After the airing of The Rings of Power Season 2 finale, the official Lord of the Rings on Prime account on X (formerly Twitter) shared an interview clip with Dr. Corey Olsen, in which he states, “First thing to specify is that there’s no such thing, really, as canon in Tolkien.”
Hundreds of knee-jerk responses latched onto this claim, resorting to ad hominem attacks calling Olsen a paid shill, a hack, and even Morgoth—though this last claim seems improbable, since according to The Silmarillion, Morgoth was “thrust through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, into the Timeless Void” due to his unruly shenanigans. Other replies called The Rings of Power “a trash embarrassment” and “an insult to Tolkien and his legacy,” while still others expressed their displeasure via some unsavory memes.
These and other responses demonstrate a loud and angry contingent of The Lord of the Rings fandom who consider only works formally published during J.R.R. Tolkien’s lifetime—and, perhaps, The Silmarillion—to be part of his “canon.” Anything which deviates from Tolkien’s precious words must not merely be ignored, but must be laid to waste like Osgiliath.
Under thoughtful scrutiny, however, such claims fall apart quickly. With respect to Tolkien’s attitudes toward his own legendarium and the idea of “canonicity”—which he would have understood differently from today’s idea of “franchise canon”—Olsen has the much better claim:
Like wings on a Balrog, there is no Tolkien canon.
From Canaticism…
In April 2023, Dawn Walls-Thumma published an article on defining canon at the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild, the largest online community of Middle-earth fanfiction. She took a qualitative approach to understanding how “canon” is used among those who engage creatively with Tolkien’s legendarium.
As part of her analysis, Walls-Thumma points out that no discussion of Tolkien canon is complete without talking about “canaticism,” a portmanteau of “canon” and “fanaticism.” Essentially, canaticism ramps up the “no true Scotsman” tendency of gatekeepers by dictating which works may be considered authentic and valid for “true fans” to reference.
Canaticism is in decline among fanfiction authors delving into Tolkien’s legendarium, according to Walls-Thumma. However, as responses to Olsen and The Rings of Power exhibit, there’s a thriving community of “orthodox canatics” (as I deem them) who loudly and abusively resist any modification of Tolkien’s works as originally published.
Or as secondarily published, it might be more appropriate to say. Tolkien famously revised The Hobbit to align with his then-in-progress sequel. In the first edition (1937), Bilbo’s game of wits in Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark,” ends with Gollum giving him a “present,” a magic ring that turns the wearer invisible. In the second edition (1951), Tolkien rewrote much of the “Riddles in the Dark” to remove references to a present and to furnish Gollum with sinister motives.1
Gandalf refers almost offhandedly to both versions of Bilbo’s story in The Fellowship of the Ring:
“…I heard Bilbo’s strange story of how he had ‘won’ it [the ring], and I could not believe it. When I at last got the truth out of him, I saw at once that he had been trying to put his claim to the ring beyond doubt. Much like Gollum with his ‘birthday-present’. The lies were too much alike for my comfort.” (Book I, Ch. 2, p. 48)
While editing The Hobbit in the 1940s, Tolkien wrote at the top of his revisions that “if The Hobbit ran so the Sequel would be a little easier…though not necessarily ‘truer’”2. With this note, he demonstrates his understanding that discrepancies in his stories did not make one version better or more accurate than another.
The basis for this attitude stems from Tolkien’s work with real-world stories like the Middle English Sir Orfeo, which survives in three separate manuscript versions. In 1922, Tolkien’s first published book was a glossary companion to Sir Orfeo and other 14th-century poetry compiled by Kenneth Sisam. Tolkien later produced his own edited version of Sir Orfeo for a naval cadets’ course in 1944, and he translated it around the same time. (The translation was published posthumously in 1975.)
Working with Sir Orfeo and similar tales throughout his professorial career gave Tolkien an expert understanding of how stories changed over time, introducing inconsistencies along the way. He wanted to evoke a similar effect in his own tales, giving them different sources and even their own discrepancies and inconsistencies—like the two versions of Bilbo’s ring-acquisition story.
Strangely, it’s these very types of discrepancies and inconsistencies that orthodox canatics criticize in post-Tolkien legendarium works, including The Rings of Power, the Peter Jackson films, video games like Shadow of Mordor or The Lord of the Rings Online, and other adaptations. Canatics insist on a level of consistency and continuity that Tolkien never attempted to achieve in his own work.
