J.R.R. Tolkien - Canon for Middle-earth

People do not agree on which books should be used to study Middle-earth. The original Middle-earth books were the The Hobbit, 2nd Edition (published in 1951) and The Lord of the Rings, 1st Edition (published in 1954 and 1855). The first edition of The Road Goes Ever On (published in 1963) and The Advntures of Tom Bombadil (published in 1964) were probably both compatible with the first two books.

But in 1965 Ace Books published an unauthorized edition of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, forcing J.R.R. Tolkien to revise both books substantially. In doing so, he altered Middle-earth and did not revise The Road Goes Ever On or The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. It could be said that neither book required any modification to be compatible with the new editions.

But things became even more confused when Christopher Tolkien published The Silmarillion in 1977. Although J.R.R. Tolkien had always intended to write a Silmarillion that was compatible with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rins, he never finished the task. To produce a complete narrative, Christopher borrowed material from older mythologies, composed new material, and editorially revised numerous passages.

The Silmarillion thus contradicts or is inconsistent with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (both editions0 in many passages.

Despite numerous fan efforts to rationalize bringing all these texts together, there is no way to successfully combine them all into a formally consistent canon. And the process is only exacerbated by the additional 13 books Christopher published, which included many notes, story fragments, and narratives that his father never published.

Beyond the books published by Christopher Tolkien, other material has been published through the years in various journals and books by people with access to Tolkien's correspondence and literary essays, as well as interviews in which he answered questions about specific topics.

At best, one can only hope to provide a framework that is mostly coherent. But it is not acceptable to Tolkien scholarship that older mythologies be treated as part of the Middle-earth mythology. Although it is reasonable to extrapolate possible adaptations Tolkien might have considered for inclusion in the Middle-earth mythologies, it is equally reasonable to conclude that their absence from the Middle-earth mythologies constitutes a rejection by Tolkien. In the final analysis, an absence of Tolkien's denial of the use of any element from a previous mythology does not constitute a rational or logical justification for arguing that it can or should be included by inference or extrapolation.

For more information

Tolkien scholar Michael Martinez has written about the problems in creating or assigning a canon for Middle-earth. Read Is your Canon on the loose? and Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide.



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