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Findegil's discussion of LIT and FAN views, along with the release of NoME, have helped me crystalise my own view of canon, which is: it depends on context!
In some contexts, I hold to the LIT view that everything JRRT wrote is the Tolkien Canon. I have a document somewhere with all his statements on the nature of the Halls of Mandos - not to try and find 'the truth', but to see how his views evolved over time. NoME has made it clear to me that the "Myths Transformed" material, for instance, formed a major part of Tolkien's thinking in his last decade and a half, so this has to be considered in any view of the "Tolkien Canon" as a whole.
Straddling the middle ground between LIT and FAN is my desire to know what Tolkien's final view of Arda was. His ideas were constantly evolving, but he did have a view of the world when he died. It's not unfair to call that version the "truest" version of the Legendarium - the version that's truest to Tolkien's ideas. The issue, of course, is that he didn't record all his ideas - we have to reconstruct them from notes and scraps. The "Myths Transformed" material is a huge part of this - in his head, Tolkien would have had some concept of what he would do with the Lamps, or the Tale of the Sun and Moon, or the voyage of Earendil into the sky... but he doesn't seem to have written it down. This is a "Canon" we have to search for, like literary archaeology to discover something that is otherwise lost with the death of its creator.
But then there's the FAN view, which is: what was the latest and most complete story? Broadly, this is Hobbit+LotR+Silm+UT, but I'm entirely willing to add details from earlier versions or later notes that don't conflict with/break the story. Gil-Galad can be Orodreth's son, for instance - it changes nothing. But "Myths Transformed" goes right out the window, because it totally shatters several chapters of both the published and latest versions of the Silmarillion.
While the third "canon" is clearly the furthest from what Tolkien ultimately intended... Tolkien's works are fiction. "Myths Transformed" never became fiction; it stopped at worldbuilding, with no clear view on how to integrate it into the fiction. As the canon for Middle-earth as a story, this is the only one that works. (Unless you want to work in the Lost Tales canon, of course...!)
hS
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