…To Cauldron
In perhaps his most famous of essays, “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien writes about the “mishmash” of elements from which storytellers create new tales. He refers to the story that authors “serve up” as a “soup” made from the historical “bones” of source material:
“Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty. For this reason…the fact that a story resembling the one known as The Goosegirl (Die Gänsemagd in Grimm) is told in the thirteenth century of Bertha Broadfoot, mother of Charlemagne, really proves nothing either way…”3
Tolkien appreciated that fairy-tales, folklore, legends, and myths changed over time. New elements were added, and the stories were adapted by their authors to fit their respective audiences, social contexts, and even didactic goals. Stories that taste different despite originating from the same “Cauldron of Story” were not a problem in Tolkien’s eyes.
Examples abound of Tolkien’s incorporation of “new bits, dainty and undainty” into his own work. He borrowed from Beowulf the idea of Bilbo taking a gold cup from Smaug’s hoard. He likely knew of several stories related to invisibility rings, including tales from Andrew Lang’s fairy books, Arthurian legends like “The Lady of the Fountain” and its predecessors, and Plato’s anecdote of the Ring of Gyges.4 In his letters, Tolkien frequently refers to his Númenorean story as a retelling of the Atlantis myth. Many such bits have been uncovered and studied exhaustively across Tolkien fandom and scholarship.
When it comes to his non-legendarium stories, Tolkien was aware of the medieval tradition of changing and expanding stories from one tradition, culture, or language to another. In addition to Sir Orfeo, he made translations and adaptations of many older stories—some might call them fanfiction—including Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Beowulf, The Story of Kullervo, Sigurd & Gudrun, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, and The Fall of Arthur. Oddly, few orthodox canatics seem concerned about his changes to these stories that differ from their “canonical” sources.
Preserving the Precious
Tolkien was comfortable adapting his own and others’ stories, but it’s fair to ask if he would have wanted his legendarium to be treated the same way. Orthodox canatics seem to believe he would prefer his tales to remain exactly as he wrote them. They try to preserve them much like the Elves used their three rings to preserve parts of Middle-earth from decay in the Third Age.
In his well-known letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien criticized such behavior. The Elves:
“…wanted to have their cake without eating it. They wanted the peace and bliss and perfect memory of ‘The West’, and yet to remain on the ordinary earth where their prestige as the highest people…was greater than at the bottom of the hierarchy of Valinor.… They became sad, and their art (shall we say) antiquarian, and their efforts all really a kind of embalming…”5
The errors of Tolkien’s Elves can be applied to orthodox canatics who want “to have their cake without eating it” by preserving the “perfect memory” of Tolkien’s words. In doing so, they assert “prestige as the highest people” by compelling new creators to engage with Tolkien’s legendarium only in a certain way—and castigating anyone who deviates from the established path. Thus, they perform “a kind of embalming” of Tolkien’s work, disavowing anything that differs from it.
This attitude runs counter to Tolkien’s stated goals of his legendarium. As he describes earlier in the same letter:
“But once upon a time…I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story…. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.”
Written in the early 1950s, well into his penning of The Lord of the Rings, this passage shows that Tolkien was eager to have others explore the world he was creating. That’s not to say he always liked how others explored that world.
In 1957, three years after publishing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was open to adapting his story, but the details of doing so annoyed him. When asked to review a synopsis for a proposed film of The Lord of the Rings, he called it “bad, and unacceptable,” with some uncharitable remarks about the plot and particular story elements.
Nonetheless, Tolkien remained amenable to the idea of a film adaptation:
“An abridgement by selection with some good picture-work would be pleasant, & perhaps worth a good deal in publicity… I am quite prepared to play ball, if they are open to advice.”6
Some orthodox canatics might point at this letter in defense of their position, as though channeling Tolkien’s own attitude toward adaptation. Strict adherence to every pedantic detail of Tolkien’s work, however, contradicts his propensity toward revision, his awareness of how stories evolve over time, and his professed willingness to “play ball” when it comes to adapting his own tales.
It’s also worth noting that Tolkien sometimes disagreed with his fans about his stories. Such disagreements included his “most devoted ‘fans’” like C.S. Lewis, who among other things thought (in Tolkien’s words) “hobbits are only amusing in unhobbitlike situations” and that the poems in The Lord of the Rings were “poor, regrettable, and out of place.”7 Given that one of his closest friends—“the man who was for so long my only audience,” according to Tolkien himself—sometimes got things wrong (insofar as Tolkien would have considered such opinions ”wrong”), it’s hard to take seriously canatics’ claims of special jurisdiction over Tolkien’s works in the form of “canon” more than fifty years after his death.
Franchise Canon and Its Forebears
The idea of “franchise canon” evolved out of older concepts of literary and religious canons. However, it has a fundamentally different purpose.
Religious canons are assembled by religious authorities to codify which texts constitute proper guides to morality and piety. Literary canons are assembled by scholars to constrain (or sometimes to expand) academic discussions. To be sure, the process of establishing religious and literary canons can be just as vicious as fandom debates. But they are fundamentally collections of completed texts, although the canon itself might grow and change over time.
