Middle-earth canon

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The Middle-earth canon[1] consists of J. R. R. Tolkien's stories of Middle-earth, some of which were compiled and edited posthumously by his son Christopher Tolkien. It is related to the concept of Tolkien's legendarium.

Contents

[edit] Canonical works

The official canonical works published by Tolkien or the Tolkien Estate include The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, History of Middle-earth Volumes I through XII, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Bilbo's Last Song, The Road Goes Ever On, The History of The Hobbit and The Children of Húrin.[citation needed] These works, together with Tolkien's unpublished notes,[2] contain the substance of Tolkien's legendarium,[citation needed] a collection of tales which, much like the world's histories, legends and mythologies, contains numerous points of obscurity, omission, or apparent contradiction.

[edit] Consistency within the Canon

Tolkien spent much of his life seeking to bring a level of consistency to his created world.[3][citation needed]As a result of the manner of its creation, the world of Middle-earth is complicated. Its creator developed the various elements of his fictional mythology over the course of decades, making substantial changes up to and including the abandonment of major themes, important facts and entire tales, and wholesale rewrites and revisions of otherwise 'complete' narratives. In two of his letters, Tolkien provided explanations and examples:

"I am doubtful myself about the undertaking [of finalizing The Silmarillion]. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Númenor and the flight of Elendil." (#247)

"…even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally)." (#144)

Towards the end of Tolkien's life, the focus of his writing shifted from pure story telling inspired by his philological pursuits,[4] to more philosophical concerns, and Tolkien never finalized a unified, systematic and wholly internally consistent legendarium. Even those materials published in the author's lifetime rarely if ever achieved (so far as he was concerned) a satisfactory state of completion and consistency. The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and The Road Goes Ever On were all published while Tolkien was alive. But The Hobbit was revised twice, and Lord of the Rings once — both because of inconsistencies.

Tolkien himself indicated that he often felt bound by what had been published before. Even when he altered The Hobbit to bring the story of the finding of the Ring in line with later changes, Tolkien retained the original as the version which Bilbo told when trying to justify his acquisition of the Ring. Likewise, in preparing The Silmarillion for publication, Christopher Tolkien made editorial alterations to remove many possible inconsistencies with The Lord of the Rings. Since then, Christopher Tolkien has identified some elements which he believes he 'got wrong', and he has provided reasons for his believing that one version or another was his father's 'intent'. All of this is inherent in trying to identify a consistent 'history' within the canon of Middle-earth.[citation needed]

With the posthumous publication of The Silmarillion, questions arose regarding how to resolve inconsistencies between it and the other texts. As Tolkien's alternative ideas were published in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales and the History of Middle-earth series, the consistency within the canon of the 'new' material in The Silmarillion was called into question by some Tolkien enthusiasts.[who?]

[edit] The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

The references in The Hobbit are all to the Silmarillion texts or the First Age of Middle-earth, as Tolkien would later call it. When The Lord of the Rings was later fit into the larger history as taking place near the end of the Third Age, more than six thousand years after the end of the First Age, this created a certain amount of incongruence that was never fully resolved even in the revisions. As the initial drafts show, the Necromancer was originally concieved to be Melkor, and Thorins grandfather to be held in the same dungeons as Beren and Luthien. However, as far as The Hobbit was originally concerned, the mere mention of these 'externally referencing' details were the end of it.[citation needed]

Tolkien would later claim these Silmarillion references in The Hobbit were merely anecdotal. [5] After the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien developed, at the urging of his publisher, a sequel that from the outset he also fully meant to be an episode (the last episode, perhaps) of the cycle laid out in The Silmarillion. This dramatic shift in the relationship between Hobbits, of the family Baggins, and the Middle-earth, of the Valar, Eldar and Edain, meant that The Hobbit as originally published contained serious inconsistencies with respect to details of the world of Middle-earth. With the Lord of the Rings being both fully sequel to The Hobbit, and fully sequel to The Silmarillion, Tolkien was faced with making the facts and history of The Hobbit 'fit' with those of The Silmarillion. As a result, successive editions of The Hobbit were produced in order to rectify many, though not all, inconsistencies.[6]

While there is a general consistency across all of these works,[citation needed][7] the most consistent agreement between sources may be found with the second (1950) edition of The Hobbit, the second (1965) edition of Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and The Road Goes Ever On, though there are incidental inconsistencies some of which are difficult, or impossible, to reconcile. In the 2004 edition of Lord of the Rings, Christopher Tolkien, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull carefully supervised a complete standardization and silently corrected several errors that came about in the text. These changes are documented in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion.

[edit] The Silmarillion and other posthumous published works

The author died in 1973 without fully resolving his published and unpublished works on Middle-earth into a complete, self-consistent narrative. His son, Christopher Tolkien, as Literary Executor and editor, posthumously published The Silmarillion based on his manuscripts, completing much of the background narrative of Middle-earth and bringing various accounts into a solid general consistency with other published work, yet also introducing some new inconsistencies with published works.

