All thoughts and opinions are welcome. The only rule I have for this place is that I ask that people remain civil to each other. It is one thing to disagree with a point or idea and quite another to attack a the person expressing it. The first is okay; the second is not.

Finally, although this is a continuation of the LotR Genfic discussion, and although I am the webmaster of the Many Paths to Tread archive, my website is affiliated with neither, and this discussion is occurring independently of the list on which it originated. So, if you find yourself annoyed or angered by the conversation here, please don’t take it out on either of those groups.

My door, however, is always open to questions or concerns at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

For those of you on the LotR Genfic list, you can find the original discussion thread here.

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.

Douglas Charles Kane’s Arda Reconstructed is an attempt to take those published sources and answer some of these questions. Kane painstakingly, word for word, traces each line of The Silmarillion and locates from where in JRRT’s early writings it came. When first I’d heard of Arda Reconstructed from a fellow fan, I was over the moon. I had attempted this on my own as part of research projects before, and it is not an easy task. To have a book providing at least a starting point for this sort of research would make my own forays into Tolkien’s legendarium that much easier. However, I also operated under the assumption that the results of such a study would make for rather dry reading and would stand primarily as a reference, to be opened at need and otherwise unread.

I was wrong on the latter as well. Kane’s research reveals several interesting trends as far as the construction of The Silmarillion is concerned. Several of them hit my own buttons as a researcher and fan-writer.

During a discussion of Arda Reconstructed on the SWG mailing list, the most frequently asked question was, “Exactly what is this book?” I feel like the book has two important components. Firstly are the charts–one per chapter with the exception of the chapters where CT has already provided a similar breakdown of sources as part of the HoMe series–that detail the sources of each line of The Silmarillion. At times, CT (and Guy Kay) took whole swaths of JRRT’s original sources and plunked them, nearly verbatim, into the published Silmarillion. At other times, they created a patchwork from numerous sources by cutting and pasting in ways that are dizzying to behold. These charts show this and, for me, these alone are worth the price of the book. I don’t even want to imagine the combined number of hours spent on such sleuthing. I’m just glad that, now, I don’t have to do it.

The second component of the book is the author’s commentary, which is largely based on observations made while, presumably, compiling the charts. Here, the book gets interesting and here, also, the book will prove problematic for some. The saying goes that if you put two Tolkien fans together, you will end up with three opinions, and Kane is not shy about expressing his, which I’m sure will imperil him in the minds of others in the community. But so it goes.

He traces several trends that occurred during the compilation of The Silmarillion that I found particularly interesting because, as noted, they relate directly to research interests and “canon” interpretations of mine. Firstly is the diminishment of female characters during the compilation of the published Silmarillion. I’ve already heard this idea poo-pooed: They were minor characters to start and were cut as part of a general goal of downplaying minor characters. Only this isn’t what Kane’s evidence shows. Nearly all of the women of Aman, for example, had at least one detail removed by CT and Guy Kay, seemingly without reason. Other roles were eviscerated, shoving female characters into the background when, according to Kane’s research, it seemed that JRRT intended them to maintain more prominent roles, often illustrative of some of the philosophical ideas that the “Silmarillion” was meant to include.

Míriel Serindë is one such character. With the total elimination of “The Story of Finwë and Míriel,” not only is Míriel moved to the margins of the story, but the philosophical and cultural concepts that she was meant to illustrate are lost as well. Ungoliant undergoes a diminishment that greatly reduces her complexity: the complexity of character that JRRT achieved in very few words being one of the truly notable aspects of the “Silmarillion.” Nerdanel is reduced from a strong and independent woman to one who, as I illustrated in my essay A Woman in Few Words, receives only four mentions in the text, all of which concern her status as a wife and mother. JRRT’s original material on her character, as my essay also illustrates, shows her importance beyond her relationship to important males.

Still other female characters–like Andreth and Nellas–were eliminated from the published story altogether, despite evidence in the published sources that JRRT meant to include them.

Also taken from the published Silmarillion are all references to the mythological sources of the stories being presented. Again, this is an argument that I have been making for years, largely in the context of fan-writings and the attempt to establish an absolute “canon” regarding events and characterizations. My point has always been that this is complicated–even rendered impossible–by the fact that JRRT framed his stories as tales told not by himself as an omniscient and omnipresent narrator but by sources that either lived through the events being described (as in Pengolodh’s depiction of the fall of Gondolin) or received information from other sources (as in Rúmil’s construction of the Ainulindalë based on what he was taught by the Valar). That this was JRRT’s intent is hard to argue against, even though I am generally averse to assigning “authorial intent” to any of the posthumous published works. From The Book of Lost Tales on through the final written sources, JRRT often directly ascribed a source of the tales he was telling or information he was presenting. Some of his later ideas–such as the attempt to integrate a round, heliocentric world with his existing mythology–directly rely on this framework. Yet this information is completely missing from the published Silmarillion. Where did it go and why?

Kane makes a compelling argument that, in an effort to achieve consistency, CT eliminated these attributions because they themselves presented inconsistencies. JRRT ascribed tales as being passed through two lines: from the Elves on Tol Eressëa to the mortal mariner Ælfwine, or from the Elves via the escaped Númenóreans. Kane suggests the CT thought it should be one or the other but not both–that having both would introduce inconsistency into the story–and so struck them altogether. Kane regrets this choice, and I agree. As a reader, it adds the illusion of historical depth and context that the published Silmarillion lacks. As a fan-writer, I wonder, if these attributions had been made clearer, would we see a greater allowance for imagination and invention in Tolkien-based fanworks? It would be more difficult to argue something from The Silmarillion as inarguable fact with a living, breathing narrator easily perceived just on the other side of it.

Kane makes a third intriguing point: the complexity of characters presented in The Silmarillion. The characters in all their shades of gray are what first seized my imagination about the book over even LotR, which is much more prone to dualism where its characters are concerned. “Silmarillion” characters, though, have always defied such easy classification. Just ask a room full of Tolkien fans whether Fëanor or Maeglin or Manwë are good guys or bad guys and observe the variety of responses that you get.

Yet Kane demonstrates a tendency of CT, during the assembly of the published Silmarillion, to edit the texts in such ways that characters are greatly reduced in complexity. Ungoliant has been mentioned; Melkor receives similar treatment. Fëanor and his sons are deprived moments that show them more sympathetically. Manwë’s tendency to look like an ignorant buffoon is not present in the source texts, but many readers walk away from The Silmarillion with this impression–I certainly did. Kane doesn’t suggest this, but I wonder if these changes were aimed at satisfying the notions of really evil villains and really fabulous heroes that seem present in many of the epics on which The Silmarillion is patterned. Garnering sympathy for the bad guys is a relatively new phenomenon and still not one that is universally liked, especially among fantasy fans. Perhaps CT felt that taking the book in this direction would be keeping truer to the epic form and make it appealing to the same fans who adored LotR.

Without having researched any of Kane’s claims for myself, I come away from Arda Reconstructed with just one major complaint. Arda Reconstructed uses only the published source texts–The History of Middle-earth, Unfinished Tales, and so on–which is advantageous in that it allows any reader to reconstruct Kane’s work (Arda Reconstructed Reconstructed?) but is also limiting as far as drawing conclusions about the correctness of CT’s decisions in putting together The Silmarillion.

