J.R.R. Tolkien - "No Such Thing As Canon..."

‘Cirdan’ by Alystraea (DeviantArt)

Earlier this month, a statement was made regarding Amazon’s ‘The Rings of Power’ asserting that “there’s no such thing as canon in Tolkien…” by someone who should surely know better considering he styles himself ‘the Tolkien professor’.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the canon of a work of fiction is “the body of works taking place in a particular fictional world that are widely considered to be official or authoritative; [especially] those created by the original author or developer of the world.”

Amazon had bought the rights for ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’, and it is the latter which includes the Appendices.

The show is set in the Second Age, covered in Appendix A, which comprises ‘The Númenorean Kings’, ‘The House of Eorl’, and ‘Durin’s Folk’.

As those books have been published, all that would be considered canon.

Yes, Tolkien continued to think and rethink many of his concepts, and the notes reflecting those thoughts are contained in ‘The History of Middle-earth’ and his letters.

Whether or not he meant for those to be published is neither here nor there.

He entrusted his works to his son, Christopher, who made the decision to go through his father’s notes, put them in order, and publish them because of fans who couldn’t get enough of Tolkien’s work and wanted more.

The point is Amazon do not have the rights to ‘The History of Middle-earth’ or ‘The Silmarillion’, which means they don’t have the rights to Tolkien’s changing concepts.

Quoting renowned Tolkien scholar, Tom Shippey, in an interview given to a German Tolkien fan site when asked about the content that Amazon was allowed to use:
“Amazon has a relatively free hand when it comes to adding something, since… very few details are known about this time span. The Tolkien Estate will insist that the main shape of the Second Age is not altered… But you can add new characters and ask… questions, like… Where was [Sauron] after Morgoth was defeated? Theoretically, Amazon can answer these questions by inventing the answers, since Tolkien did not describe it. But it must not contradict anything that Tolkien did say… It must be canonical, it is impossible to change the boundaries which Tolkien has created, it is necessary to remain ‘tolkienian’.”

In their defence of ‘The Rings of Power’, some will bring up Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, arguing that the films butchered Tolkien’s canon.

While it’s true the order of events and some of the characters’ motivations were changed – the most glaring of all, Faramir – overall, the films stayed true to the themes and tone of the books, and the characters remained recognisable… again, with the exception of Faramir, which is a shame.

Peter Jackson was mindful of staying as true to Tolkien as he could, as he states in this oft-shared interview:
“… in terms of the thematic material, we didn’t want to put any of our own baggage. I mean we had no interest in putting our messages into this movie, but we thought we should honour Tolkien by putting his messages into it, and we thought he cared about things… the countryside and the rise of evil and he cared passionately about certain issues and we thought what we should do to honour him is to make sure that what he cared about ends up in the movie, that’s what we tried to do.”

Using what Tom Shippey said as the benchmark – the films didn’t change the boundaries which Tolkien created, they remained ‘tolkienian’.

In a ‘Vanity Fair’ interview, dated 14th February 2022, one of the showrunners said, “There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to… As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with…”

Making something that purports to be tied to Tolkien’s works, that includes the words ‘The Lord of the Rings’ in its title, should keep within the ‘boundaries which Tolkien has created…’ 

Compressing the timeline, changing the order in which the rings were made, changing character dynamics and their interactions with one another – I’d argue these are on the other side of the boundary Tolkien created.

To then trot out a supposed ‘expert’ to state ‘there’s no such thing as canon in Tolkien’ to legitimise the contents of the show is extremely disrespectful.

I’ll leave the last word to Tolkien himself, the actual professor:
“… Z [Zimmerman] and/or others… may be irritated or aggrieved by the tone of many of my criticisms. If so, I am sorry (though not surprised). But I would ask them 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…
“The canons of narrative art 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…” (Letter #210, written to Forrest J. Ackerman, American magazine editor, science fiction writer, literary agent and actor, in relation to the first proposed film of the ‘The Lord of the Rings’, a project created in 1957 by Ackerman and Morton Grady Zimmerman.)