The distinction with franchise canons is that they are overseen by intellectual property owners who are working within living, expanding fictional worlds. Two developments gave rise to franchise canon as we know it today: (1) the internet, and (2) the expansion of copyright protections.
The use of “canon” in reference to franchise fandom arose in early internet discussion groups. For example, in 1996 a Star Trek fanfiction author wrote on alt.startrek.creative, “I used to stick to canon religiously. Now, I just say ‘screw it’ for Trek.” Going the opposite direction, a 1997 Usenet poster says about Star Wars, “I can write a book with Luke and Leia in it and call it Star Wars, but the story and the things in that book isn’t SW, it’s just my imagination.”
While conversations like these were going on, franchise owners were pushing for expansions of copyright protections in a new digital age. In the U.S., the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act expanded copyright protections to the life of an author plus 70 years (or a flat 95 years for corporate works). This and similar legislation in areas around the world paved the way for popular franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek to expand further, while enabling franchises like Doctor Who and Tolkien’s legendarium to respawn with greater power, a la Gandalf the White.
The internet also increased communication between fans and franchise owners. In response, franchises were forced to pay more attention to continuity and consistency. They did this in part by defining the boundaries of canon through proclamation.
For example, Lucasfilms created a hierarchy with cascading tiers of canonicity. When Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, the company rebranded its Expanded Universe stories as “Legends” and grafted a new branch of canon stories onto a trunk of older tales. Some of those tales, like Tolkien’s stories, had already been revised multiple times by their original creator—but new canon directives overrode the old versions. (Insert obligatory “Han shot first!” protest.)
Some franchise owners are more rigorous about canon than others. What constitutes “canon” in the Wizarding World seems to depend on J.K. Rowling’s mood on any given day. Meanwhile, the BBC has eschewed declaring any Doctor Who story as canon (or not), whether television series, novels, audiobooks, or other media.
On the spectrum of franchise canon, both Tolkien and the Tolkien Estate historically lie closer to the BBC than Lucasfilm. This leaves fans to debate what, if anything, might constitute canon in a new age of post-Tolkien legendarium franchise.
Incomplete Inconsistency
Not all urges to define canon are malignant or mean-spirited. As Walls-Thumma points out, with regard to fanfiction some writers adhere to Tolkien’s “canon” (as they individually define it) as a creative choice or challenge. Others are more interested in writing tales compatible with their interpretations of Tolkien’s values and themes, rather than specific details of his stories.
In broader fandom discussions, there are valid conversations to be had about the stories as Tolkien told them versus later adaptations. Amiable conversations tend to refer to these as discussions about “lore” rather than canon. Less friendly conversations wind up like stone-giants hurling rocks at each other on a thunderstorm-y night.
On a personal level, it’s also fine to dislike changes to the stories, whether big or small. When it comes to The Rings of Power, I’m not particularly fond of Galadriel’s premonitions—what I’ve come to call “Nenyavision.” And I have serious questions about the showrunners’ understanding of Second Age geography. It wouldn’t take a very strong vintage of the Old Winyards for me to admit to disliking other things about the series.
But those dislikes have nothing to do with adhering to a non-existent canon. I’m able to admit that they’re matters of my own preference, without trying to summon Tolkien’s spirit like some keyboard Necromancer. In trying to assert “canon,” orthodox canatics ironically impose an intent and practice that Tolkien simply did not embrace.
As Christopher Tolkien writes in his Foreword to The Silmarillion:
“A complete consistency…is not to be looked for, and could only be achieved, if at all, at heavy and needless cost. Moreover, my father came to conceive The Silmarillion as a compilation, a compendious narrative, made long afterwards from sources of great diversity…”
This conception also applies to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which are (ahem) “canonically” translations of tales found in a fictional Red Book of Westmarch, itself assembled from alleged earlier sources. There are a lot of layers, and which ones get peeled away is a highly personal choice about how deeply one wants to dive into Tolkien’s fabricated history.
Even if we consider canon to consist of the most basic precepts that all fans can agree on, things get murky fast. Asking ten fans, “Do Balrogs have wings?” is likely to generate more than ten responses. (They don’t, by the way—unless you mean metaphorical shadow wings, in which case, sometimes they do.) Trying to achieve general fandom agreement about what constitutes canon on any larger scale is as pointless as turning the story of Túrin and Beleg into a buddy comedy.
In other words, there is no One Canon to rule them all.
Tolkien was familiar with both religious and literary canon, as indicated in his letters, but he likely would have rejected top-down, author-proclaimed franchise canon as we know it today. Neither would he have appreciated the efforts of orthodox canatics who guard his precious words like the Black Gates keeping Frodo and Sam out of Mordor.
