As part of my between-semesters study, I am reading secondary sources about JRRT’s world. It is easy, at times, in fandom (actually, in life), to place myself within an echo chamber of likeminded folks who share many of the same opinions and ideas that I do. Most of my closest fandom friends self-identify as “canon heretics” (as, by the title of this weble, I clearly do as well); if any of them advocate for strict canonical interpretation, they do it outside of my hearing. Yet slapping each other high fives gets old after a while, so I committed part of my break between semesters to reading those secondary sources that have earned acclaim and respect and, presumably, have ideas that are more “mainstream” than mine.

Top of the list, of course, was The Road to Middle-earth by Tom Shippey. Shippey is considered by many as the Tolkien scholar, and part of his appeal comes from the fact that he, too, is a philologist and even held some of the same academic posts as JRRT. If anyone can illuminate what it means to create a universe and write multiple books from a “philological perspective,” then presumably it would be Shippey.

One of Shippey’s theories regarding the construction of Middle-earth concerns “asterisk reality,” which is termed after the philological convention of using an asterisk to identify words that didn’t come from a source but were constructed based on the philologist’s knowledge of and extrapolation from other words and conventions in the language. Shippey maintains that it is this “asterisk reality”–the unknown that lies between two known points–that so enthralled JRRT. He saw stories in words: how they evolved and changed over time in response to happenings in the larger world. The “asterisk reality” attempts to glean those events from language and that–not the ever-popular “playground theory”–explains how JRRT began with a language and evolved a history for Middle-earth.

Perhaps the best-known example of this comes from the Shibboleth of Fëanor, published as an essay in the tenth volume of the History of Middle-earth series, Morgoth’s Ring. JRRT wished to explain how the Noldor came to replace the thorn (Þ) with the s sound. Before this, he had never conceived of the notion of friction between the sons of Finwë, but in explaining how the s began to be used, he delved the history of the House of Finwë and the tensions surrounding the replacement of one of the sounds used in Míriel Þerindë’s name, tension that became outright animosity between the two eldest princes and, eventually, the conflict between Fëanor and Fingolfin that underlies the entire history of the Noldor and without which it is impossible to imagine The Silmarillion. Between the thorn and the s lay this “asterisk reality” and the construction of a story from philological inquiry.

Now asterisk reality might sound familiar. You have known facts at Point A and Point Z and, between them, an infinite body of unknowns. Known Points A and Z might infer what lies between but it’s certainly nothing near to fact. So we start on a path from A and stop when our feet land upon Z. Shippey’s asterisk reality describes creating a story using philology, but it also describes what we know as “fan fiction” and, more specific than that, “gapfillers.”

So we are, essentially, practitioners of asterisk reality. The discussion of “canon” as it relates to Tolkien-inspired fiction also concerns this asterisk reality, perhaps even more so than the “facts” that bracket it. We all know that Maedhros was hung by his wrist from Thangorodrim; canon debates tend to center on how long he hung there and how he was kept alive and whether it’s possible that Fingon rescued him because they were lovers and not just cousins and friends. But all of these things are asterisk realities, so–however sound our conjecture and the evidence upon which it is based–a single definitive solution is impossible.

In The Road to Middle-earth, Shippey discusses JRRT’s work with early manuscripts in an attempt to demonstrate the existence of an “unconquered” (i.e., not French-influenced) version of the English language in the 12^th century. JRRT’s conclusions about the land in which such works were created and the scribes that penned them involved, at times, “a streak of wishful thinking,” in Shippey’s words. “The ghosts would be gentleman, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them,” Shippey writes before going on to say, “This sentiment may have been misguided: if we really had the ‘lays’ on which Beowulf was based, we might not think much of them, and if we had to deal with the scribes of Ancrene Wisse, we might find them difficult people” (pg. 41).

The notion of “canon,” as defined by the community in which we write, often seems to impose a sterility upon the texts with which we work. Canon is made up of facts, and if it cannot be appended with a clear citation, then it is not “canon.” To allow conjecture to flourish too much by combining “facts” from the text is acceptable to some, but it is not canon, and the prevailing attitude in the Tolkien-writing community is that such liberties demand explanation from the author (usually in the form of volumes of author’s notes), lest her or his conjectures be mistaken as uninformed and treated as such. But add a dose of the author’s “wishful thinking” and, suddenly, we’ve veered over the line for many people. One of the more memorable comments that I’ve ever received accused me of writing Another Man’s Cage for my own pleasure. Well, yes, as an author, shouldn’t I find pleasure in what I am writing? It is a story, a piece of fiction, not an instruction manual for a newfangled doohickey; if you remove my emotions, as the author, from the story, then what is left? “Canon,” I suppose, which amounts to a bare retelling of The Silmarillion or, in the case of AMC, not much at all. Yet I sometimes feel that this is what some Tolkien-writers feel is adherence to canon, with the expectation of apologies from authors who let too much of themselves show in how they work off of bare texts. They haven’t remained “clinical” enough. They’ve erred. They are often accused of allowing their own nefarious whims trump the “intent” that informed what JRRT placed upon the page. To some, this even amounts to insult against the author whose works we all admire, in one way or another.

