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Can any new information be canon if J.R.R. Tolkien is dead?


J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the stories of the Middle-Earth and he has passed away, so can any new information be added to these stories without his approval?



Answer



No, no new information could be added.



But "canon" in Tolkien is a very difficult matter. He was working on some of the stories for nearly 50 years on and off, and his conception of many elements changed significantly over this period. His son Christopher traces the development and evolution of some of the elements in his massive 12-volume History of Middle-Earth series, but even he doesn't always know exactly how it worked, and several times in a later volume notes that he has discovered something that contradicts what he set out in an earlier one. Often his father wrote contradicting texts at different times on the same piece of paper, sometimes overwriting in pen something completely different he had originally written years earlier in pencil.


This is most evident in the published Silmarillion. This was Christopher's best effort at the time, only a few years after his father's death, to put together a coherent statement of the mythology for publication. As he notes in the introduction to that book, the various elements of the mythology were in quite different states: some of them fully-fleshed out narration, others just outlines. He worked with the fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay to expand some of the more basic ones and finish others.


But just because that book was published as a single finished item doesn't necessarily make it "canon", and Christopher later came to regard his decision to publish in that form as a mistake. Hence the publication of Unfinished Tales and then the HoME series, where he attempts to follow the creative process itself and show extracts from the different and contradicting stages, rather than attempting a "best guess" as he did with the published Silmarillion.


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