In fact, I think he would have found them to be rather orcish.
- In The Annotated Hobbit, Douglas A. Anderson provides the text of the first edition of The Hobbit alongside the second edition story, noting where “present” was edited out. See in particular Ch. 5, note 25 (pp. 128-131) and Ch. 6, notes 2-3 (pp. 140-141).
- See The History of the Hobbit by John Rateliff (p. 732).
- See Tolkien On Fairy-stories, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson, “Origins” (pp. 38-49).
- See The History of the Hobbit (pp. 174-182).
- See Letter 131 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (expanded edition), edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien. Quoted sections are on pp. 211-212 and 203-204, respectively. This letter is sometimes included as prefatory material in The Silmarillion.
- See Letter 201 (p. 376).
- See Letters 31 (p. 49) and 137 (p. 245).
The arguments aren’t really convincing:
–That Tolkien can edit his own stuff does not mean other people can.
–Tolkien incorporated other stories (like Beowulf) in his work, but he didn’t call his work Beowulf. Other folks are perfectly able to use Tolkien’s stuff in their own stories, but not to call it Tolkien. Terry Shannara made an entire career of this.
–As you noted, Tolkien actually had very strong ideas about how his stuff should be used.
–The IP canon argument does not seem to apply to the community that you start off criticizing.
–You don’t really have an idea how Tolkien would have reacted. “Likely would have” is not evidence.
And, please, of course you agree that there are things that problematic. Should a porn version of the LOTR be considered all part of Tolkien’s world? I don’t think I’m a canonatic to say no.
Absolutely. That was a very strange line of argument.
And the writer of this piece doesn’t seem to understand what a critical edition of a medieval text does. Yes, there were variant texts of Sir Orfeo. No, that doesn’t mean the story was different in each. It means there were differences in the spelling of words or names and some differences in a word here or there and a couple of different/added lines. One manuscript version is shorter because the poem is incomplete due to missing pages. But it’s not like in one version Orfeo decides not to bother going to the fairy realm to get his wife back. The writer above is using an example that doesn’t support their argument because they don’t actually know Tolkien’s academic work.
Which is much like the ROP writers not actually understanding Tolkien at all. The objections to their ham-fisted pastiche are not defending the canon so much as objecting to clumsy attempts to ape Tolkien by amateurs.
Thanks for the wonderful article!
I also usually find me arguing on facebook and elsewhere that the notion of a canon that is defined by the “objective” lore of Middle-Earth (what “really happened”) would run totally counter to what Tolkien actual wrote (as you said, all his major works are presented as stories told and retold).
I have the pet theory that the recent obsessions with canon in the sense of “what really happened within a certain fictional universe” (as opposed to “which works matter in a given context”) stems from all these highly naturalistic cinematic renderings of fictional universes we have these days. After all, seeing something with your own eyes usually means knowing that and how it happened. Reading about it is different – it feels like something someone might have told you, and the assumption that the text you read is just one possible interpretation of the actual event makes a lot more sense. If your main source of canon is a written text, you’ll probably be more open to the idea of different interpretations co-existing.
So I suspect that Tolkien “canatics” are mainly influenced by movie culture, applying a notion of absolute visual objectivity to written works that actually resist it.
I think we should all agree that the Hobbit movie trilogy is not canon.
Like you, I am fine with the idea that a film adaptation requires breaks with the written word, particularly for something like the Rings of Power where there is only a sketch of the story to work with. I don’t think this applies only to Tolkien, it is inevitable in any film adaptation.
However, you make changes only at your peril and only for good reason, trying to keep Tolkien’s spirit and themes alive while trying to appeal to an audience that is not solely Tolkien die-hards.
The Rings of Power fails that in my opinion, particularly with the Mithril/Simaril tie-in and the elves having seemingly no choice but to make the Three Rings. Their forging is clearly more than a mistaken exposure to Sauron’s influence but is a sin, as the elves are trying to avoid the inevitable fading that is Iluvatar’s plan for them. This is a parallel to the Numenorian sin of invading Valinor to try to achieve immortality. Those two sins are only redeemed in the Last Alliance and the sacrifices that were made there. Soft-pedalling the intent behind making the Three Rings undercuts that redemption.
The rest of the show is hit and miss. Pacing suffers from having too many story arcs to track. It feels like an Amazon exec said “How can you have a LOTR show without wizards and hobbits”, so they threw in Gandalf and the Harfoots (the Entwives, Bombadil and Barrow-wights were also non-sequiturs).
