My Response to Corey Olsen's Claim That There Is No Canon in Tolkien's Work

(avg. read time: 7–14 mins.)

As I said months ago, I have no intention of watching or reviewing season 2 of The Rings of Power. After my review of season 1, I am happy with the choice I made, as the time it saved me allowed me to revisit The Silmarillion and write my commentary series on biblical and theological links in the story, as well as to work on other writing projects. However, there is something that has come out of the discourse surrounding The Rings of Power that I did want to discuss, which is Corey Olsen’s much-criticized declaration that “there’s no such thing, really, as canon in Tolkien.” I have seen many responses to this claim, and while I largely tend to agree with the spirit and even some details of what is said, I have not found that any response I have seen so far fully reflects what I would say (though this one is pretty good).

First, we should observe that there is indeed complication when it comes to discussing canon in Tolkien’s work. The reason Olsen says there is “no such thing, really, as canon in Tolkien” is because “Tolkien’s ideas were ever evolving.” In some respects, this is true, but it is not as if everything in Tolkien’s story is marked by perpetual fluidity. Even though he made corrections even to published works—more significantly in The Hobbit but also in The Lord of the Rings to a lesser extent in order to make everything more coherent—once those corrections were done, these works published prior to his death took on the role of what some call “hard canon” in that it is established fact within the world of the story, and anything else written in relation to that world must account for it. The corrections for the sake of coherence would hardly be needed if Tolkien was not at all concerned for establishing some manner of canonicity in his story. Posthumous publications of his tend to have the status of “soft canon” in that they may be treated as factual within the world of the story, provided they do not contradict the hard canon. Unfinished or underdeveloped ideas do not overrule the hard canon, and certainly earlier drafts do not override published text, but in many cases later ideas may arguably be given priority of something like “canonical status” in the absence of evidence that Tolkien decided to abandon the idea. While Tolkien changed things over time, many other things remained consistent because fluidity was not the defining feature. For example, from 1916/1917 to the time of Tolkien’s death in 1973, Tuor was the one who came to Gondolin, Eärendel/Eärendil was born there because of Tuor’s coming to Gondolin, and King Turgon died in the Fall of Gondolin. Similarly, for as much as the details of The Lord of the Rings changed in Tolkien’s drafts, various core materials remained intact from their conception, such as the structure of the ending.

It is also fair to say that Tolkien left himself loopholes on occasions for material that was not yet published. Namely, the conceit of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion especially is that they are based on sources. And if Tolkien wanted to tell a different version of a story, he could always say it came from a different source. One of the most significant aspects of his story in which this makes a difference is in how he wrote about the Sun and the Moon. The Silmarillion contains a mythologized version of this story, but Tolkien in later writings would insist that this story, as such, could not have come from the angelic Valar, for it contradicts cosmological truth as we know it. The same issue applies to the shape of the world and how it was changed or left unchanged when Númenor was destroyed, depending on which source you read. He never fully integrated these ideas because of how much revising work would be needed to clarify matters. But again, these complications of canonicity arise because Tolkien cared about coherence within his story, truthfulness in fantasy and mythology, and maintaining the inner consistency of reality in the Secondary World while taking seriously the idea he had from the beginning that this was a time in the imaginary past of our own world. Those underlying concerns drove the changes he made. They are the canons that drive the canon.

I deliberately use that term in two different ways because I have seen a frequent case of confusion in a certain quote used in response to Olsen. Tolkien wrote in Letter #210 in commenting on a planned film adaptation of LOTR that “The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.” While I think this quote is fairly applied to The Rings of Power, it is not in itself a rebuttal of the claim that there is no canon in Tolkien. The term “canons” used here is not the same as fans tend to use for Tolkien’s narrative canon. Canon in the latter sense concerns authoritative source material that must be respected and accounted for, particularly in terms of establishing what is factual within the world of the story. It can also be called “canon” in the sense that it is the standard or measure to which other stories told within that world must conform or by which claims and stories about this world can be judged. But when Tolkien writes of the “canons of narrative,” he is speaking of standards or guiding principles of storytelling, much as one can speak of the “canons of textual criticism.” The quote itself does not establish the importance of Tolkien’s story as canon, but other parts of the letter do.

Second, having made all of this clarification, a fundamental problem with Olsen’s attempt in claiming there is no canon in Tolkien to defend ROP for doing such things as having Gandalf come to Middle-earth in the Second Age—and come in an asteroid, and not know his own name, and meet the Hobbits then, and go to the East where he meets Tom Bombadil on the other side of Middle-earth from where he lives, and so on—is that it is, even granting the dubious claim, irrelevant. It has already been established by the showrunners themselves that they do not have the rights to all of Tolkien’s fictional oeuvre; they only have the rights to adapt materials from The Hobbit and LOTR, including the Appendices of the latter (excepting certain terms currently wrapped up in copyright restrictions like “Hobbit”). Citing stories beyond that is not especially pertinent when they cannot adapt them. They could try avoiding being inconsistent with that other material when possible, but they already do not care about thoroughgoing inconsistency with the source material they can adapt, so it is not like that would matter to them. As it is, the show does have a canon it is supposed to adhere to, and it is that source material it is supposed to be adapting for a new medium. Whatever other ideas Tolkien thought of with Gandalf or the other Istari, it is irrelevant to this show because the writers do not have the rights for them. How it should relate to that canon as an adaptation of the story for a new medium is another matter, but the fact remains that the story without which this one would not exist is the canon for the adaptation.

