"Canonicity II": Has Yours Changed?

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

And then of course there is also the "common-base-of-assumptions" definition, not really the same as FAN above, which would essentially mean the published Silmarillion augmented by UT because that is what the vast majority have actually read. Not all that many, relatively speaking, have read Morgoth's Ring much less Nature of Middle-earth.

After all, generally the Arthurian "canon," at least in the English-speaking world, has come to mean Malory

Very true! I think generally (Gil-Galad being an exception) you can add in things from the notes to the "common-base-of-assumptions" without people querying it, eg in fanfic or art. But if you're going with "canon" as "what are people familiar with", then yeah, that's separate. (I'm betraying more about my own way of thinking than I meant to, aren't I? :O)

Originally Posted by Galin

My opinion here is that MT-ideas were not ultimately intended for the fiction of Quenta Silmarillion, but for works like the Awakening of the Quendi (pre-existing Sun) and The Drowning of Anadune (always round world) -- with "touches" in QS still being possible, like the Dome of Varda in LQSII for example. In other words, the "solution" to JRRT's problem (noted by Christopher Tolkien in MT) ultimately fit well with his "new" Numenorean slash Bilbo transmission, and a multi-perspective legendarium. Or in other, other words, I suggest that Tolkien realized he didn't have to drastically revise QS specifically, as it was now a mostly Mannish text.

You may be right! And there's certainly a potential to view "the canon" as being a set of sometimes-contradictory accounts and legends of the same events. LotR, QS, MT, and even Lost Tales and Notion Club can all be in the canon, much like the different contradictory Norse or Greek mythology texts should all be considered.

The question is what you do with that view. In the real world, you can look at the texts and accounts from some culture to see how it evolved over time, but in this case the documents are all written by one hand, and not in the same order as they would "actually" have been. Hmm... I get the feeling Tolkien would have appreciated someone taking all his books, manuscripts, and notes, and treating them as a collection of found texts and received stories. Ignore the date he "copied them out", and just use the text itself to trace the history of the tellers! But I think you'd have to be an expert in literary analysis even to attempt it.

(Given that said analysis wouldn't include the actual existence of Elves, it would be interesting to see whether "round-world" or "flat-world" came out as the earliest, most primitive version...!)

hS