On the other hand, I did like the inclusion of Adar, which although not strictly canon, is in line with the legendarium. Since elves live forever, there is no reason why one of the original elves that were used to breed the orcs could not have survived to the Second Age.
No storyline has gotten enough time, though the show worked best when focusd on the fall of Eregion. They could have done much better spending more time on the elves in the first two seasons. There was no discussion of the difference between the types of elves (Noldor, Sindarin, etc.) or possible tension btween them or the main characters (Galadriel has just as strong a claim of leadership as Gil-Galad has, not to mention the bad blood between Celebrimbor’s branch and the rest of the Noldor).
Overall however, Season Two was better than Season One, and I wish them the best for the rest of the series.
Much respect, Curtis, for allowing comments on this post.
As somebody with no interest in ever watching RoP (and also as the dedicated editor of WhatCharacter.com), I thought that my view on the whole canon thing might be of interest.
I view canon, primarily, as a huge waste of human efforts. I don’t mean to denigrate religion by this (considering that’s the origin of the term), but what it boils down to is a bunch of people caring too much about what pretend things actually happened in a pretend world.
Yes, I enjoy LOTR, but I’m not going to fret if somebody makes a movie/show/whatever that deviates from the lore established by the original work. I mean, the original animation of The Hobbit not only called Smaug “Slag”, but had Bilbo marry the Princess of Dale! The Bakshi animation alternates between calling Saruman “Saruman” and “Aruman” (which to someone like me with an unhealthy interest in mythologies, is hilarious).
The more we fret over canon, the more we just work ourselves into unmitigable corners. For example, The Wizard of Oz is one of my favorite book series. But if you follow “canon”, you have to ask yourself: Where did Ozma come from? Is she really the girl-turned-boy-turned-girl that grew up named “Tip”? or is the a fairy who rolled with Lurline until she decided to be the queen of Oz?
It’s. All. Pretend.
The only value “canon” provides is that we can get together and talk about the plot of books and generally agree on what happened. But even then, I’ve gotten into arguments with people over Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (McMurphy is totally a Christ-figure, and I will die on that hill).
But when people start griping about how “that didn’t happen,” …well, they’re half right. None of it happened. It’s make-believe.
I’m a proponent of a literary interpretation method that I call “the splintered realities” method. Every work exists within its own continuity, and every subsequent work (editions, sequels, adaptations, etc.) takes place in a continuity that is adjacent to, but not necessarily equal to, the origin. Therefore, every point in which it differs is simply just a slightly different (or sometimes vastly different) continuity. It’s like the Many Worlds theory, but for books.
At least, that’s what helps the Aspergery part of my brain give it a break and not worry late at night about how the Marquis got his coat back, or why if Rakhir and Elric are both incarnations of the Eternal Champion, and that every reality only has one EC at a time, why they exist in the same world at the same time…
In the end, most people wouldn’t worry about canonicity if the new contents involved the same quality and talent that Tolkien put into his work.
Since that’s not the case, it tends to leave a bad taste when corporate hacks take liberties with Tolkien’s work.
It depends on how much of a departure it is and if it’s well written. If you include hitherto unmentioned hobbit precursors to explain something about Gandalf and cutesy explanations for some of his later sayings…that’s just crappy writing.
Seriously, it’s bad. I don’t care if it’s canon or not. I care if it’s good and if the event or character could fit in the world of LoTR. Much of Rings of Power just doesn’t work. (Galadriel’s character, the timeline, the order of the forging of the rings, crappy depictions of Numenor and the conflation of that era of the forging of the rings with the fall of Numenor, etc)
The Dwarf stuff works great. I like Elrond (if not the forced conflict with Galadriel) and the non canon Arondir is great! Elendil is cool (not sold on Isildur as presented but eh…) And Sauron, though problematic in some ways, is largely excellent. Individual parts are ok, even the non canon stuff. The overall is a mess. And questions about what is canon is far from the main problem.
The problem with Rings of Power isn’t that it plays fast and loose with the major aspects of Tolkien’s legendarium, it’s that it’s badly-written, often narratively daft, and dull.
Adaptations involve change, no one’s seriously questioning that except for pure troll value. Peter Jackson made changes (XenArwen for Glorfindel, the lack of Bombadil, to name just a couple) but you don’t see nearly as many complaints (there’s always a few morons, but those are everywhere) simply because they were well-crafted adaptations and took care to stay true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the originals where possible, and deviate where necessary without completely changing the character of the characters.
Canon is not sacrosanct and sticking to it is not required, but “not completely messing up a beloved property without the explicit permission of the creator” is, I would feel – Wheel of Time being a classic example of “not to be confused with the book of the same name”.
To be fair almost everyone drops Bombadil.
