XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien   
   From: Troels@ThisIsFake.invalid   
      
   WARNING: Rant coming on!   
   (   
      
   In message    
   Stan Brown  spoke these staves:   
   >   
   > On Wed, 9 Jan 2013 06:50:11 +0000 (UTC), Lewis wrote:   
   >>   
   >> Tolkien says a lot of things that don't fit with the published   
   >> books. UT is not canon. The letters are not canon.   
   >   
   > There we disagree.  If the Letters are not canon, then what is?   
   >   
   > You can argue that the Letters are self contradictory, and that's   
   > true. But LotR is self contradictory too; inconsistencies have   
   > been pointed out here for years.  So being self contradictory is   
   > not enough to exclude a work from the canon.   
      
   I agree, Stan, though I would go much further :-)   
      
   I think that the idea of trying to define any kind of "canon" to mean   
   anything less than "every single scrap of text that was verifiably   
   written by Tolkien" is not only meaningless, but creates a   
   misrepresentation of his work.   
      
   Tolkien's work was /never/ at rest -- he spent ten year writing /The   
   Lord of the Rings/ (and then had to wait another 8 before it was   
   published, years in which he revised and niggled further), and in   
   that time his views on his own work changed, so that even /The Lord   
   of the Rings/ is not really internally consistent (it has a better   
   level of consistency than any other book that I can mention, but at   
   certain key points, we have passages based on different assumptions:   
   the initial cosmogony is one example and the nature of the Orcs is   
   another).   
      
   The idea of a "canonical" version of Arda is a falsehood -- something   
   that might have been Tolkien's dream, but which was ultimately   
   unachievable by him.   
      
   I know that the concept is quite popular, but the resulting   
   conception of Tolkien's Arda is, as I said, a falsehood and a highly   
   misleading misrepresentation of Tolkien's actual work and of his   
   conception of Arda.   
      
      
   And for the topic at hand:   
      
   I have already said that I do not believe that the ideas about the   
   /palantíri/ that are expressed in the mid-sixties text ever informed   
   the first edition of /The Lord of the Rings/, though they did inform   
   the changes made to the second edition in 1966-7.   
      
   In /The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion/, Wayne Hammond and   
   Christina Scull write:   
     *584 (II: 189). It is not a thing, I guess, that Saruman   
       would have chosen to cast away.* -- The words 'I guess'   
       were added in the second printing (1967) of the Allen &   
       Unwin second edition, the first of several emendations   
       dealing with the /palantír/ and what Gandalf knew about   
       it. Writings by Tolkien on the history and use of the   
       /palantíri/, produced while working on these revisions,   
       are published as /The Palantiri/ in /Unfinished Tales/.   
      
   I have not tracked down all these changes (insofar as they are all   
   listed by Hammond & Scull -- I don't have a handy list of all the   
   changes made to editions prior to 2004, like the one Wayne and   
   Christina include for changes made to the 2004 - 2005 editions), but   
   I do hope that their reference to 'several emendations' is sufficient   
   to show that the text of /The Lord of the Rings/ as we know it today   
   is not only consistent with Tolkien's notes, but is actually informed   
   by the ideas set out in these notes.   
      
   --   
   Troels Forchhammer   
   Valid e-mail is    
   Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.   
      
       Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis   
       best suited to open the way to the next better one.   
    - Konrad Lorenz   
      
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