion for publication. Still others want to talk about the whole corpus of texts without privileging any one version of the story.
None of these groups is right or wrong, and arguments between them are (it seems obvious) completely pointless. And yet a lot of arguments about Tolkien's work do in fact stem from the (often unrecognized) fact that the participants are taking different approaches. It's the equivalent of those arguments that appear to be about something substantive but are really just semantics, the people involved having different definitions for the terms they are using.
In other words, the issue isn't that Galin or anyone else disagrees about the authority (whatever that might mean) of the published Silmarillion. It's that they are interested in a different question.
|
Some people just like to pick and chose what they like from different time periods. At the end of the day Tolkien never finished his work and after painstakingly going through his notes, Christoper was able to give us a coherent story. This is the only story we are going to get and it's the only story that fits with other published works.
The issue at hand is they disagree with the authority of Christopher Tolkien, because I don't see people arguing that Aragorn should really have been a Hobbit named Trotter or any of the countless other ideas that Tolkien dropped.
We can never know what Tolkien would have written had he lived, because he changed his mind about a lot of things, but we can know what the story that fits the other published works tells us.
Tolkien's early works are a great read and enjoyable on their own, but Sauron being a cat is not something that works with LOTR nor does Beren being an elf.