Kane acknowledges this up front in the book:

It is possible, even likely, that som eof hte changes, omissions, and additions that I describe reflect textual material not included (for whatever reason) in those works, or some other source only available to Christopher (including, perhaps, personal conversations taht he had with his father). (pg. 25)

However, as the analysis proceeds, the reality of the methodological limits of the book sometimes seems to fall by the wayside in favor of expressing a strong, certain opinion about how The Silmarillion was created. On the one hand, I understand this desire. Few are the Silmarillion fans who don’t maintain a least one negative opinion as far as CT’s choices go. At the same time, one of the quips I hear uttered at times by Silmarillion fans is, “I could have done a better job of putting together The Silmarillion than Christopher Tolkien did,” and this unfailing makes me grit my teeth because, no, chances are that if just about anyone besides CT had attempted to create The Silmarillion, we would have an inferior book. I think that–given the time and effort put into it–the “mistakes” in the published text illustrate the enormity of the task more so than any shortcomings CT possessed.

Kane doesn’t go so far as this, obviously; in fact, he speaks in gratitude for CT’s role in bringing JRRT’s posthumous writings to fans and also points out the special relationship between them that made CT the ideal choice for compiling his father’s writings. But even with all of this, I don’t feel as though his conclusions are qualified enough in terms of their shortcomings. For example, when he discusses the diminishment of women in the published Silmarillion, he is often quick to place the responsibility for this onto CT’s shoulders, identifying these changes as wrong or, at best, puzzling. For example, in discussing the removal of the detail that Nerdanel, as well as Fëanor, learned metalsmithing from Mahtan, Kane remarks, “This is one of the most blatant examples of how Christopher’s changes appear to weaken an important female character” (pg. 80). And, true, the changes are puzzling, but the reason doesn’t necessarily lie in any choice that CT made. That is a spurious conclusion to draw based solely on the fact that the published material does not immediately illuminate the reason behind such changes.

In fact, another secondary work about J.R.R. Tolkien underscores the perils of drawing such conclusions. Shortly after finishing Arda Reconstructed, I found a copy of Paul H. Kocher’s Master of Middle-earth at the library. Master of Middle-earth was published in 1972, five years before The Silmarillion, so nearly everything about the Elder Days was left to piecing together details from LotR and The Hobbit or pure speculation. Even after the publication of The Silmarillion, The History of Middle-earth, and the other supplementary texts, I was often amazed at how on-target Kocher was in his speculations about the Elder Days. Yet, at times, he was also dreadfully off-base. For example, he writes,

If the navigable sea has any such boundaries Middle-earth cannot be a rounded sphere as we now conceive Earth. In the imrama tales this point posed no dificult to the wonder-oriented Celtic mind of the Dark Ages, which popularly accepted the world as bounded and flat anyway, or, when it did not, was quite willing to forget roundness under the spell of a good story. But is such a prescientific cosmology intended by Tolkien for Middle-earth? He never discusses the question explicitly one way or the other. He leaves us to survey the text of the epic and its Appendices for ourselves. Quite possibly he considers the question to be of no real importance to the story, and so is indifferent whether it is raised or not. (pgs. 12-13)

Never explicitly discussed? Of no real importance? Indifferent?? With access to the texts we have now, we know to be as wrong-headed as Kocher’s assertion that Idril must have become a mortal because she married one. The question of how to integrate scientific reality–so important to the underlying philosophy of “subcreation” that JRRT used in his stories–with the primitive but beautiful myths he had constructed actually pre-occupied JRRT quite a bit at the end of his life, and he’d even begun changing some of his writings to reflect a round, heliocentric world. My point isn’t to berate Kocher for not having read texts that weren’t even close to publication when he wrote his otherwise insightful book about JRRT’s mythology. My point is that the sources that build all of JRRT’s works are unbelievably complex, and even after the publication of The Silmarillion and more than a dozen texts to support it, there are still troves of unpublished notes and documents to which most of us don’t have access. And this is to say nothing–as Kane himself admits–of conversations between JRRT and CT to which even the most devoted researcher will never have access.

It may well be that CT is a misogynist intentionally bent on diminishing the roles of prominent women; it may be that he possesses a less nefarious (but no less harmful) bias that caused him to choose certain details over others when editing the book to a reasonable length; it may well be that he simply made some unfortunate changes in the interest of slimming and simplifying the text that gives that impression. Or it may be that there is somewhere a scribbled note indicating that Nerdanel should not have learned her father’s art. Or it may be that JRRT expressed to CT his uncertainty about the direction Ungoliant’s character was heading. It may be that we will never know, or that what seems a “trend” is really no more than an unfortunate coincidence, and the label of “misogynist” is too dire, in my mind, to attach to a person without full proof of malevolence or ignorance underlying his decisions.

And this, I think is the major shortcoming of Arda Reconstructed. If CT’s theoretical intellectual heir publishes another twelve volumes of the History of Middle-earth illustrating why CT made the changes that he did, then Kane’s book will become as much of an anachronism as Kocher’s: useful in some regards but generally unreliable for its opinions that fail to account for texts and information that it knows exists but cannot access and the possibility that such information will fundamentally alter one’s conclusions. It is not that those opinions should not be expressed. To the contrary, I suspect that Kane’s conclusions will make for some wonderful discussion and debate in the fan community. But I think the book should have done more to remind readers of the limitations posed by its methods and should have taken more care in assigning responsibility for choices with which the author did not agree.

So should you buy the book? Its price tag was a little wince-worthy on my starving student’s budget but, yes, it is worth every penny. As a researcher, I cannot be anything but grateful to Kane and relieved at not having to compile the information that he makes available in tidy tabular format in this book. The tables alone are worth the price of the book and, I suspect, will be well-thumbed in the years to come. The discussion is lively and moves surprisingly fast, given the density of the material that Kane covers. Aside from my misgivings about his certitude at points, he brings to light interesting trends that I think are worth considering and discussing, even if we never reach any definite conclusions.

As a fan-writer, too, Kane’s work if anything demonstrates the frailty of what we fans often identify as “canon”: that notion that there exist facts in JRRT’s writings that can unequivocally be determined as “right” or “wrong.” Several of my fellow fan-writers raised the question of how Kane’s work will change how fiction based on JRRT’s writings is perceived. Pie-eyed optimistic heretic that I am, I believe that Arda Reconstructed defends a less stringent notion of canon. It is a firm reminder of the state of flux in which many of JRRT’s writings were at the time of his death. While any single fan can take a work or works and pin it down as “This is truth to me”–as many do with the published Silmarillion–that really cannot be defended beyond personal preference, and Arda Reconstructed illustrates why.

I give Arda Reconstructed 3.5 Keebler E.L. Fudge “Elves Exist” cookies out of four.

(I should add that this list is relevant to the Silmarillion fandom, perhaps the broader Tolkien fandom in places, but they are hardly representative of Fandom as a Whole, if there is any such thing, and they are not meant to be.)

5. AU. Short for alternate universe, this term isn’t bad if it’s used for what it is meant to represent: stories that are set in an actual alternate universe. This term’s shortcoming comes from the way that its definition has been distorted unto meaninglessness by confusing unpopular interpretation with distortion of the canon. I’ve discussed this elsewhere, so I won’t say much more here except to note that it is unfortunate that a term intended to delineate a distinct, legitimate genre has instead become an aspersion and used to attempt to shame authors into a mainstream, fanonical, and crowd-approved interpretation of JRRT’s texts.

4. OOC. Short for “out of character,” I’ve seen this used as a warning, as a form of AU (i.e., “Warning: I’ve made Maedhros really mean and OOC!”), but most often as a criticism of stories where the reader feels the author strays too far outside the bounds of believability.

But, in Silmfic, “OOC” is almost meaningless.

