‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[mark12_30]

Fordim wrote:

am I really “free to let my imagination run wild?” Can I ‘make’ the people of Ered Luin into creatures with six arms and wings, who eat nothing but the bark of oak trees and kill their enemies by bombarding them with sea-shells…just by imagining them as such?

Sure. You just can't call it 'canon'. It's now your own imagination.

Once I would have been horrified by your six-armed, winged, shell-throwing bark-eaters; but then I reread the Sil, and re-discovered (to my horror) that Luthien by her arts had changed Beren into a werewolf, and herself into... a bat. Horrors! How undignified! Professor, you can't be serious.

(EDIT: I realize on rereading that was hazy... I say this because I think Tolkien had a very adventurous side. I would never turn an elf into a bat, would you? So how do you know he'd be horrified by your new creatures? He might be, but who knows? He'd be far, far more horrified if you married Frodo off or described Aragorn cheating on Arwen. ...end edit)

Once you begin creating new creatures that aren't in Tolkien's writings, you're doing your own subcreation now. If you were writing fanfiction, you'd put in the copyright part, "Tolkiens' creations belong to him, and mine belong to me" or some legalese version of that (I'm no lawyer.)

The professor's reaction might have been, put them in somebody else's mountains, not mine. But I don't think he would have told you to stop sub-creating.

Interestingly, as soon as you say this, you seem to back away from such an absolute freedom of the reader by insisting that “if we want to re-arrange Tolkien's world, we may do so, but let's not call it Tolkien's 'canon' in the process.”

And I stand by that. Perhaps it seems contradictory. But then, Tolkien both hoped/wished/expected his mythology to be added to by others, and, jealously guarded it to be his own. THere's a contradiction there too.

So you would seem to be suggesting that the “freedom” you talk of is a lot more complicated than it would appear: I can “re-arrange” the world, but without having any kind of ‘real’ effect on it?

Just like Jackson did; he rearraged many things; but the books are still there, on my shelf, unabridged, unedited and reliable.

How much freedom is that? It sounds more like the freedom of the deranged man to say what he wants about the world, since, as everybody knows, he’s mad and therefore harmless: we already know what the ‘truth’ is so let him have his little say.

Frankly, I’d like to think that there’s a bit more room for me in the sub-creation of Middle-Earth than that!

It depends on whether you are trying to write something which might make Tolkien happy (some writers do) or whether you're trying to do something original using Tolkien as a starting place. Or to put it another way, it depends on whether you want to write "Gap fillers" which should be strictly canonical by definition, or, take some liberties and go off on a tangent. What would an elf have to say about your winged-six-armed-bark-eaters, anyway? It's a free country; you can write a story about a canonical elf encountering something very, very strange and 'non-canonical'. Just don't make it a "gap filler."

Maybe we need a table of applications for the word "canonical". It's been discussed before. Pio made the point in this thread that as soon as somebody else starts writing/ inventing other than the professor, it's no longer canon. I'd agree. SO I suggested (allow me the conceit of quoting myself) the following categories for RPGs or fanfics (they'd apply to any TOlkien-related creativity) :

Canon-Consistent: no deviations allowed. Pure Tolkien. If it's not in, alluded to, or clearly allowed (erring strictly on the side of safety) by one of his (later??) books, you can't do it. Or perhaps, you would have to argue your case before the moderator.

Canon-Friendly: Not quite so strict. If it's close, with pretty much Tolkien's style and grace and flavor, we'll go with it, and hope he wouldn't frown too hard.

Alternate Universe-- the What-Ifs. What if Frodo got married, what if Boromir didn't die...

and... Other.