‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[mark12_30]

An afterthought:

I have come to love the histories-- Trotter, Tinfang Warble, and all-- precisely because they show me *Tolkien's road to Faerie*-- the road that he himself trod over the course of his lifetime. It's the man's own enchantment-- the enchantment that he himself is UNDER-- that I value the most, because that enchantment was what fueled his sub-creation and enchanted so many others. In reading his letters, I see clearly why he is enchanted, and I understand that the enchantment is open to me as well.

And Bilbo, are there other prophets-- in this case, mythmakers? Of course.

It was in retrospective that Tolkien amassed all his storey elements into the grand vision of the Legendarium. For that reason alone I think it valuable to put aside or hold in abeyance if you will his rather insistent claims in later years about what the text means. I am far more interested in what might have brought those Black Riders riding, riding, riding in the first place. My bet is on an entire panoply of possibilities.

But Bethberry, that is his whole theory of sub-creating, myth-making, being a recorder, searching for eucatastrophe. To understand the fruits, check the leaves, trunk, roots and the soil. Look at his life. Look at what he insisted was important for *him*, what he was grounded in.

To put it another way, a man is what he eats, body, soul, and spirit.