We recently had this discussion on the SWG list. As I pointed out in my post, even the most written-about characters are barely mentioned in the text; for example, Maedhros–who commands an impressive 22% of stories on the SWG archive–is mentioned only eighty-eight times in The Silmarillion. This isn’t a whole lot to go on.

Silmarillion characters, by and large, are not characters at all. They are archetypes; they are familiar faces throughout literature, here, being used to illustrate broad points about an imagined history. While a perceptive reader can and will detect complexity in these characters, this is more often derived from implication than anything explicit that JRRT has done in terms of characterization. For example, Fëanor is widely regarded as a complex character. What The Silmarillion actually says about Fëanor, though, is anything but shades of gray: He is depicted negatively, representing the worst qualities of pride and arrogance; he is the quintessential fallen character who serves a broader purpose as a vehicle for expressing ideas about possessiveness, pride, and obedience to authority.

These are Fëanor’s canonical traits: He’s a proud jerk. Readers, though, see complexity in his relationships with his family, people, and the Valar. They read between the lines to determine that he was not always such a negative character; that his negative traits evolved from what was done to him rather than from core character flaws.

Most of Tolkien’s Silmarillion characters are this way. They have a handful of defining traits and not much else. It is possible to see much more implied in the story, but this is largely conjecture and interpretation and can hardly be called “canon.” So what of OOC?

OOC, I think, is a completely irrelevant label in Silmfic 99% of the time that it is slung against a story or author. “Keeping to canon” in terms of characterization is limited to understanding the roles that a character plays in the broader framework of the story and not much else. In other words, understanding Fëanor the symbol/archetype requires that he maintain certain traits in order to function in the same way in fan-authored stories as he does in the texts. Making him a meek and pie-eyed boot-licker of the Valar is likely to irrevocably change his character’s function in the story*. Making him chronically anxious or empathetic or a great teacher or a loving father … not OOC. Those things can all coexist alongside his necessary role as the proud jerk to create a portrait of Fëanor the man (not Fëanor the symbol/archetype). As authors, moving characters beyond their roles as symbols or archetypes is usually a good idea.

In Silmfic, OOC is rarely a legitimate critique. More often than not, it is wielded against those stories that do not conform to the reader’s personal interpretation of a character. For example, Another Man’s Cage was once deemed “OOC” by a reader because Fëanor hugged his kids. This particular reader–who clearly wasn’t inclined to see characters rounded beyond those few key traits JRRT gives us–couldn’t see how one as “evil” as Fëanor could ever do something so sweet and cutesy as hugging his kids.

There is absolutely nothing in the texts to support this idea. There isn’t, of course, anything in the texts that definitively states that Fëanor did hug his kids either. Which left that reader and me at an impasse, neither of us wrong but neither of us right either, hurling textual facts at each other that proved nothing definitive.

Slathering “OOC” onto any interpretation which one does not agree is not the solution.

* I would not be me if I did not mention that one can actually justify some of these “OOC” 180-from-the-texts depictions by remembering that The Silmarillion was written as fictional myth or history, with all the thorny issues of finding “truth” in myth or history present here as well. This takes more convincing in a story, I think, but is not outside the realm of possibility.

3. Mary Sue. “Mary Sue” is another one of those terms that has lost its meaning. When I first joined the Tolkien fandom, Mary Sue was usually defined as “ya know her when ya see her.” As I did more and more reading, Mary Sue came to be a character with flawed characterization: Instead of being possessed of all the round, complex traits that we know we should invest our characters with, she was flat and unequivocally Good. Because she represented the author, of course, and the author was simply acting out a fantasy.

Later, Mary Sue was redefined for me as an actor that warped the plot or the other characters. The problem with her wasn’t her flat characterization but the way that she had of hijacking canonical plotlines or skewing canon characters into “OOCness” (see the gripe above this one), i.e. making Frodo’s choice to take the Ring to Mordor not an act of self-sacrifice but because he was enamored of her, and she was going along with the Fellowship because she and Legolas could not be parted from each other. She could be the most believable female character in the world, but her exertion on the storyline and her fellow characters (as understood in the canon) was too strong.

Naturally, “Mary Sue” is not the only fannish term to have different definitions depending on who you ask. (Just ask a few people what “PWP” stands for …) That’s not my problem with the term.

The concept of “Mary Sue” is often itself misogynist. Like “AU” and “OOC,” it often becomes a criticism broadened to include any story with an original female character. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it suggests that there is something wrong with giving the spotlight–or even part of it–to a woman. One of my major critiques against JRRT’s writings is that they are an old boys’ club. Yes, he did better than many–even most–male fantasists, but his stories are still about males shaping their world to suit their vision. It’s called the Fellowship of the Ring for a reason. There is also a reason why even gender-conscious fans do not blink at the term “Men” being used to refer to mortal human beings of both genders: Because mortal women in JRRT’s writings so rarely give us reason to apply it to them that we don’t usually get the chance to notice the sheer wrongness of a sentence like, “Haleth was a Man who led her people to victory.”

One of the major positive functions of Tolkien-based fiction (aside from its value as entertainment or personal fulfillment or as a fun community-building hobby) is that authors can give voices to the unnamed, unvoiced women in the stories and begin to correct the gender imbalance in JRRT’s works. Pinning a derogatory label on the front of every female character who does not appear on the short list with which we have to work in “canon” is one way of further stifling creativity in this regard.

Secondly, the oft-mouthed definition of Mary Sue as a (female) character who is “too perfect” is problematic. What does that mean? That a woman can’t be beautiful, smart, and charming? (I do not believe that. I know some.) Characters that are “too perfect” appear throughout JRRT’s writings. They are both male and female. Critiquing a character as not relatable because of his/her unreal perfection is fair game. Claiming that, as a whole, female characters that are “too perfect” can’t function in a story is sexist. Despite the existence of terms like “Gary Stu” and “Marty Stu,” I’ve never actually seen these terms applied to a story. The message I come away with is that “perfect” women (read: strong, beautiful, assertive, charismatic) are problematic. The same traits in a guy are Finrod.

Thirdly, the accusation of “Mary Sue” is most often made against those characters appearing in stories authored by young women. They are problematic (it is said) because they are shameless self-inserts and represent a female fantasy and nothing else.

And what, pray tell, is wrong with that?

It seems to me that male-authored literature and media is full of self-inserts that represent male fantasies. How many skinny nerds become superheroes or martial arts masters or secret agents charged with saving the world? How many of them get ripped and get the girl? How many adolescent males authoring fan fiction do you think make their male self-inserts well-rounded characters? And how much critique do you think these young men get when they fail to do so?

We not only critique young women; we made up a whole term to point out their literary sins!

No, “Mary Sue” has to go. Not only is it being applied too broadly to exclude female characters in general, but it is being used to devalue the writings and fantasies of young women. It asks, why should they be writing about themselves as an equal, as a Tenth Walker, when they could just pick one of the boys that JRRT gave them to write about?

2. Slash. As I’m writing this, I’m sensing a trend in my loathing of most of these terms: once-accurate (and largely neutral) terms become pejorative and are broadly applied to anything that even vaguely resembles what the term was invented to actually define. Or: if it quacks like a duck, that means it must be a duck, even if it’s really a goose, my dogs’ honking stuffed duck toy, or my crazy uncle dressed like a duck on Halloween.

Slash, as I understand it, was a term originally coined for stories with a prominent same-sex non-canonical consummated pairing. Despite the awful-sounding name, it really was meant to be neutral: “Slash” referred to the literal slash between the characters’ names when indicating the pairing, i.e. Maedhros/Fingon, Aragorn/Legolas, Kirk/Spock. It was a distinct subgenre of fiction that represented the author’s purpose in writing the story–to present sexually a non-canonical homosexual (usually male) couple–and not to act as an indication of non-sexual content.

