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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Canon - Page 2

© Michael Martinez

The History of Middle-earth has undoubtedly led us to this quandary at the crossroads. We have so many choices to make that no one really knows which way to go. Every now and then someone starts off down a road and screams, "Here it is! Follow me!" And mostly the crowd just ignores them, continuing to mill about in wild confusion. Occasionally someone dumps a bucket of water on the canonists' parade, too. And we all end up sopping wet. As soon as you take up the topic of canonicity, you have put the literary equivalent of a "soak me" sign on your forehead. The problem with defining a canon for Tolkien is that no one wants to share your canon. A few people have tried to be open-minded, but they inevitably get sidetracked when discussing someone else's canon. "Well, you see, in my canon...." Tolkien didn't make the task easy by any means. He kept starting and abandoning projects throughout his life, and because they all shared something in common (though one would be hard-pressed to identify many elements common to all the projects), there are people who glibly dip into one project to borrow material for discussing another project. I am always amazed when someone brings up "The Fall of Gondolin" while discussing the Balrog of Moria, for example. There is no connection between the story from 1916, and "The Bridge of Khazad-dum". None. Tolkien uses the word "Balrog" in both, but then, Shakespeare used the word "Elves". Are we to assume that Shakespeare's cob-webbers are somehow connected with Tolkien's Noldor? "The Fall of Gondolin" is important to The Silmarillion. There is no doubt about that. But "The Fall of Gondolin" is not a part of The Silmarillion. "Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin" was literarlly written by Christopher Tolkien. Sure, he tried to follow his father's writings, but what he calls editorial compression is, in fact, writing. Christopher Tolkien had to sit down and compose his own version of the tale, which already existed in at least four different versions (as "The Fall of Gondolin" from The Book of Lost Tales, as sections in "Quenta Noldorinwa" and "Quenta Silmarillion" from the 1930s, and in the fragment "Of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin"). The Silmarillion is a book, composed or compiled by Christopher Tolkien. "The Silmarillion" is a story which J.R.R. Tolkien began working on about 1930. The story became the book, but the book is not the story. That is, the story was never completed, and has never been published. The Silmarillion is not even presented as an attempt to reconstruct the story. It's an attempt to keep J.R.R. Tolkien's fans happy. He had promised to publish The Silmarillion but no one really knew what that was. Tolkien himself never produced the Silmarillion because he would get only so far on a Silmarillion and then would start all over again. And there were so many associated texts which were never intended to be a part of the Silmarillion, but which inevitability became a part of The Silmarillion.

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