‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Bêthberry]

Really now Fordim, I think there likely will be as many sporting metaphors as we have readers and imaginations willing to create them.

Your question reminds me, Fordim, of Calvin's own dilemma when people began interpreting the Bible differently, after he had assumed there would be consensus of understanding.

davem,

If you will, a few points, although I am increasingly becoming convinced this is futile, particularly after your suggestion we all know what Tolkien means; it is only the 'clever' ones who create confusion. What's the point of discussion here, among a community of people who enjoy reading Tolkien, if we simply say that we would all agree if only we didn't talk about it?

Reading LotR changed me. I'd never paid any attention to the natural world before reading it, I never had much interest in 'spirituality' - up to discovering LotR at 16 my reading matter of choice had been comicbooks. I was changed by Tolkien's works, they gave me my first 'glimpse' into something beyond materialism. But everytime I go back to them I find more in them, I find confirmation for my experiences. Everything I read in Tolkien's writings - fiction & non fiction. I don't feel myself to be so 'important' in this context - Tolkien has taught me something - & from everything I've read of his, he's taught me exactly what he intended to teach me.

With all due respect, and in no way to diminish the power of your experience or epiphany (a word which I use with complete and utter respect, as, indeed was theway I regarded your story about your Guardian Angel), this seems to me still to be valorising Tolkien based on the effect reading him had on you. It is the radical change upon your understanding which the text produced in you that allows you to revere Tolkien so highly. Having then had this awakening, you return to the texts to 'repeat' it, so to speak.

"he's taught me exactly what he intended to teach me" Logically, this seems to me to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Er, no - it doesn't really, does it? Mystical experience is 'spiritual' & aesthetic satisfaction is 'sensory' (unless you believe they have their origin in the same 'state' - 'Truth' perhaps? 'Truth is beauty & beauty, Truth'etc. But I don't think Aiwendil would accept the reality of Mystical experience, unless he was allowed to translate it as meaning the same thing as 'aesthetic satisfaction', & so could say 'There, its all simply 'aesthetic sastisfaction'. I have to seperate the two & keep them seperate, otherwise the 'common ground' is false,

Sorry, I could very well be dense here, but I don't see why you have to keep them separate. Tolkien, I thought, in OFS, clearly explained fairy as the satisfaction of primordial human desires, to survey 'the depths of time and space', 'to hold communion with other liveing things', 'the realisation of '"imagined wonder"', "An essential power of Faërie is thus the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of 'fantasy'." He was, and I speak humbly here, as humbly if not more so than Tolkien was, offering a racially new explanation of the value of Christianity.

He was valorizing it upon his understanding of the importance and significance of story and story-making to mankind. Fantasy is not important, he was saying, because it reproduces the experience of Christian story. Rather, that for him God redeems "the corrupt-making creatures, men" in "a way fitting to ... their strange nature." "For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation."

This seems to me to place aesthetics upon a far more important level than you would wish to acknowledge. It is, I would humbly suggest, a psychological reality of our species. It accounts, I think for the fact that even those who do not "believe in" or accept your Truth can still experience satisfaction upon reading Tolkien's work. It seems to me that Tolkien in effect explains the significance of Christianity through the esthetic experience.

*takes a deep breath in hopes this does not offend as such is not my purpose*