These days, though, I get the impression that “slash” has come to mean “anything gay.” If your characters just happen to be gay and just happen to have an off-screen and completely non-sexual same-sex pairing, then that is slash. If I want to look at the social issues that might have been present in Gondolin if Ecthelion and Glorfindel really were a couple, even if I never venture beyond the council rooms and parlors of the city to look at their personal/romantic lives, even if they never kiss, then a certain subset of readers will expect me to label that story as slash. It’s not remotely incestuous; it doesn’t “violate canon” in any way, but it depicts gay characters, so people need and deserve a warning.

Among my friends who write mostly same-sex pairings, there is lately a revolt against the term. They don’t like it, and I don’t blame them. Broadly defined as it is, it becomes a way of enforcing homophobia. Readers who don’t like slash often use sexual explicitness as the reason for that. They’ll often affirm, in the same breath, to dislike graphic het stories too. The difference is that a lot of these readers won’t blink at a story that mentions Maglor’s extra-canonical marriage but will pitch a fit if Glorfindel and Ecthelion have an extra-canonical off-screen romance. That’s homophobia, folks. Allowing homophobic people to avoid that truth by aiding them in sweeping anything “gay” under the same label as “gay sex” is wrong.

1. Canon. Tolkien’s stories are full of mythical entities. A coherent canon is one of them.

If one defines “canon” as basically the same as “inarguable facts” (implying that the writer cannot deviate from them without making a mistake or writing an AU), then there are precious few of those in JRRT’s writings.

That is not the problem. That is, in my heretic’s estimation, what makes JRRT’s writings such a fruitful playground for my own creative endeavors and why, I suspect, unlike many other fandoms, one doesn’t see too much migration of Tolkien fans.

The problem is that discussions of canon often begin with the belief that it is possible–with enough study of the texts–to find out answers, “what really happened” in the stories. That it is possible to grade most scenarios, tidily, as right or wrong in terms of canon. That “canon-compliant” and “AU” do not occur on a continuum.

I’ve already made the argument elsewhere that precious little truly counts as canon. Few of the “facts” presented in the stories can’t be challenged in some way. I’ve argued yet elsewhere that where people are hung up on questions of canon, they need to be asking questions about stories and writing. I stick by those beliefs and, in my perfect fannish world, would no longer see discussions of canon framed as finding right or wrong answers but as looking at myriad possibilities with the goal of creating a thoughtful or entertaining story.

So … what terms would you strike from the fannish lexicon?

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.

When I first started studying Tolkien’s works and writing stories based on them, I had this idea that, as I studied more, I’d move closer to being able to define canon definitively; that is, to produce a final and unequivocal judgment on how things really went down. Instead, I’ve found that the opposite has happened. Pandemonium remarked the same in the comments on Take Pity upon Him: “As I’ve examined JRRT’s work, canon becomes more and more nebulous to me.” Yet, at the same time, I feel better equipped now than I did four years ago to analyze what JRRT wrote in terms of “canon,” even if–at the end of my study–I don’t end up with any answers at all.

Sometimes, I think that we discuss canon and how to define it without really differentiating the ways that authors use JRRT’s writings to form judgments on their relative truth. This leads to arguments where something that is clear fact to one author, debatable to another, and false to a third, and all three fans are trying to prove each other wrong without considering whether they might all be right. I don’t think that canon can be so neatly summed up as “is” or “is not”; it occurs on a continuum, and different people will draw the line between “canon” and “not canon” in different places–even multiple places–along that continuum. I am going to attempt to summarize some common ways–complete with made-up terms!–that I think authors put together information from the texts to develop their definitions of canon.

Defining Canon

Canon. “Canon is synonymous with fact. It is not arguable. An author who violates this canon unintentionally has made a mistake; an author who violates this canon intentionally has written an AU.

Precious little from JRRT’s texts are canon by this definition. That which qualifies tends to be basic facts that would either be difficult/impossible to distort or lie about (such as the date of a major battle in which a literate culture particpated) or which are so frivolous that no one would logically have motivation to lie about them. Hair color, if definitively stated, is one such detail, perhaps ironically since this fandom is prone to fights over characters’ hair colors. But if Fëanor’s hair color is stated definitively to be black (The Silmarillion, “Of Fëanor,” §6), why would a loremaster or historian have reason to lie about this? Geographical details, dates, and physical descriptions all tend to fall into this category … in other words, mostly boring stuff.

Personal canon. Personal canon is an individual author’s appraisal of what parts of the texts are “fact” and employs any or all of the analyses discussed below and then some. For example, some authors have determined from reading the HoMe that JRRT’s final word on Gil-galad’s parentage puts Orodreth as his father. For these authors, Orodreth as Gil-galad’s father is personal canon; it is not an indisputable fact and so not simply canon, but it is a detail in the texts that these authors have analyzed and found to be true. For other authors, their personal canon is that Fingon was Gil-galad’s father.

It is important to point out that personal canon must come from the text (i.e., is not paracanonical or extracanonical) and is different from personal verse.

Personal verse. Personal verse is the sum total of all that an author believes to be true about the world in which she or he writes. It involves facts from the text (personal canon), as well as facts that the author develops based on and independent of the texts (paracanon, extracanon et al; see below).

For example, a personal verse might use the personal canon that Orodreth was Gil-galad’s father. It might also operate on the idea that Maedhros and Fingon were lovers and that confusion about Gil-galad’s paternity arose because historians associated with the House of Fingolfin were encouraged to conceal Fingon’s homosexuality and so distorted facts when they thought they could get away with it so that it appeared that Fingon had a wife and fathered a child.

Paracanon. In my original comment to Rhapsody about this, I called this extra-canonical. I’ve reassessed this term and think that paracanonical describes better what I mean, but to keep things as confusing as possible, I am using extracanonical elsewhere for something different. Paracanon is arrived at by putting together facts from one’s personal canon and drawing conclusions based on those facts. Likewise, paracanon cannot conflict with other facts in one’s personal canon.

The important aspect of paracanon is that the conclusions are fact-based. They are not merely whims or inventions. The author has analyzed a body of facts from the text and has, from this analysis, developed a personal canon. In putting those facts together, certain conclusions can sensibly be drawn. This is paracanon.

Naturally, for every dozen authors, you will end up with a dozen paracanons!

The Maedhros/Fingon pairing is a paracanon. Any fan of this pairing can tick off a dozen personal canon facts that makes this pairing, for them, a logical interpretation based on these facts. The pairing comes from putting those facts together and deciding that romantic involvement between the characters is the preferred conclusion to draw from those facts.

At the same time, other authors will put together personal canon facts to develop the paracanon that Maedhros and Fingon remained close (platonic) friends throughout their entire lives. Both paracanons are justified with JRRT’s texts and don’t involve any invention on the author’s part.

Some authors will necessarily “stretch” further than other authors in developing paracanons. However, the mechanism is the same.

Extracanon. Extracanon develops ideas outside of but in accordance with the texts. In other words, extracanonical facts in an author’s personal verse do not have any strong basis in the texts. Neither do they directly contradict the texts that an author uses in his or her personal canon.

Original characters are perhaps the best and most common example of extracanon. Their presence does not contradict the texts in most cases, but the texts don’t give us any information about them either.

Pandemonium’s The Apprentice is a good example of extracanon being used in this fashion. Sámaril is not a canon character. But neither does his existence as an apprentice in the Gwaith-i-Mirdain defy canon in any way.

