A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Canon - Page 3
© Michael Martinez
Confused? Now you know why I don't try to define canons. Well, okay, I define them all the time. I wear them like disposable wrist-watches. I use them until the batteries run dry and then discard them. The canons I use today may look like the ones I used yesterday, but they are really different in some subtle, obscure fashion.
The real canon, the underlying core story (which seems to have changed relatively little after Tolkien abandoned The Book of Lost Tales), was an evolving, growing story about an imaginary past. A historical period which never was. This historical period included the rise and fall of a great Elven civilization. The Elves have moved on, but we remember them, vaguely, and Tolkien's canon was an attempt to formalize that memory. The problem is, he never really succeeded in putting that canon down on paper.
Tolkien recorded a myriad of ideas and conflicting details and incidents. If we take them all together, we get a morass of unbelievably confused images and nits to pick. So we are forced by the differences and contradictions to pick and choose our sources. But mixing and matching sources from 1917 and 1970 is not reasonable. Galadriel doesn't even exist in 1917's stories, and The Book of Lost Tales had long been abandoned by the time Tolkien was winding down his musings near the end of his life. If one gets the impression that he was probably terribly depressed by the prospect of fixing up the whole thing, one might not be far from the truth. Sorting through all the traditional attempts to document the histories is a real chore. Heck, it used to put me to sleep until my body built up some immunity to the somnolent texts.
The Internet only exacerbates the situation. The Law of Mandos stipulates that, whenever Turin or Morgoth become the focus of discussion, someone will inevitably drag in the "Second Prophecy of Mandos". This little gem has no relevance to The Lord of the Rings, but is frequently cited as proof that Morgoth will return at the end of Time, and that Turin will slay him. The inconvenient fact that Tolkien abandoned the prophecy in the 1930s, and ultimately only considered restoring it in a substantially different form (due to Andreth, an Edainic woman of Beleriand, whose prophecy foretells of Turin's temporary return at the end of the First Age), is either unknown to the faithful or disputed in some fashion.
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