"Canonicity II": Has Yours Changed?

[Galin]

For me, canon equals author-published material.

With respect to "in story" texts: the rest is JRRT in the process of making more canon

With respect to the revised foreword to The Lord of the Rings, this is an external text (JRRT writing as the author), and thus not canon for me. In general I think it's open to something like the Death Of Author principle.

Originally Posted by Boromir88

Everything had to be neat, clean, categorized and explained; absolutely no contradictions. As I started reading more than The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit however, . . .

But there are un-neat, unclean, unexplained things, along with arguable contradictions, in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, including an unreliable narrator in Bilbo, for example.

. . . trying to come up with "no contradictions" canon, was I daresay impossible. I think it actually soured my experience, and "broke the enchantment" (to refer to another thread from the days of old).

I'll put it this way: some of the posthumously published corpus started chipping away at the story, undermining it, and thus, breaking the enchantment. Folks naturally want the/a story, and Tolkien, likewise naturally, didn't want readers to see its process . . . which is not a jab at Christopher Tolkien for publishing anything. Christopher Tolkien wasn't trying to create canon in any case, nor undermine it, I would think.


I've invented (or maybe not) a term "false contradiction", and I mean something like this (for a mostly made up example).

A) Tolkien publishes a limited history of Rohan in Appendix A.

B) Tolkien writes a long history of Rohan, but mistakenly contradicts a couple of things in Appendix A.

C) Tolkien writes another extended history of Rohan. This time nothing arguably conflicts with Appendix A, but this version rather noticeably conflicts with "text B" in many areas.

Certainly there are contradictions when we compare the three texts, but is it fair to a subcreator/writer to claim that the History of Rohan is "now" (post-posthumously-published-papers) full of contradictions?

I say it's full of false contradictions. Tolkien was working toward the history of Rohan.

Or in other words, more of A, author published work