‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[mark12_30]

Fordgrim wrote: ... if we are really to emulate Frodo, Aragorn, Sam (etc) we must resist the temptation to look to the author for the answers and struggle to find the freedom in the text that allows us to think/create for ourselves.

Fordgrim, I'm with Sharku here: if the author hadn't intended us to know anything besides what was in the published stories only, then he didn't have to leave it around to be published later. But he *wanted* to publish the Silmarillion; he *wanted* to respond to (respectfully phrased) questions about Middle-Earth and its denizens. If he intended us not to know these extra-trilogy details, he didn't have to fuss at them to prepare them for publication, didn't have to answer the endless letters he received, didn't have to grant any interviews at all.

He didn't want to explain Tom Bombadil; so he refused to. Bombadil is a mystery; you figure it out. There, in my opinion, anyone is free to write a fanfiction and try to fill in Who Tom Really Is. And I think Tolkien would have been amused by the effort, and pleased to the degree that it was properly woven with the available information (limited as it is) that he had already provided.

There are places where Tolkien gave little-to-no-information (what happened in those Ered Luin, anyway? What was the culture like out there?...) And in those areas, we are free to let our imaginations run wild. Where he is mum, we may speak freely.

Of course, it's a free country, and 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.

Davem wrote:

This situation, as Tolkien moves from storyteller to philosopher/comentator on his Secondary world, from translator to theologian, is the real reason, IMO that he could never finish the Sil.

davem, I'm hesitant to agree on this. While he says in Letters that he spent "too" much time playing solitaire, and accused himself of laziness, he *was* getting on in age. The evident change in priorities could be due to the weariness of age and the anticipation of his afterlife, which I believe helped motivate him into the philosophy and commentary.

But either way, I wouldn't prefer a finished Sil over the philosophy. I think I prefer having the philosophy. In the end, once HOME was published, we got more of a Sil than we would have from the Professor anyway.

I see the deepening as a growth and strength in Tolkien, and as something to look forward to in the aging process; not as weakness or negligence or lack of focus on his part.