Published in 1977, four years after Tolkien’s death, The Silmarillion itself represents a compressed and abridged cycle of Tolkiens drafts of his elvish legends - exhibited in the structure and style of the various Annals and Quenta Silmarillion versions seen in the numerous volumes of the History of Middle-earth. Christopher Tolkien, the authors son, who had a long-standing involvement in J.R.R. Tolkiens creative process, having given feedback on drafts of the Lord of the Rings, and having heard The Hobbit as a child, organized and published his father’s literary legacy. The younger Tolkien edited a version of what he thought at the time his father might have produced. He also warned readers not to look for absolute consistency between the posthumous work and items published earlier:

"a complete consistency (either within the compass of The Silmarillion itself or between The Silmarillion and other published writings of my father's) is not to be looked for, and could only be achieved, if at all, at heavy and needless cost."[8]

Throughout his commentaries in the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien has pointed out many choices, differences and discrepancies in his final editorial selections/alterations in The Silmarillion. In most cases, he defends them as what he thinks would have been his father's true intentions. A particularly acute problem, in this regard, are the chapters published in The Silmarillion about the ruin of Doriath and the fall of Gondolin, especially the former.[9] It cannot be certain that these chapters, as published, represent J. R. R. Tolkien's own ideas about how those stories ought to be handled.

An example of anecdotal inconsistency within the canon between the published works can be found in the lineage of Gil-galad. In the published Silmarillion he is said to be the son of Fingon, but, as disclosed in the History of Middle-earth,[10] this was largely an invention of Christopher Tolkien, based on a single marginal note by his father.[citation needed] In fact, Tolkien considered many genealogical arrangements for Gil-galad (most notably that he was the son of Finrod Felagund) before finally deciding that he was in fact the son of Orodreth (who himself was no longer a son of Finarfin, but rather his grandson).

An example of general consistency within the canon can be seen by comparing the chapter Of the Voyage of Eärendil in The Silmarillion with its corresponding sections in the History of Middle-earth Volume V. The Quenta Silmarillion of the 1930's was the final writing of J. R. R. Tolkien of this section and it is carried forward into The Silmarillion nearly word for word with editorial modifications — for consistency with other works — primarily limited to nomenclature; e.g. Fionwë to Eönwë, Lindar to Vanyar, etc.[citation needed]

[edit] References and footnotes

  1. ^ Some relevant dictionary definitions of canon are: American Heritage Dictionary: "an authoritative list, as of the works of an author"; "a basis for judgement; standard; criterion." Compact Oxford English Dictionary: "4: the authentic works of a particular author or artist. 5: a list of literary works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality". Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: "3: b : the authentic works of a writer c : a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works (the canon of great literature); 4:b : a criterion or standard of judgement."
  2. ^ Linguistic materials concerning Middle-earth, written by Tolkien, have been published, with the permission of the Tolkien Literary Estate, in two periodical publications. The Qenya and Gnomish Lexicons, in full, appear in Parma Eldalamberon Numbers 11-16. Other mostly self-contained fragments,notes and poems appear in various issues of Vinyar Tengwar.
  3. ^ J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien Editor, The History of Middle-earth, Vol. XII, p. ix, C. Tolkien: "... whereas my father set a great store by consistency at all points with The Lord of the Rings and the Appendices, so little concerning the First Age had appeared in print that he was under far less constraint." Also, J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien Editor, The History of Middle-earth, Vol. X, p.i, C.Tolkien: "...at that time he was deeply committed to the publication of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings 'in conjunction or in connection' as a single work, 'one long saga of the Jewels and the Rings.'."
  4. ^ Tolkien, J. R. R., edited by Christopher Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1984, 'Secret Vice', p.211, "...your language construction will breed a mythology." Also, Carpenter, Humphrey, editor, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, George Allen and Unwin, 1981, ISBN 0-395-31555-7, Letter 257, "The germ of my attempt to write legends to fit my private languages..."(emphasis added). Letter 163, "All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me are inextricable from the stories. They are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of linguistic taste could have a function."
  5. ^ Carpenter, Humphrey, editor, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, George Allen and Unwin, 1981, ISBN 0-395-31555-7, Letter 163, Tolkien to W. H. Auden: "The Hobbit was originally quite unconnected, though it inevitably got drawn in to the circumference of the greater construction..."
  6. ^ Among simple inconsistencies surviving into the later editions, Bilbo and the dwarves take far too long to reach Rivendell if the map from The Lord of the Rings is used to gauge the distance; this inconsistency can only be explained with great difficulty if at all. The problems of reconciling The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings regarding this can be found in a discussion in Fonstad, Karen Wynn. The Atlas of Middle-earth, Boston, Houghton MIfflin Co., 1981, ISBN 0-395-28665-4, p.97
  7. ^ Tolkien, in his essay On Fairy Stories, claimed that no story can be successful without maintaining "the inner consistency of reality." J. R. R. Tolkien,The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p.132. An author, he says: "...makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. ... The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. W. H. Auden supports this notion in his review of one of Tolkien's book: "Of any imaginary world the reader demands that it seem real, and the standard of realism demanded today is much stricter than in the time, say, of Malory." New York Times, Book Review, The Fellowship of the Ring, October 31, 1954
  8. ^ The Silmarillion, p.8, additionally: "My father came to conceive The Silmarillion as a compilation...and it is to some extent a compendium in fact and not only in theory."
  9. ^ History of Middle-earth Vol.XI, p.356, Christopher Tolkien writes: "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 editorial function."
  10. ^ History of Middle-earth, Vol. XII, pp. 349-351

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Middle-earth Portal
These links are to websites where the Middle-earth canon issue is discussed by readers, fans, etc.


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J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium
Published during his lifetime:
Posthumous publications:
Lists of articles: