What counts as "canon"?

[Ashbranch]

Hehe - that looks like a very long and involved thread! I pretty much agree with your suggestion that some works are more "cannon" than others, on a sort of sliding scale, though just to muddy the waters even further the text of LotR was changed by Tolkien for the various editions that came out in his lifetime, and indeed since. Same with the Hobbit, and the Sil, of course, was edited and in some places substantially altered by Christopher Tolkien.