‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Aiwendil]

davem wrote:

I can't see that putting together 'fragments' of LotR, if that was all that existed, would serve any purpose, beyond satisfying some disire in the person who put it together. And if those fragments were from different versions of the story, & differed in sometimes major ways in the story they told, then you could at best only end up with a general sense of the story - you wouldn't end up with a work of art - unless the person doing the constructing (could we even call it 're-constructing' if there had never been a complete version of it?) was an artist - & then it would be their work - not Tolkien's.

There are, I think, two things to say to this.

First, I don't see any fundamental reason that the published The Lord of the Rings might not, in some alternate history, have been compiled by someone out of diverse texts. Indeed, it has been noted that the early parts of the book differ considerably in tone from the later; this makes such an alternate history all the more plausible. Would The Lord of the Rings be worthless if this were its origin? I don't think so. The value of the book has nothing to do with whence it came; it lies in the book itself. You may object that a work like LotR could never have been compiled out of miscellaneous texts and notes. I don't think that's correct; but we could take the thought experiment further and imagine that the book is altered in certain ways to make the alternate history more plausible. Suppose that Tolkien had given up before his final revisions, and had left the original drafts of most of the book V and book VI chapters as the latest extant. Now our hypothetical scholar puts together a continuous narrative out of these texts. It is different from the real-world LotR. Is it worthless? Sure, as compared to the real-world version it may have weak writing in some passages and in certain details it won't be refined. But would a few changes for the worse to The Lord of the Rings really make it utterly worthless? I think not. Perhaps you think so, and thence stems our disagreement, but I would guess that most people would count the thing as having at least some value.

My second point: you say that the construction would not be a "work of art", or if it were, it would not be Tolkien's. As for the first bit, I fail to see how it could be anything other than a work of art. Any continuous narrative is a work of literature. It may be a very bad work of literature, but that doesn't disqualify it from the medium. As for the second: well, yes, it would not exactly be Tolkien's work of art. Nor would it quite be the constructor's. I see no problem with that. The premise is that the work of art will have value in itself, not value derived from its authorship.

I fear that you will disagree with this premise, in which case we're back into an old argument I've had with others in this very forum regarding the nature of art, and I think that there would be little more we could say to each other on the matter without it devolving into a contest of axioms.

Your 'rules' for what you will & will not allow into a 'revised' Sil seem simply arbitrary.

They are! That was part of what I meant to get across with all my ranting about possible Silmarillions. With respect to the whole network of texts that constitute the source material, they are completely arbitrary.

Of course, we did not choose them arbitrarily - but that is a completely different question. We chose them so that they conformed more or less to the logic of the published Silmarillion, the logic of what is often naively called "canon". So, for example, we prefer later texts to earlier ones. Is there any reason that this principle is superior to any other? No. None at all.

When you speak of taking Galadriel (1) & Galadriel (2) & producing 'something new' I can only see this as an admission that what you're doing is not revising but re-writing (if not reinventing entirely) 'The Silmarillion'.

I don't see the utility of making delicate distinctions between revising, rewriting, reinventing, and whatever else we may come up with. I don't care, quite frankly, which one of those three we are doing. Nor do I care about the semantics of "the same character" and "different characters with the same name" and "the same character with different names", etc., etc.

If the purpose is not to try & construct a 'canonical' or 'definitive', or 'best of a bad job' Sil, then what is the point?

An important distinction needs to be made. We do not claim to be constructing a "canonical" or "definitive" Silmarillion. We do, however, aim to produce as "good" a final product as we can. "Good" is here, necessarily, both vague and subjective. Maybe (well, certainly) you won't think that the final product is "better" than the published Silmarillion. Maybe I will. To be quite honest, all that I really care about is how good I think it is in the end.

What I see is libraries full of 'versions' of the Sil - & I can only see that making more & more people feel like the lady Fordim has just described to us.

Insofar as your objection to a New Silmarillion is really a practical objection, I think I ought to be able to put your mind at ease. Our version will never be found in a library. It will never be sold. It will never be published. It will hardly ever be read, save by those who are working on it.

I'm sorry if my saying the project is pointless has upset anyone

It certainly hasn't upset me.

Beyond those things a 'Silmarillion' of any academic value cannot be put together

Again, this makes me think that our disagreement really comes down to an underlying one regarding the nature of art. I do not claim that a new Silmarillion will have any academic value. Only UT and HoMe have academic value. But I do not think that literary value is the same thing. I think that literary value has solely to do with the aesthetic pleasure one has on experiencing (in this case, reading from beginning to end) a coherent work of art.

Incidentally, in case anyone's interested, the threads I alluded to wherein can be found some rather long-winded debates concerning the nature of literature and of art in general are Book of the Century?,The Tolkien Template, and Are There Any Valid Criticisms?