Ralph Bakshi dropped him from the 1978 movie because “he didn’t move the story along.”
Brian Sibley omitted Bombadil from the 13-hour 1981 Radio 4 adaptation on the grounds that it was preferable to “excise one large episode than to dramatically reduce several others.”
Peter Jackson administered a bombadilectomy on similar grounds to Bakshi: he’s just not essential to the overall story.
The Bombadil segment is a great hint at the depth of Tolkien’s world and justly beloved, but if you’re aiming for a movie-style narrative pace to get Frodo from the Shire to Mt Doom, it’d just be a bizarre side-quest.
Bombadil was responsible for getting the hobbits out of the Old Forest, and for Merry ending up with the blade that eventually undid the Witch-king of Angmar.
Claims that “he didn’t move the story along” are, imho, nonsensical…
The most common complaints with LoTR the movie among people who love the book are what Jackson did to Faramir and Gimli.
The people making those complaints usually agree that Boromir was improved in the movie in ways that highlighted his fall, and the knife edge he was on.
“Canon” is what you aim at people who disagree with you.
That said, if you want to ignore things that are in the text, be upfront about it and announce it at the beginning of your project. Say something like, “While the books of Bilbo and Frodo reveal their understanding of the history that led up to their own adventures, there are OTHER versions of that history…..”
Boom. Canonicity problem resolved. If you want to have Hobbits before the date Bilbo and Frodo thought Hobbits arrived in the West, you can. Does the history of the Elves not mesh with what Bilbo and Frodo set down? No problem. Bilbo and Frodo trusted THEIR sources which may have been edited. (I like Bilbo and Frodo but they are not trained historians.)
tl;dr It’s not “canon” that’s the problem. It’s people who try to claim THEIR stufff is canon when they could and should have given it a fig leaf of why their story breaks the canon.
I think the producers of RoP were pretty upfront about the fact that they were going to have to break with canon, if only because the Second Age lasted so long that no characters except the Elves managed to live through them and they were going to need to compress the timeline dramatically. I’m not at all crazy about some of the choices they made, but I don’t think they ever tried to pretend the narrative they came up with is consistent with canon.
I think it’s the same logic by which movies are “If you loved the classic novel, you’ll love this all-star production!” when they’re urging you to see it. When the complaints about changes come, it’s “Well, they’re different mediums, you can’t blame us for changing it.”
Olsen has said that he insisted that line be included in the video, because he wanted to spark a conversation about this topic.
I found Peter Jackson’s films more enjoyable than irritating, watched them a few times before I could just relax with them. Might’ve taken a more relaxed attitude sooner if I’d read any of Christopher Tolkien’s “History of Middle Earth” series first.
Of course a Canon of Tolkien’s work exists.
Its the material Tolkien had published.
No new Lord of the Rings work is part of Tolkien’s Canon.
It can still all be inspired by and based on his works and be part of the broader world of the Lord of the Rings.
And that is just fine.
I don’t know why anyone would try to create new works and attempt to argue they are part of the Tolkien Canon.
Of course they aren’t. They are creative works inspired by Tolkien’s amazing Canon of work.
That is just super awesome.
Let’s be real here. This article isn’t about cannon. It’s about fans voicing legitimate concerns over studios, who are leveraging works that are near and dear to their hearts, and using established fan bases to try and wring a nickle out of a penny. This companies aren’t “breaking cannon”, because they don’t even know what it is most of the time. They’re producing the equivilent of bad fan fiction. I say bad fan fiction, because there is plenty of fan fiction that follows the internal rules of the universe.
People often quote that things have to change in an adaptation. That’s true. What that means is, you have to drop or combine extraneous story lines, which have plenty of space in a novel, but not in a manuscript, which is often ~117pgs long. It means that you no longer have internal monologues and omniscent understanding of things, thus you have to create scenes to explain those moments. It means that you don’t need 20 peoples hands in the fire, saying that things need to be this way or that. You need one director, trying to bring the story to life as he sees it, which should involve a minimum of changes. You’re not telling your story, you’re interpreting someone successfuls story. That’s oftent he main issue. They had it over to someone who isn’t talented enough to tell the story they want to tell, so they go after anything they can get their hands on, and try to shoe horn their story onto it.
Focusing specifically on books, as far as cannon goes, I’d start by saying that one of the very first, and very biggest rules of writing fantasy, is that you can be as fantastical as you want, but don’t break your own rules. If people can’t teleport, then they’re not going to be able to teleport when things get really bad. That’s poor writing. Unless you’ve previously established a way to teleport and it’s just that people in-world don’t think it’s possible, but you’ve left the clues the reader could have seen, then it’s bad writing.
