‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

A very interesting question with which to resurrect the thread, H-I – but one that may need a bit of tweaking.

The question as you phrase it would seem to be a bit of a big baggy monster about morality and society in the primary world: a worthy question, but not really in the spirit on the original thread. If I might be allowed to rephrase it, and then take a running start at an answer…

Going back to SaucepanMan’s point:

that moral “truths” do “lie in numbers”

I wonder how applicable this can be to whatever “truths” we discover in a text like LotR? That is, if a hundred people think that Aragorn’s statement that he will help the hobbits is the expression of selfless sacrifice (“I will give up my aspirations for the good of Middle-Earth”) and fifty think that it is enlightened self-interest (“I will help you because it is convenient since my own Road lies that way”) then is the first interpretation more right than the other? What if the ratio changes and there’s a thousand people who support one interpretation and ten who support another? A million against one?

Most of us, I am sure, would want to say that of course interpretation is not a matter of sheer numbers – this is not a democracy! But surely to goodness there is some truth in what SpM is saying when we look at it in terms of interpretation. I mean, there is no way to prove finally that the Ring is not an allegory for the Atomic Bomb, but few people hold to that interpretation any more because majority opinion has swung against it.

And to fully return to the topic of this thread: if there is a democratic aspect to this, does the author get just one vote or more? To adopt (rather inappropriately, I admit) a different metaphor, if the readers and the writer are shareholders in the meaning of a text, does the author have a controlling share or is he just one more shareholder among many?