Canon: what ARE we babbling about?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by davem

Why surely? Its not 'sure' at all. That's what I've been arguing. It is lazy though....



No, Tolkien used the term Legendarium to refer to his mythology as a whole. He tried to fit TH into it. I'm arguing that was a mistake & that he never managed to successfully do it. The Legendarium is his Middle earth mythology as a whole.



Me neither - I just don't believe that, even though it is a work of art in comparison to LotR, it should be part of the Legendarium. And I have to say that your opinion of TH as 'silly and childish' is exactly in line with Flieger's position - though not with mine. It contains things (which I've detailed) which are 'silly & childish' when seen in the context of the Legendarium but not when it is seen as a work of art in its own right. As I said TH suffers by comparison when it is included in the Legendarium.

Help me from this slough of laziness which I thought was a morass of logic. How one can, logically, exclude from the mythology the story which introduces one of Tolkien's most original contributions, the hobbits. The hobbits the most original part of the Legendarium. Furthermore, to jettison the original concept of hobbits for any later one is a revisionary act, particularly reprehensible if it attempts to deny the original conception and to deny that changes were made to the conception. Just what version of Galadriel are we supposed to use? That can be argued at finitum. The point about the Legendarium is that it is not a coherent system, not a Unified Field Theory and no amount of whittling can solidly put a round peg into a square hole. It is something that evolved over time and to ignore that evolution and the different stages of it is to falsify it.

By the way, by referring to Tolkien's use of the word Legendarium, you are backtracking away from your use of Legendarium as "a work of art".

And my use of 'silly and childish' in reference to TH was intended to be ironic,. Of course, I suppose you can ignore my intention and stick with your misreading, but that would conflict with other comments I have made in defense of the 'childish' elements in TH.