For cannon specifically, it’s created by default. Just as I said above, you can’t break your world’s rules. Cannon is simply what those rules/lore are. I’ll say that there are different tiers of cannon. If a discrepency is found, you’d always go with what the original author said. Then secondarily, there are other people who have a legitimate claim to add to the world. Guest authors, family, etc. It can be viewed as a nice expansion, while still knowing that the orignial authors works take precedence when questions and issues arise. Then you get into fan fiction and go on from there.
As I said, even fan fiction can be perfectly fine. You know where it stands for legitimacy, but if it obeys the established rules of the world, then it’s all good. That’s the crux of the issue. No one cares where it came from if it’s well written and follows all the rules. It’s just more to enjoy.
It’s when it’s poorly written, butchered, and intentionally changed to fit the narritive of someone whos not talented enough to succeed on their own, that people speak up. As they should. We should have standards, and not sit meekly by as worlds that are a part of our souls at this point, are butchered for profit. That’s what you’re advocating for when you belittle the concerns of the fans that helped build the series to what it is, and hold it close to their hearts.
Now we just need a “Kevin J. Anderson’s DUNE books are canon, actually” article. :)
I say all of this as some who desperately wanted this show to be amazing and prove all the nay-sayers wrong. My disappointment with Rings of Power is not that changes were made, but with what was changed and for what reason. I do not think the rationale for most of their choices is narratively sound or respectful of the source work and what makes it unique and beloved.
I find the reference in this article to Tolkien’s response to the 1957 script of particular interest, as it somewhat conveniently leaves out a very important section of Tolkien’s lengthy and largely negative response to that attempted adaptation:
“The canons of narrative in any medium cannot be wholly different ; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.”
The specific criticisms Tolkien leveled at the proposed Zimmerman script in that letter are things that RoP does in spades- compressing time, ignoring the importance of geography, manufacturing explanations for things that require none (Sudden Onset Vitamin Valinor Deficiency, the confusing origin of mithril, Rube Goldberg Mt. Doom, where Gandalf’s staff came from) and ‘the intrusion of unwarranted matter’. Yes, that letter makes clear that Tolkien understood the need to make changes from one medium to another and that he was open to adaptations. It also outlined quite specifically what he felt were not good adaptational choices and RoP seems to have taken that list as their guidebook.
Many, I’d say most, of the choices RoP has made do not add anything of depth to the existing story, cause far more narrative issues than they solve, and attempt very clumsily to insert messages that do not mesh with the spirit of Middle-earth as established by its original subcreator. A sloppy and quickly abandoned anti-immigration narrative makes no sense in Numenor and they did zero narrative work to make it make sense. A female empowerment arc for Galadriel makes no sense for a character whose species does not have ingrained misogyny and has never experienced it, and they did zero narrative work to surround that. (Her story absolutely follows those beats, complete with a “proving I’m better than the boys” fight against comparative toddlers that was badly choreographed, badly staged in the middle of marketplace for some reason, and badly scripted). The writers could have taken this series as an opportunity to flesh out Celeborn as a character, really build up a personality for him and showcase Galadriel’s relationship with him and her family and how she might have struggled with her love for them against her desire for power (something many modern wives and mothers would have related to, by the by). But, crucially, they can’t do enemies-to-lovers trope scenes with a *loving husband,* so he had to be killed off in favor of a sexy!Sauron she can threaten with a knife to the throat because they wanted that romantasy reader engagement (it’s Amazon; they know their Kindle download stats). They made Elrond kiss her specifically to cause upset among book fans for the social media engagement they knew something so ludicrous would cause. They are not making these decisions in service to any story at all, but to the whims of social media and current publishing trends, and that is what is so repugnant about the series as a whole.
Author Garth Nix has said that there is no sense of the numinous in Rings of Power; he is completely correct. RoP may kind of look like Middle-earth sometimes, but it doesn’t *feel* like it because the show runners are too inexperienced and easily led by the studio’s demands for the next Game of Thrones to craft a story that fits within the world they paid so ridiculously much to inhabit.
As the Professor himself wrote in the same letter this article references:
“I would ask [the script writers] to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about”.
To me, the committee behind Rings of Power has made no such effort in understanding that irritation and resentment on the part of the fan base they paid billions to acquire (why bother adapting anything if not for the built-in audience?). Instead, they have mocked it and reveled in it, making story decisions specifically to cause irritation and upset. They have treated the central spirit of Middle-earth carelessly and recklessly, their story choices, interpolations, and changes all signs that there is little to no understanding of or appreciation for what it is all about among the script team or the Amazon production committee that rules them.
It’s not about sticking religiously to canon; it’s about basic narrative integrity and respect for the world you’re playing in.
