‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[davem]

Originally Posted by Bethberry

But this is a far, far jump from the kind of investigation into Authorial Intention which you have been positing in the past, to my mind.

I'm not changing my position, merely coming at it from another angle. My point has always been that authorial intention, in fact authorial 'presence', has to be taken into account if we are to understand a work of fiction - particularly so with this work of fiction, where the author is not simply adopting a Chaucerian role a la Canterbury Tales, but plays a central role in the existence of the story - the Elf-friend is not merely a redactor, he is a living link with a lost past - literally so in the case of the Notion Club Papers.

Tolkien stands both 'outside' his mythology as its creator & inside it as its 'translator', & so he, the author, the man Tolkien, must be taken into account not just because he himself is a character in the secondary world, but because the whole world is a product of his own experience & exists because he desired it to exist.