Other extracanons place canon characters in settings other than what JRRT described. Erestor gets a lot of extracanonical treatment. He frequently ends up in Gondolin; in my By the Light of Roses, he ends up in Formenos. There is no canon support for either of these ideas. Neither does canon dispute them, however.

Making Fëanor a chronic nail-biter or Túrin’s favorite color black or Amarië the daughter of an important Vanyarin scribe are all extracanonical.

As with paracanon, different authors will have different comfort levels when it comes to how far they’re willing to go in inventing extracanonical details.

Pericanon. Pericanon analyzes and interprets the texts using concepts from psychology, mythology, sociology, science, and other “real world” disciplines. Because JRRT intended his stories to serve as a history or mythology for our world, and Arda corresponds with our solar system, then much of what we understand about our world can also be applied to Arda and, thus, becomes a sort of canon.

Authors using pericanon might use it to choose one text over another for their personal canons (such as using the more scientifically accurate ideas from Myths Transformed in describing how Arda operated outside a mythological framework) or add extracanonical details (such choosing to have Maedhros threaten to kill Elrond and Elros based on his psychological state at the time).

My assertion that homosexuality is canon is based on pericanon: If Elves and Men are human (in JRRT’s own words [Letter 153]), and homosexuality is normal behavior among humans, then lacking anything in the texts that makes an exception for Elves and Men, homosexuality would have occurred in their populations as well.

Pretty much everything Pandemonium writes uses pericanon to develop and explain not only the science of Arda but its cultures. My Another Man’s Cage uses pericanon in that I was often informed by psychology in how I developed the characters extracanonically.

I should note that pericanon uses our understanding of our world to enhance existing information from the texts, not to challenge or contradict them. To challenge the texts requires …

Historiocanon. Historiocanon is the process by which some authors challenge the texts and develop interpretations that do not take the texts at face value. Historiocanon justifies deviating from the texts where historiographical analysis causes concern about authorial bias or inaccuracy.

Pericanon can influence historiocanon when our understanding of how the world works calls us to question the accuracy of the texts. JRRT acknowledges this himself in Myths Transformed (HoMe XII) when he expresses doubt that readers would believe that scientifically sophisticated cultures (like the Eldar) would believe primitive and implausible cosmogonical myths.

Historiocanon is based on an understanding of Arda as our own solar system and, also, the JRRT’s texts as an ancient history/mythology of our own world and so subject to historical analysis. Historiocanon can hinge on the following (please note that this is an incomplete list):

• the narrator possesses bias (such as Pengolodh’s vilification of the Fëanorians in light of his service to Turgon, who was opposed to them)
• the narrator is relying on hearsay or could not possess accurate knowledge about the subject (such as Pengolodh writing about Fëanor’s death, which occurred before he was born, or about Lúthien’s plea to Mandos, during which none from Middle-earth were present)
• knowledge of how the world works makes the event as reported impossible (such as Maedhros hanging on Thangorodrim for fifty years)

Pandemonium’s Risk Assessment uses historiocanon to offer alternate explanations about lembas. My An Ordinary Woman uses historiocanon to argue that Lúthien’s exceptionality in, well, everything was more a case of hero worship and wishful thinking by her people than truth.

Pericanon and historiocanon are both, of course, personal canons as well: They require accepting Arda as our own solar system and a world subject to many of the same natural laws. Historiocanon also requires accepting as personal canon that the texts are historical or mythological accounts and can be analyzed using historiography. I think it makes sense, then, that these forms of canon will be the most controversial in terms of concept alone (not individual use) and won’t be used by everyone. However, they are valid ways to develop interpretations of canon.

Alternate universe. By definition, alternate universe (AU) requires the deliberate changing of a canon detail to affect the outcome of a story. Juno Magic’s Lothíriel is an AU because it adds a tenth walker to the Fellowship. My For What I Wait is AU because it is based on the premise that Fëanor outlived all of his children.

Both of these stories change canon facts. There were nine members of the Fellowship; it is hard to argue–though perhaps not impossible–that a tenth would have been completely overlooked by the many people who observed or were involved with the Fellowship. That Fëanor died shortly after the Battle-under-stars is another fact that would be extremely difficult to argue against. The AU aspects of both stories are not justifiable using any of the above-discussed canons. They are simply changes to the canon that the reader will have to accept and that are essential to the story.

It is important to note that AU cannot be justified by canon. Positing that Lúthien was less than perfect, as I do in “An Ordinary Woman,” is not AU because it makes sense from a historiocanonical perspective, which can be defended using Tolkien’s texts. Deciding that Erestor grew up in Gondolin is not AU because it does not counter a canon fact; it is extracanonical. Writing Maedhros and Fingon as lovers is not AU because it can be defended using evidence from the texts. However, I think that the term and label “AU” is misapplied as often as it is used correctly.

When Does “Canon” Become “AU”?

I am hardly the first to tackle this topic. Earlier this year, we had a discussion on the SWG Yahoo! group about how to define AU. This prompted a series of posts and discussions elsewhere (many of which I didn’t even know about until researching this post). I will link these discussions throughout my post, but it seems that they come to some of the same conclusions.

First of all, that the “AU” label is misused in the Tolkien fandom. I’ll discuss this further in a moment.

Second of all, that there is a strong desire, in discussions of canon, to move beyond the “is canon”/”is not canon” dichotomy and to recognize at least a third way to classify ideas used in fan fiction. Marta called this “extra-canonical” in her post On Canon and Fanfic, and this term (and the concept it defines) was echoed throughout the discussions following her post. So my own idea of a continuum between “canon” and “AU” is hardly original to me.

So why so many differentiations when Marta made good use of the single term “extra-canonical”? Mostly as a demonstration of how many different methods fans use to arrive at the extra-canonical (by Marta’s definition of the term) details that they use in their stories. I don’t expect the terms I’m using here to make it into popular usage. They’re awkward and hard to distinguish between for anyone who doesn’t make a regular habit (as I do) of thinking and writing about these things. In other words, for most people, they’re useless.

However, I think there is an important point to be made with them. As I defined each term, I often qualified that different authors would have different comfort levels with how far (or in what direction) they wanted to take various interpretations. Perhaps the most salient example is that of the paracanon about Maedhros and Fingon. Proposing that the texts suggest close friendship requires less stretching than suggesting that the characters were lovers, even though both interpretations utilize similar analyses. Yet I know that readers and authors will consider some details “canon” and others “AU,” even when the same methods were used to construct them. People are fond of lamenting that AU is hard to define. I don’t think that it is, if we recognize that accepting all of the above as legitimate analyses of Tolkien’s texts and understand that our willingness to accept (or not) an interpretation derived from them reflects more about how we see canon than the actual canonicity of the interpretation.

I also wonder if people’s comfort differs between the different ways of interpreting the texts that I’ve mentioned here. For example, maybe I’m not willing to stretch far in terms of paracanon. Maybe I like my interpretations of the texts to as innocent and obvious as possible. But maybe I’m willing to accept more in terms of extracanon: If you want to add all sorts of original characters and off-the-wall facts about the canon characters, then this doesn’t bother me. So Maedhros/Fingon feels wrong to me, but I’m okay with Fingon having, once upon a time, studied herb lore, lived with the Fëanorians in Tirion, and been engaged three times to three different women before the Darkening. Looking at the different ways that we shape our personal canon from the texts will, hopefully, aid me in approaching these questions in the future.