And on perhaps the most pedantic note, but one I feel justified in, I am miffed that they named Celebrimbor’s assistant Mirdania, when -ia is not referenced anywhere as a Sindarin personal name suffix. Could they truly not even be bothered to treat the Elvish with care?
An AU fanfic posted on AO3 is one thing. A billions of dollars major adaptation is another beast entirely. The fanfilm Born of Hope from years back did a better job telling an untold story on a minute fraction of this budget (anyone who hasn’t heard or or seen it, try to find it. It tells the story of Aragorn’s parents meeting and is incredible considering the little resources they had).
I really can’t stand gate-keeping in this way. If you don’t enjoy a piece of media, that’s your problem, not mine. I should be able to watch it and decide for myself if it gives me the vibes that made me fall in love with the source material.
My opinion, which I do not care if you agree with or not, is that basically all of the adaptations I’ve seen have something in them to love and cherish. I loved Bakshi’s Hobbit, in particular the music. I loved Jackson’s trilogy. I loved the new Rings of Power show, and I’m excited for the Rohim animated show. The Hobbit trilogy was kind of meh, but still had some cool moments. Most importantly, I am not stressed out by the feeling of “this new medium introduced a change to my understanding of the bigger picture!” — yeah, it’s fiction, it’s legend, it’s lore, it’s malleable.
But maybe I just prefer being a Sorcerer to being a Wizard.
Left untouched by this discussion is a more unpleasant issue–the (largely unspoken) ethos held by some critics that Tolkien (and fantasy in particular) are written by and for white men and thus any modifications to a story must not change that. Advocates of this position use canon as a convenient deflection when they complain that they don’t like seeing the women taking a more active role than Tolkien described, or the presence of non-white characters generally. These canatics (really, racists/mysogynists) are the ones most likely to describe any inconsistency with their perceived canon as “woke.”
These troglodytes make it difficult to have a honest conversations about what canon should be, and they are sure to turn up even if you only wish to express reservations about adaptations of Tolkien’s works apart from canon issues. I honestly have no problem with departing from canon if it serves the storyline (the Fellowship of the Ring, IMO, benefitted greatly from the increased sense of urgency imparted at the beginning–the idea that it took 17 years for Frodo to get going from Bag End may work for a 1000 page novel, but not for a movie), but I have a LOT of issues with Rings of Power involving the fact that time and distances seem to have no meaning, and a lot of the money seems to have gone into cinematography rather than trying to tell an interesting story. Look! Here’s Galadriel on a horse galloping down a beach! And now . . . she’s still galloping! Her hair is flying in slo-mo! And now she’s STILL galloping! But gosh, isn’t this a great shot? Try to discuss those issues, and you will get sneering commentary about how Galadriel’s not supposed to be a fighter, Arondir shouldn’t be black, yada, yada yada.
Um. The omissions in one of the paragraphs from the Letters which you quoted do make quite a difference. Here is the full paragraph:
So his original idea of making a mythology for England which others were free to elaborate on was no longer operative by the time Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings.
When it comes to adaptations, I do not really care about canon in the sense that “everything has to happen precisely as in the books”, but of course I prefer (and I think everyone does) when those changes still align with the spirit of the original material or, at the very least, try to make some narrative sense within the context of the adaptation.
The PJ movies, for example, vastly improve the character of Boromir over the books, but for me they fail Faramir by changing his character and with the whole detour at Osgiliath (Sam saying “by all counts we shouldn’t be here” has been a constant joke among my fellow Tolkienites for obvious reasons). Molly Ostertag’s transmasc gay Frodo and bisexual Sam are obviously not canon in the sense that Frodo was never described as such in the books, but the way she weaves their relationship in the story follows the themes of unwavering bonds and self-sacrifice that are all over the pages of LotR, and they align with the support that Tolkien (in his “old English man” way) gave to his queer acquaintances in real life. Aragorn’s secret diary makes everything a gay sex joke, but it’s still a favourite among fans everywhere. And so on and so forth, adaptations without end.
The reason I dislike RoP is not that it deviates from canon; it’s that to me it seems written by someone with no understanding of geography or people or narrative cohesion, and of course under the legal constraint of not being able to use anything that is written in the Silmarillion or the HoME, which is like trying to produce the Phantom of the Opera but with half of the music sheet missing and most of the words redacted from the book. All it does is make me ask why would you do that.
(Lateral to the article, which seems to use Tolkien as an example of the attitude to canon in all fandoms, several Tolkien fans are also Tolkien scholars and they obsess over canon but with the definition of “things that Tolkien wrote down and we can quote in essays”. If we couldn’t cope with the idea that there is not one single definitive version of the stories of The Silmarillion, we wouldn’t have bought all 12 volumes of the HoME.)