‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Bêthberry]

Mr. Hedgethistle,

my current position (and I?m comfortable with it) is that the ?struggle? that takes place is entirely internal to the individual reader (or, more appropriately, lest Bêthberry should read this to the individual moment of readerly engagement with the text.

I cannot express how pleased I am that you have found a position you are comfortable with.

That is, we are ourselves torn between the desire to interpret for ourselves (Gollum jumped into the fires to save the world; he fell by accident), and the demands placed upon us by elements of M-E ? such as eruism ? to interpret events in a particular way (Gollum got a little push from a Guiding Hand ? revealed in the Sil to belong to Eru, and most closely connected in the Primary World to Christian Providence).

I think this is not quite my point, although it could be yours. The text does, I would argue, provide a comfortable setting in which to accept that moment of the fall/jump is aesthetically significant and in keeping with other elements in the text. We might have here an example of a confusion between the poet's act and Eru's act. I might think that Tolkien hoped readers to make that leap between the two, substituting Eruism for his own faith, but it seems to me that what we have here is a unified heterocosm which works against any kind of interpretation which would support randomness in Middle-earth.

I am , al always these days, rushed. Does this make sense?