Which brings me to the other point about the misuse of the term “AU.” There is the popular complaint that some authors use the “AU” label to deflect any criticism about the wanton flouting of canon in their stories. Several people made this point in the posts I’ve linked here; Roh Wyn goes as far in Can(n)on Fodder to differentiate between canon deviations: non-canonical, where “some important detail has been altered, and this alteration affects all the downstream activities events or characters so that the entire story is different from canon”; and un-canonical, “stories that essentially break canon. … [T]hey don’t merely change a few canonical details. These fics change the basic premises of canon, so that the ultimate story bears little relation to the original.” My understanding of Roh Wyn’s uncanonical is that these are those stories that change details from the text because the author doesn’t know better (or doesn’t want to do the research to find out) or because the author simply likes the changed version better than the textual version but doesn’t want to think about how to make the work within the general canon framework Tolkien has established; for example (to borrow Roh Wyn’s example) because s/he wants Aragorn and Boromir to be twins but doesn’t want to have to do the work to make that plausible. So it just is–much in the way that Legolas has been married off to many teenaged unicorn-riding princesses–and the reader is expected to accept it without explanation or question.

Others bring up how “AU” is used as a defense against the so-called “canon police” or “canatics,” who are depicted as fans who hunt through stories looking for any detail that does not jive with their particular interpretation of the texts. In a comment on her rantastic Is AU a negative label?, Juno writes,

In my rant I didn’t discuss the validity of labels such as “canon” or “AU” as such. They definitely can have their uses. But they also pose problems. There are no fixed, exact rules about what is and what is not “AU” or “canon”. Actually, there IS no one canon, really; canon is not determined by physical laws or divine laws, canon is always the result of the interpretation of an individual and thus … fluid. Therefore, labels can be misleading. Especially in LOTR fandom, especially about new authors I’ve noticed the tendency to label what I would call “canon stories” as AU, simply because some kind self-appointed canon-police scared them and made them feel insecure about their stories.

In my original post on the SWG that started this whole discussion, I admit to doing just that. I am not alone in this either. But I’m also willing to admit that this comfortable deflection of attacks from canatics does a disservice to actual AU stories and the very valid approaches to the texts that I and others take in developing personal verses that give thoughtful treatment to Tolkien’s writings.

All of the terms I discuss above are valid ways of approaching and interpretting Tolkien’s texts, and none of them are AU. Yet I’m sure that many of us can think of examples of each where the author or her/his critics would suggest such a label: the Maedhros/Fingon pairing (or Celegorm/Aredhel, for that matter), a story told by an original character or heavily featuring original characters, a story that challenges the truth behind Laws and Customs among the Eldar. I think the temptation–when encountering a story that uses an interpretation unfavorable to us as readers–is to discount that story as “uncanonical” or to suggest that the author needs to label it as “AU” rather than giving thoughtful consideration to the means by which authors use facts from the texts to arrive at different interpretations or conclusions.

And this brings me full-circle back to Pandemonium’s comment about how the study of Tolkien’s texts makes recognizing a definitive “canon” more and more difficult. Personally, in all but a few instances, I’m ready to be done with the term “canon” for good. It’s misleading. It doesn’t exist in the form that we think it does, though it’s a nice idea–that with enough study and effort, we can devise a compendium of facts about Tolkien’s world that allow stories to be graded in terms of canonicity–like many of the fancies to which humankind has been prone over the millennia.

I doubt that one humble heretic like me will ever have such influence, though. In the meantime, though, if I can encourage even a few people to resist the temptation to jab pointy fingers and shriek, “AU!!” and, instead, stop and think and question how the author arrived at a particular conclusion, then I will consider my overwrought analysis a success.

Then, suddenly, it occurred to me: That never happened.

The idea that Maedhros wished to slay the sons of Eärendil before his hand was stayed by Maglor is a popular fallacy in Silmarillion-based fiction. I was curious as to how many people thought that it was canon that Maedhros threatened to kill Eärendil’s sons at Sirion, so I posted a poll in my LiveJournal. As of collecting poll results on 17 November 2008, at 11 AM EST, just under 13% of respondents thought that “[d]uring the attack on the settlement at Sirion, Maedhros wanted to kill Elrond and Elros, but Maglor stopped him.” But, perhaps more intriguing than that, just over 28% of respondents weren’t sure if this was canon or not, which means that 41% of Tolkien fans who responded to the poll either thought that Maedhros’s threat to the boys at Sirion was either canon or possibly canon.

But this idea is a fanon, though I think the poll results underscore that it is a tenacious one. I remember encountering it in some of the first Silmarillion-based stories that I read. As attested by my recent experience, it is still making the rounds, and almost half of Tolkien readers don’t recognize it as AU (nor are authors writing stories based on this fanon particularly forthcoming about this fact, at least in my experience, which suggests that they likely believe its canonicity as well or believe that a fanon so deeply entrenched no longer warrants an “AU” designation … though tell that to Maedhros/Fingon authors!). This is intended in no way to reflect poorly on readers or authors who either believe this to be canon or who think there is a possibility that it might be. I would have to disparage myself as well, since at one point in my “career” as a student of Tolkien’s works I would have confidently checked the “Canon” option. When I first encountered this fanon, I was not well-versed in canon, so my mind adjusted what I read in Tolkien’s books to accommodate what enough authors wrote about that, surely, it must be true. Right?

Defining canon is difficult for any of Tolkien’s works, but that difficulty is compounded when trying to make sense of The Silmarillion. The Silmarillion was published posthumously. It was an incomplete and ever-evolving work that Tolkien had literally spent a lifetime writing. Christopher Tolkien took what drafts and scraps he could find and attempted to create from it a coherent history that he felt represented his father’s last word on many subjects that had never achieved anything near to finality in JRRT’s lifetime. With the publication of The History of Middle-earth series, fans and students of JRRT’s work were given access to the same materials with which Christopher Tolkien had worked–and then some–and the unique opportunity to Monday-morning-quarterback CT’s version of The Silmarillion. Hence, it is not at all uncommon to find Silmarillion authors who don’t use parts of The Silmarillion as their primary canon but prefer the “HoMe version” that they feel probably better represents JRRT’s final word on a subject. Therefore, when discussing matters of “canon” in The Silmarillion and how fanons evolve from the texts, it is important to consider not only The Silmarillion but the portions of The History of Middle-earth on which it is based.

What does The Silmarillion say about Maedhros and Maglor’s relationship with Elrond and Elros? It’s pretty straightforward:

For the sons of Fëanor that yet lived came down suddenly upon the exiles of Gondolin and the remnant of Doriath, and destroyed them. In that battle some of their people stood aside, and some few rebelled and were slain upon the other part aiding Elwing against their own lords (for such was the sorrow and confusion in the hearts of the Eldar in those days); but Maedhros and Maglor won the day, though they alone remained thereafter of the sons of Fëanor, for both Amrod and Amras were slain. Too late the ships of Círdan and Gil-galad the High King came hasting to the aid of the Elves of Sirion; and Elwing was gone, and her sons. Then such few of that people as did not perish in the assault joined themselves to Gil-galad, and went with him to Balar; and they told that Elros and Elrond were taken captive, but Elwing with the Silmaril upon her breast had cast herself into the sea. …

Great was the sorrow of Eärendil and Elwing for the ruin of the havens of Sirion, and the captivity of their sons, and they feared that they would be slain; but it was not so. For Maglor took pity upon Elros and Elrond, and he cherished them, and love grew after between them, as little might be thought; but Maglor’s heart was sick and weary with the burden of the dreadful oath. (1)

Nowhere in this account is Maedhros said to have wanted death for the young sons of Eärendil, much less that he tried to accomplish it.