Third, the impression given that Tolkien was unconcerned about canon does not fit with statements we have from him. He takes his works as written (i.e., as the canon he must account for) in his responses to criticisms (see here and here). I have already noted—and I treat this subject in more detail in the last section of Chapter 2 in my book on The Hobbit, in Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book on LOTR, and in a section of a review I wrote here—that Tolkien presents his story as set in an imaginary past of our own world, and so one could speak of the Primary World as exercising a kind of canonical authority for the Secondary World, although the Secondary World setting drives the particular ways Primary World truths are represented. Moreover, his most developed articulation of his theoretical framework in “On Fairy-Stories” is relevant here as well. In a part of his essay about the inadequacy of the “willing suspension of disbelief,” he says the following:

Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.¹

While the terminology of canon is not used here, the idea is present in terms of what is true within the Secondary World and what is consistent with the established laws within it.

Fourth, Tolkien also showed that he cared about his literary canon in his response to a proposed film adaptation in Letter #210. I have gone over this letter and Tolkien’s thoughts on film adaptation here, and I have even applied them to Jackson’s films here (for my reviews of his adaptations, see the series here and here). We need not revisit all the details in this post, but the fact remains that he cared about how his works were adapted. He accepted that change was inevitable and that the different medium required different presentations of certain things, but that did not mean he gave carte blanche to any and all kinds of changes. A man who did not have a sense of his own canon could hardly have written at the end of this letter “it must be brought into relation with the book, and its gross alterations of that corrected…. The Lord of the Rings cannot be garbled like that.” Read the letter and see how many of these criticisms apply to ROP. If Tolkien had a problem with deliberate and grossly divergent compressions of time and space compared to his book in this film adaptation, just imagine how he would have felt about the much more radical compression of these things in ROP, as well as the events presented out of narrative order even within the compression. Of course, I have gone over in much depth and detail elsewhere how season 1 of ROP failed not only by the standard of literary canon, but also by the canons of storytelling. It is neither a good adaptation nor a good show in its own right, and I doubt season 2 would be significantly different in that regard.

Fifth, there are also a couple errors of detail to deal with in the rest of Olsen’s statement. After a video insert of a terrible attempt from the show to give Gandalf his name because the showrunners unnecessarily decided to “mystery box” his name for most of the first two seasons, Olsen says, “In the text of The Lord of the Rings [i.e., the canon], we are told that Gandalf, with the other Wizards, arrived at around year 1000 of the Third Age. And in his later years, he was playing with the idea of maybe Gandalf coming sooner, maybe some of the Wizards coming in the Second Age, and taking part in the Wars of the Rings of Power.” Again, none of these ideas are present in what is to be canonical for the show, but there are other problems.

Olsen is conflating a few things here to make it sound like this plot point is like something Tolkien actually wrote in a way that is not such an egregious departure born from hackery in insisting that Gandalf be in a story he does not belong in simply because fans associate him with LOTR. In 1959, Tolkien wrote some notes, now included in The Nature of Middle-earth, on the idea of the Istari plus Melian going to meet the Elves at Cuiviénen to act as their guardians (93, 95, 99). This is millennia before the Second Age. There is otherwise nothing about Gandalf coming to Middle-earth before the Third Age, except for a vague note from the 1970s: “That Olórin, as was possible for one of the Maiar, had already visited Middle-earth and had become acquainted not only with the Sindarin Elves and others deeper in Middle-earth, but also with Men, is likely but nothing is [> has yet been] said of this” (The Peoples of Middle-earth, 381). So he's not really playing with this idea in the way that we see here, since he has returned to Aman from whatever encounters he had at a time when Glorfindel is about to be sent back. Around the same time in the 1970s, Tolkien did consider the idea of the Blue Wizards (the two besides Gandalf, Saruman, and Radagast), named in this manuscript as Morinehtar and Rómestámo, as coming to Middle-earth in the Second Age:

Their task was to circumvent Sauron: to bring help to the few tribes of Men that had rebelled from Melkor-worship, to stir up rebellion … and after his first fall to search out his hiding (in which they failed) and to cause [?dissension and disarray] among the dark East … They must have had very great influence on the history of the Second Age and Third Age in weakening and disarraying the forces of East … who would both in the Second and Third Age otherwise have … outnumbered the West. (The Peoples of Middle-earth, 385)

As such, we do not see even in this brief and late undeveloped note an idea that even these two Wizards, not including Gandalf, came to take part in what he calls “the Wars of the Rings of Power” (presumably a name, not from Tolkien, to describe the wars of the Second Age as a whole fought against Sauron). Rather, these two Wizards, not including Gandalf, drew off potential servants from Sauron and hampered his efforts.

Olsen and his interlocutor (Will Smith, but not the most famous one of that name) then discuss Gandalf’s names. Most of this does not require comment, but he errs in what he says of Gandalf’s comment to Faramir (who Olsen calls “a dude from Gondor”) when giving his various names that “to the East I go not” (IV/5). Olsen explains this comment as strictly applying to Mordor and meaning, “Don’t expect me to go throw down with, you know, the Dark Lord at the gates of Barad-dûr.” Tolkien’s own account from a note written before the second edition of LOTR says otherwise. In the midst of discussing the various reference points for the West, the North, and the South, he defines the region of “the North” as including “roughly West to East from the Gulf of Lune to Núrnen, and North and South from Carn Dûm to the southern bounds of ancient Gondor between it and Near Harad. Beyond Núrnen Gandalf had never gone” (Unfinished Tales, “The Istari,” 415).² On that same page, he says, “Aragorn claims to have penetrated ‘the far countries of Rhûn and Harad where the stars are strange’ [The Fellowship of the Ring II/2]. It need not be supposed that Gandalf did so.” There is no reason to restrict the East to Mordor, and by Tolkien’s own account “the East” does not necessarily even include Mordor.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2006), 132 (emphasis original).

2. This is my Ballantine Books edition. Pagination may vary.