Yet, as Shippey demonstrated in the quoted passage above, the very author whose intent we are supposed to descry was himself working in a field that not only relied heavily on hypothesis based on small and seemingly unrelated textual “facts” but allowed his own “wishful thinking” to touch upon the conclusions of his work. So, when I am fulfilling his great dream of having other hands and minds complete his stories, then I am supposed to believe that he would have wished me never to allow myself and my own “wishful thinking” to enter into that task? What, then, I would ask, is the purpose of what we do? Surely, the end result does not take us much beyond what JRRT himself accomplished in his lifetime, and I have a hard time believing that his “intent” ever included a wish for his work to stagnate so.

In describing what inspired Tolkien, both as an author and as a philologist, Shippey writes, “One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map …” (38). When I first read that line, I couldn’t help but to think that most of the fans I know who write stories based on JRRT’s books would use very similar words to describe why they do what they do. It is not so much the stories on the page as the unwritten spaces between them; the sense of a deep history behind each character and event, hinted at by JRRT and palpable to us, his readers and fans, that compel us to live part of our lives in Middle-earth. In constructing our stories to bridge the gap between fact, between canon, we rely on informed conjecture, yes, but also a healthy dose of our own wishful thinking, much as JRRT himself has done.

The answer to that question is simple: JRRT doesn’t. At least, not in any of the books published during his lifetime or posthumously to this point.

The issue is a larger one. That this question comes up at least every year is indicative of its importance. This is a major event and a popular one to write about. Surely JRRT told us something about it! It is the fanfic writer’s instinct, when confronted with the desire to write about a particular event, to go to the texts for answers. But when there are no answers to be had …

What next?

My short answer was, and is: Use your imagination. Take what you know from the texts and how you personally interpret the texts and make something up. Yet I think that our perception of our relationship with the texts and of the texts to our stories sometimes makes this easier said than done. There is the uncomfortable feeling that one should not simply make up details about an event of such importance. Surely the answers lie in the texts somewhere, to the writer savvy enough to know where to look and know how to put the clues together!

I remember when I wrote Another Man’s Cage, my first reaction to posting that story was to label it as alternate universe (AU). The first reaction of many of my readers was to suggest that I do the same. To use a somewhat odd metaphor, imagine that I hold a rock, and that is my story. The big barnside is the text on which I am writing. If I peg the rock at the side of the barn, and it lands off in the tall weeds somewhere well away from and out of sight of the barn, then that is how scantily AMC was related to anything concrete in the texts. The texts shaped the direction of the story, but the story was quite independent of the texts after that initial toss.

I’ve already discussed at length elsewhere that this is not the same thing as AU. Yet that still does remove all of the squirmy discomfort that, in lobbing stones at barns, where those stones land might still be somehow wrong.

I do think, in writing Tolkien-based stories, that a lot of times we get hung up on questions of canon when the question should be writing: How to create an engaging and internally consistent story from one’s own head. Take the Maedhros-on-Thangorodrim example: JRRT gives us little help. Few events get such varied treatment in stories. I’ve seen,

• Morgoth sending a minion or going himself to force-feed Maedhros;
• Morgoth sustaining Maedhros unnaturally using “magic” (think Húrin);
• Maedhros only hanging for days or weeks, not years, because his story was exaggerated by loremasters and bards looking to tell a good story, so the how of survival isn’t even an issue;
• Maedhros surviving because, as an Elf recently arrived from the Blessed Realm, he had the endurance to do so; and
• Maedhros surviving on bugs and rainwater and determination until he’s rescued.

None of these are right; none are wrong. Each writer can provide his or her own facts from the texts to justify one interpretation over the other, and we’re no closer to an answer than we were at the start.

I love analyzing and discussing canon. I love taking the details used to arrive at each of the above interpretations and evaluating the relative worth of each, combining and recombining and questioning them, but at the end of the day, discussing “canon” about such questions with hopes of arriving at definitive answers to be applied to stories is pointless. It’s like arguing about whether Mexican, Thai, or Indian is the superior type of food. Each person can make her or his argument, but in the end, it really is a matter of taste.

On my list of things that I wish the Tolkien fandom would just get: stop turning such questions into questions of canon. Turn them into questions of writing. Accept that we will still be arguing about this twenty years from now, and–barring the publication or discovery of some textual evidence for the validity of one interpretation over another–we will still be no closer to an answer. What matters, at the end of the debate, isn’t what JRRT said or didn’t say, but how we present our stories, make them compelling, and make them work within our own visions of this world in which we play.

However, I think that anyone whose seen a couple of these go-arounds knows that such discussions tend to deteriorate into a squabbling over which set of facts is better put together than another. The question of how a writer uses her or his freedom to weave a compelling story around a major event where we have little help from the original author is never addressed; at least, I’ve never seen it. But that, I think, would be a productive conversation to have.