However, there is one portion of this quote that I suspect is the basis of the fanon that Maedhros attempted to slay Elrond and Elros before being stopped by Maglor: “… [Elwing and Eärendil] feared that [their sons] would be slain; but it was not so. For Maglor took pity upon Elros and Elrond” (1). “Maglor took pity” … surely that implies a darker fate for the sons of Eärendil, does it not? Furthermore, Elwing and Eärendil had reason to fear that their sons would be killed by their captors.

To address the points out of order: of course Elwing and Eärendil thought the Fëanorians possessed the capacity and motivation to kill children. Elwing and Eärendil are certainly not partial to the Fëanorians, nor would they be particularly inclined to give them credit for mercy, much less justice. I think it’s important to distinguish between the point-of-view of The Silmarillion’s narrator–who possesses some distance if not complete impartiality–and the points-of-view of the characters, who certainly held the considerable bias expected of anyone who survived two attacks from the same people and would have lacked the emotional distance to overcome this. To them, the Fëanorians would have been inhuman, barbarian, capable of slaughtering small children simply to exact vengeance. Elwing, also, lost both of her brothers to the “cruel servants of Celegorm” during the attack on Doriath; would she even have known of Celegorm’s death and Maedhros’s attempt to save her brothers? (2) Furthermore, it is unlikely for reasons of propaganda: When trying to convince the people of Sirion of the justice of their cause in withholding the Silmaril from the Fëanorians, it would not have behooved Elwing or Eärendil to acknowledge their foe’s capacity for mercy. Short of painting Elwing or Eärendil as liars (which I am not willing to do), this makes it very likely that they would have come to believe this themselves, a belief that likely would have strengthened the more they invoked it.

So Elwing and Eärendil’s belief that their sons’ lives were in danger is neither surprising nor a reliable statement about the Fëanorians’ intentions.

Maglor’s taking pity on the sons of Eärendil really does not say anything about Maedhros either. In light of the fanon that Maedhros wished to slay the boys, of course, it applies quite neatly. But that is hardly the only interpretation to which that statement fits. A council might have met to decide the boys’ fate, at which Maglor spoke of his pity for them and his intentions to foster them. Perhaps the children were to be held as captives but for Maglor’s pity. Perhaps they were to be left in their settlement with the few survivors, but Maglor feared that this might cause them hardship or death and, pitying them, wished to offer them a better chance. Maybe they were to be fostered to someone else–say a mother with several children already–but Maglor chose to raise them instead. The interpretations into which that passage will fit are endless.

And, in fact, I would argue that the popular fanon under discussion here is one of the least logical interpretations, given what we know about Maedhros.

What do we know of him in The Silmarillion? His detractors will be quick to point out his oath and his role in three kinslayings, as well as the fact that he sat at the head of the House of Fëanor through all of the First Age and, therefore, would have borne primary responsibility for the kinslayings at Doriath and Sirion, which could not have happened without his consent. These things are all true. But there are other equally valid facts that temper his characterization. Of his house, canon shows him to be most concerned with unity and peace. At the Fëanorians’ first landing on Beleriand, he stood up to his father and asked that the ships be sent back for the House of Fingolfin. He relinquished the high kingship to Fingolfin not long after. He, with Maglor, attended the Mereth Aderthad. Canon shows him maintaining friendship with both the Houses of Fingolfin and Finarfin. He orchestrated the Union of Maedhros, which might have been successful but for treachery. Prior to both the kinslayings at Doriath and Sirion, he attempted diplomacy and was turned away both times. If we place credit for the kinslayings most solidly on his shoulders as the head of his house, so we must place credit for the diplomacy that, had it been accepted, would have avoided need for the attacks.

But perhaps the most compelling evidence against the fanon in question is Maedhros’s action after he discovered that the sons of Dior had been left to starve in the woods by Celegorm’s servants: “Of this Maedhros indeed repented, and sought for them long in the woods of Doriath; but his search was unavailing, and of the fate of Eluréd and Elurín no tale tells” (2).

If he was indeed repentant and went so far as to search “for them long in the woods of Doriath,” why would he slay out-of-hand two other young innocents in an almost identical situation?

I’d go so far as to argue that, based on what we know of Maedhros, to depict him as willing to slaughter two children without cause is out-of-character. Yes, a writer can make a case for something happening between the kinslayings at Doriath and Sirion that would make what we know of him based on almost six hundred years’ (3) evidence of statesmanship and mercy no longer applicable. But that writer will have to make a strong case for that and, frankly–given that most stories employing this fanon plop us right into the room with the sons of Eärendil or, at best, the battle–most stories do not. The assumption is that Maedhros is nasty enough to contemplate such an act, which is terribly out-of-character.

But, as I noted earlier, not all authors consider The Silmarillion as their canon. I think, then, that it is also necessary to look at what The History of Middle-earth has to say about this event and Maedhros’s role in it.

Elwing’s choice to withhold the Silmaril from the sons of Fëanor is one of the oldest ideas that was maintained consistently through to The Silmarillion’s publication and first appeared in the Nauglafring in The Book of Lost Tales 2. In fact, in Christopher Tolkien’s commentary on the next History of Middle-earth volume, he states, “The Sons of Fëanor have previously all been named only in the Tale the Nauglafring,” making their involvement with Elwing and her Silmaril as old as they are (4). At this point, however, The Book of Lost Tales lacks any mention of her children and the Fëanorians’ treatment of them.

But the idea did not proceed without changes. We see the story emerge again in The Shaping of Middle-earth (HoMe, vol. IV) in the summary “Sketch of the Mythology”:

Their son (Elrond) who is half-mortal and half-elfin, a child, was saved however by Maidros. When later the Elves return to the West, bound by his mortal half he elects to stay on earth. Through him the blood of Hurin (his great-uncle) and of the Elves is yet among Men, and is seen yet in valour and in beauty and in poetry” (5, boldface mine).

So, in the earliest version as this story takes shape, it is Maedhros who takes pity on Elrond, not Maglor.

“Sketch” was then expanded into the Quenta Noldorinwa, or simply Quenta. For the section of the story concerned, there existed two versions. In the first version (Q1), we see the continuation of the idea in “Sketch” that Maedhros rescued Elrond: “But Maidros took pity upon her child Elrond, and took him with him, and harboured and nurtured him, for his heart was sick and weary with the burden of the dreadful oath,” where we also see some of the language of the published Silmarillion taking shape (6). The second version (Q2) at first continues this idea of Maedhros-as-savior. However, revisions to Q2 introduce two important changes. Elrond is given a brother, Elros. And Maglor and Maedhros switch roles, with Maglor becoming the children’s savior. The Earliest Annals of Beleriand and The Later Annals of Beleriand, which are believed to be slightly later than the Quenta, echo the changes in roles between Maedhros and Maglor. (See Notes for a more detailed analysis of the addition of Elros and the likely sequence in which the primary source texts were written and revised.)

And this, so far as we know, was Tolkien’s final word on the subject (7).

“After the hasty ‘Sketch of the Mythology,’ … the Quenta Noldorinwa [Quenta] was in fact the only complete version of ‘The Silmarillion’ that my father ever made,” writes Christopher Tolkien in the Prefare to The Shaping of Middle-earth. JRRT was interrupted in his work on The Silmarillion to write The Lord of the Rings. He simply never got back to it in its entirety. The fact that the wording used in the Quenta is almost exactly what would be published in The Silmarillion for the account of Elrond and Elros makes sense, given this: It was the final version that CT would have taken as “canon” when putting together The Silmarillion. So, in the HoMe, there is no mysterious expansion on the account given in The Silmarillion of Elrond and Elros’s fostering by Maglor that shows Maedhros to be ruthless in excess of what we observe throughout the rest of the published Silmarillion. In fact, we see quite the opposite: JRRT’s original conception of Maedhros was as the twins’ rescuer, not potential murderer. The reassignment of this role to Maglor came rather late and was only repeated in the Annals of Beleriand before Tolkien ceased to write any further on the subject.

