Tolkien’s Precious Words and the Rise of Canon Gatekeeping

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

1. 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). ↩︎
2. See The History of the Hobbit by John Rateliff (p. 732). ↩︎
3. See Tolkien On Fairy-stories, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson, “Origins” (pp. 38-49). ↩︎
4. See The History of the Hobbit (pp. 174-182). ↩︎
5. 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. ↩︎
6. See Letter 201 (p. 376). ↩︎
7. See Letters 31 (p. 49) and 137 (p. 245). ↩︎