Quote:
Originally Posted by mark12_30
I think once the BD had a working definition of canon, what was it? Or did we have competing definitions?
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We definitely had some scorched earth--can't recall if anything grew in it. I'm pretty sure we had a member or two who thought that
J.R.R. Tolkien didn't have full control over what was canon!
Even ignoring for a moment whether we, the fans, accept RoP as canon (I'm going to go out on a limb and say "we don't"), where or when did the
Estate say RoP was canon? It may at some point have said RoP was authorised (i.e. it was granted a license to adapt the work)--but, even then, I thought this was an inheritance of the Saul Zaentz rights, which the Estate doesn't even have access to or authority over.
Imagine if it
were canon! RoP is effectively throwing a black hole into the 2nd Age, sucking all events into the same human lifetime. Has Appendix B's timeline now ceased to be canon? What about the Prologue when it says Hobbits weren't literate pre-Shire?
I suspect that your Facebook sighting may not have thought things through!
But that doesn't mean we can't have a rigorous debate about it! Alas, but I no longer think it is as simple a matter as I once did, but I would in general say only CT had any sort of canonical authority outside of JRRT, and that his authority was limited to some judicial matters and was quite non-legislative. I suppose, in principle, if CT had picked a successor to be THE executor, I'd be willing to entertain the idea that the Estate, in the form of that person, had some canon-deciding authority, but CT's whole praxis became to lay out what his father had written, tangles and contradictions and all (and regretted where he'd made Decisions), so I think he effectively ended the possibility by divesting himself--and the Estate--of canonical powers.