Incanus or Outcanus… canon who?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Well, I will stick my wings out gingerishly to test the heat.
Only JRRT could produce what is called "canon".
CT could not produce actual new canon himself. He could edit works of JRRT and publish that, to be seen for the first time by the public. But he could not himself write wholly new stories about the Legendarium that could be canon.

At the risk of being accused of arrogance for quoting myself, I feel I should add something that I just learned myself this morning and which relates to my comment about CT.

Another Tolkien friend asked about Guy Favriel Kay's role in editing the Silm, having just learned about his role in helping edit the Silm. Quite a few other Tolkien fans were also surprised to hear of his work with CT. It hasn't been widely acknowledged and in the 1977 Foreward (repeated in the Second Edition), CT makes a concluding comment to thank Kay for his work. It isn't clear if this is simply academic courtesy or an acknowledgement that Kay played a significant part in helping with the edition. Kay himself is reluctant to speak in detail about it. He has said that he learned a great deal about narrative writing working on Tolkien Sr's drafts and manuscripts. And he has gone on to become a highy regarded fantasy writer himself, winning international awards and becoming a best seller with translations into several languages.

As part of my searches about Kay's contribution, I came upon the fact that CT has acknowledged that chapter twenty two of the Quenta Silmarillion was in fact not an edited version of one of JRRT's texts but largely rewritten by CT himself.

It seemed at that time that there were elements inherent in the story of the Ruin of Doriath as it stood that were radically incompatible with ‘The Silmarillion’ as projected, and that there was here an inescapable choice: either to abandon that conception, or else to alter the story. I think now that this was a mistaken view, and that the undoubted difficulties could have been, and should have been, surmounted without so far overstepping the bounds of the editorial function.

'Apart from a few matters of detail in texts and notes that have not been published, all that my father ever wrote on the subject of the ruin of Doriath has now been set out (...) If these materials are compared with the story told in The Silmarillion it is seen at once that this latter is fundamentally changed, to a form for which in certain essential features there is no authority whatever in my father's own writings.

It is dicey to quote this because the source was not given but I suspect it is in book 11 of HoMe, a copy of which I don't have at hand right now.

The upshot of this of course influences what people might call canon. There are many online discussions asking how much of the Silm reflects CT's writing and even how much reflects Favriel Kay's work. Certainly I find the style in CT's edition of the Silm much different from JRRT's style in HoMe and the later editions of Tolkien Sr's work and for that reason I am not sure that we can say that the Silm is canon, if by canon we mean, as Tar Elenion says,

Everything Tolkien wrote is canon. Anything Tolkien did not write is not canon.

And as an addenda to this, I note the following discussion about Vincent Ferré's article in The Great Tales Never End which apparently fails to make any mention of Guy Favriel Kay's contributions to editing the Silm. https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules...=4534&start=20

A review of Ferré's article can be found in the respected Journal of Tolkien Research https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloft.../vol14/iss2/8/, which faults Ferré's omission.

So was CT the first fanfiction writer? He was certainly a fan.