‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Aiwendil]

Davem wrote:

This is as much a matter of understanding & acknowledging how Tolkien thought about & approached his work.

But there's a difference between understanding how he worked and understanding how we ought to think of the texts.

If I understand you then the "objectively real Middle-earth" you speak of is the imaginary place inside Tolkien's head - specifically, the imaginary place inside his head where every aspect of the history "feels right" to him. I of course have no problem with this as a definition. But you cannot so define it and then use the fact of the definition to show that the author's intent is the ultimate aribiter of canon - unless you so define "canon" as to make that statement trivial.

The trouble with this claim is, again, that Tolkien is dead - and even if he weren't, he's a distinct person whose mind cannot ever be fully read. How, then, are we to know which Middle-earth is the right one? Of course, we can always try to choose a set of statements from the text that we think correspond with his wishes - taking the latest statements where we can and so forth. This is what we are doing in the Silmarillion project. But this ultimately comes down to choosing a set of rules and then applying them to the texts.