I think that this is significant, not so much in asserting that Maedhros and Maglor were mis-assigned roles in the published Silmarillion (because Maglor-as-savior does appear to be a final and reliable revision) but to lend further proof to the fact that Maedhros behaving without mercy towards the twins is terribly out-of-character. With few exceptions, JRRT established early the roles the Fëanorians would one day have in the published version. Maedhros and Maglor–just as in The Silmarillion–stood out for their guilt and capacity for mercy as compared to their brothers. In the several versions of the “Silmarillion” found in The Shaping of Middle-earth, these traits can almost be said to become these characters’ foundations. Not only are they involved early in the sparing of Eärendil’s sons, they go so far as to forswear their oath following the desertion of Dior’s sons. They attack Sirion only reluctantly and under pressure from Amrod and Amras, who earn their deaths in that battle much as “the 3Cs” earn their deaths at Doriath:

In annal 210 it is said that Maidros actually forswore his oath (although in the final annal he still strives to fulfil it); and this is clearly to be related to his revulsion at the killing of Dior’s sons in the annal for 206. Damrod and Diriel [Amrod and Amras] now emerge as the most ferocious of the surviving sons of Fëanor, and it is on them that the blame for the assault on the people of Sirion is primarily laid: Maidros and Maglor only ‘gave reluctant aid’. This develops further an increasing emphasis in these texts on the weariness and loathing felt by Maidros and Maglor for the duty they felt bound to. (8)

As a self-proclaimed “Fëanatic,” attempts to vilify the Fëanorians beyond what their canonical deeds already accomplish for them tends to annoy me because of the flat characterization it produces, if nothing else. And part of me wonders if this fanon has been seized so eagerly by authors who don’t like the Fëanorians and are quick to assume the truth behind any besmirching of their names that isn’t dismissed outright by the canon.

But, then, a more reasonable voice replies that fanon is fanon, and there really is no reason to assume bias much less maliciousness at work behind this particular fanon.

After all, as MithLuin remarked in a comment on my original LiveJournal post on this topic, this fanon does add tension to an event hastily sketched in the published Silmarillion:

But conflict makes for good drama, so in a story, it works better to have them argue over this before he agrees, rather than writing:
“I want to keep them!” ~ Maglor
“Okay.” ~ Maedhros :)

This is an event of enormous historical and symbolic significance to people who study and write about Tolkien’s works. Its cursory treatment in the text belies the enthusiasm people feel for writing about it, and with good reason. In this event there is an intersection of the three ages that receive the most treatment in fiction set in Tolkien’s world. There are Maedhros and Maglor of the First Age, committing some of their final acts before going to death and self-exile, respectively; this event, in many ways, represents the closing of the chapter on First Age history. There are Elrond and Elros, who in the Second Age will aid in developing their respective Elven and mortal communities, in many ways representing here the beginning of the chapter on Second Age history. And, of course, all of this will culminate in the Third Age, the epic events of that era being impossible without this moment in distant history, when Elrond’s house and especially the heir of Elros (Aragorn) will aid in banishing Sauron from Middle-earth. It comes as no surprise to me, in looking at stories about this topic, to see an enthusiasm for tales about Maedhros and Maglor’s relationship with Elrond and Elros among fans of both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. There are few better examples of the continuity and connectivity of Tolkien’s several works than this.

And, at the same time, there is emotional power there as well: two kinslayers at the ends of their lives who still have love and mercy enough in their hearts to aid two orphans. There is symbolism in the loss of their twin brothers Amrod and Amras in the same battle in which the twins Elrond and Elros are found; there is the deeper connection to those twins Eluréd and Elurín lost during the second kinslaying and the chance to make amends, especially for Maedhros, for that terrible deed. Perhaps this is the reason for my distaste for this fanon. In Maedhros and Maglor’s mercy toward Elrond and Elros, Tolkien has created an event that serves as the climax to one story at the same time as it acts as the preface to another, as well as providing an apt example of the complexity of character in The Silmarillion that makes writing about the book such a delight. Thrusting one of the characters undeservedly into the place of villain ruins this.

Works Cited

• 1. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, “Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath.” Return to first in-text reference
• 2. Ibid., “Of the Ruin of Doriath.” Return to first in-text reference
• 3. This figure was computed using the final dates in The Grey Annals and The Tale of Years, both found in Volume XI of The History of Middle-earth: The War of the Jewels. These are JRRT’s most up-to-date timelines and fit together without contradicting each other, so can be used in conjunction to get fairly accurate chronologies for the First Age. I measured between the burning at Losgar (4997 YV or 47,871 Sun Years after the arrival of the Valar in Arda) and the Fëanorian sack of the settlement at Sirion (531 FA or 48,432 Sun Years after the arrival of the Valar in Arda) for a total of 561 years. Return to first in-text reference
• 4. J.R.R. Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth. Vol. III, The Lays of Beleriand, ed. Christopher Tolkien, “Commentary on Part III: ‘Failivrin.’” Return to first in-text reference
• 5. J.R.R. Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth. Vol. IV, The Shaping of Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien, The Earliest ‘Silmarillion’: The ‘Sketch of the Mythology,’ §17. Return to first in-text reference
• 6. Ibid., The Quenta §17. Return to first in-text reference
• 7. Ibid., The Earliest Annals of Beleriand, introductory material. Return to first in-text reference
• 8. Ibid., The Earliest Annals of Beleriand, Commentary. Return to first in-text reference

Bibliography

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth. Vol. II, The Book of Lost Tales 2, ed. Christopher Tolkien.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth. Vol. IV, The Shaping of Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth. Vol. V, The Lost Road and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Tolkien.

Notes

Annal 329 of The Later Annals of Beleriand reads, “The folk of Sirion were taken into the people of Maidros, such as yet remained; and Elrond was taken to nurture by Maglor.” This seems almost a reversal on the addition of Elros in the Quenta, until one considers that the multiple sources under discussion here are believed to be written close in time to each other, and it is not always possible to accurately date the revisions made. CT’s Commentary on the Later Annals of Beleriand, in the commentary to Annal 325, makes note that, “The order was then inverted to ‘Elros and Elrond’. No doubt at the same time, in annal 329, ‘Elrond was taken’ was changed to ‘Elros and Elrond were taken.’ This isn’t entirely relevant to the topic under discussion but is more to satisfy the curiousity of astute readers who note that my conclusions do not match exactly with the text proper of The Later Annals of Beleriand. Given all of this, I consider the following timeline as far as the composition and revision of JRRT’s various primary sources:

• The ‘Sketch of the Mythology’: Maedhros as savior of Elrond
• Quenta Noldorinwa, version 1 (Q1): Maedhros as savior of Elrond
• Quenta Noldorinwa, version 2 (Q2): Maedhros as savior of Elrond
• Q2 revised to reverse Fëanorians’ roles: Maglor as savior of Elrond
• The Earlier Annals of Beleriand: Maglor as savior of Elrond
• The Later Annals of Beleriand: Maglor as savior of Elrond
• Q2 and The Later Annals of Beleriand revised to add Elros: Maglor is now the savior of Elrond and Elros, and the final version has taken shape (Return to post)