Nonetheless, every first endeavor of this sort serves an important function in the ongoing study of literature and the past. And the canon discussions are relevant to our knowledge of the literary past. Literature doesn't make the world go round. It doesn't save lives. It doesn't put food on the table. It's just there. We read it. But it moves us, provokes us to discuss it, and to understand it. In fact, we attempt to understand things about literature which the authors never intended us to understand. A friend recently asked me, after finishing The Lord of the Rings, what the book is really about. I told her that not everyone agrees with Tolkien, but he said it was about death and the search for deathlessness.

No, that's not what my friend thought the book was about. In fact, until I saw a video of Tolkien explaining the story, I had never conceived of Tolkien's interpretation, either. Up until that time I had always thought it was about how heroic Hobbits can be. Some people see it as a brush stroke on the canvas of the battle between Good and Evil (I always have trouble sorting the Good guys from the Bad guys myself). Some people seem to feel The Lord of the Rings is a subtle allegory about expanding personal horizons through chemical processes. I suppose the 1960s weren't too good to those folks.

Inevitably, any serious discussion about Tolkien leads to the question of what is acceptable. That is, what is the "canon" we must rely upon to form a common reference? There is no answer to that question. There never has been, and I don't believe there ever will be. We have a plenitude of canons to choose from. We can fire a battery of canonical postulations at each other in debate after debate and keep our heads spinning. I often jump from one canon to another when discussing Balrogs, Elven history, geography, Tolkien's intentions, and "the mythology". If ever I tried to stick to any one canon, those days are long gone, and unlike Elrond, I don't remember them well at all.

The History of Middle-earth has undoubtedly led us to this quandary at the crossroads. We have so many choices to make that no one really knows which way to go. Every now and then someone starts off down a road and screams, "Here it is! Follow me!" And mostly the crowd just ignores them, continuing to mill about in wild confusion. Occasionally someone dumps a bucket of water on the canonists' parade, too. And we all end up sopping wet. As soon as you take up the topic of canonicity, you have put the literary equivalent of a "soak me" sign on your forehead.

The problem with defining a canon for Tolkien is that no one wants to share your canon. A few people have tried to be open-minded, but they inevitably get sidetracked when discussing someone else's canon. "Well, you see, in my canon...." Tolkien didn't make the task easy by any means. He kept starting and abandoning projects throughout his life, and because they all shared something in common (though one would be hard-pressed to identify many elements common to all the projects), there are people who glibly dip into one project to borrow material for discussing another project.

I am always amazed when someone brings up "The Fall of Gondolin" while discussing the Balrog of Moria, for example. There is no connection between the story from 1916, and "The Bridge of Khazad-dum". None. Tolkien uses the word "Balrog" in both, but then, Shakespeare used the word "Elves". Are we to assume that Shakespeare's cob-webbers are somehow connected with Tolkien's Noldor?

"The Fall of Gondolin" is important to The Silmarillion. There is no doubt about that. But "The Fall of Gondolin" is not a part of The Silmarillion. "Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin" was literarlly written by Christopher Tolkien. Sure, he tried to follow his father's writings, but what he calls editorial compression is, in fact, writing. Christopher Tolkien had to sit down and compose his own version of the tale, which already existed in at least four different versions (as "The Fall of Gondolin" from The Book of Lost Tales, as sections in "Quenta Noldorinwa" and "Quenta Silmarillion" from the 1930s, and in the fragment "Of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin").

The Silmarillion is a book, composed or compiled by Christopher Tolkien. "The Silmarillion" is a story which J.R.R. Tolkien began working on about 1930. The story became the book, but the book is not the story. That is, the story was never completed, and has never been published. The Silmarillion is not even presented as an attempt to reconstruct the story. It's an attempt to keep J.R.R. Tolkien's fans happy. He had promised to publish The Silmarillion but no one really knew what that was. Tolkien himself never produced the Silmarillion because he would get only so far on a Silmarillion and then would start all over again. And there were so many associated texts which were never intended to be a part of the Silmarillion, but which inevitability became a part of The Silmarillion.

Confused? Now you know why I don't try to define canons. Well, okay, I define them all the time. I wear them like disposable wrist-watches. I use them until the batteries run dry and then discard them. The canons I use today may look like the ones I used yesterday, but they are really different in some subtle, obscure fashion.

The real canon, the underlying core story (which seems to have changed relatively little after Tolkien abandoned The Book of Lost Tales), was an evolving, growing story about an imaginary past. A historical period which never was. This historical period included the rise and fall of a great Elven civilization. The Elves have moved on, but we remember them, vaguely, and Tolkien's canon was an attempt to formalize that memory. The problem is, he never really succeeded in putting that canon down on paper.

Tolkien recorded a myriad of ideas and conflicting details and incidents. If we take them all together, we get a morass of unbelievably confused images and nits to pick. So we are forced by the differences and contradictions to pick and choose our sources. But mixing and matching sources from 1917 and 1970 is not reasonable. Galadriel doesn't even exist in 1917's stories, and The Book of Lost Tales had long been abandoned by the time Tolkien was winding down his musings near the end of his life. If one gets the impression that he was probably terribly depressed by the prospect of fixing up the whole thing, one might not be far from the truth. Sorting through all the traditional attempts to document the histories is a real chore. Heck, it used to put me to sleep until my body built up some immunity to the somnolent texts.

The Internet only exacerbates the situation. The Law of Mandos stipulates that, whenever Turin or Morgoth become the focus of discussion, someone will inevitably drag in the "Second Prophecy of Mandos". This little gem has no relevance to The Lord of the Rings, but is frequently cited as proof that Morgoth will return at the end of Time, and that Turin will slay him. The inconvenient fact that Tolkien abandoned the prophecy in the 1930s, and ultimately only considered restoring it in a substantially different form (due to Andreth, an Edainic woman of Beleriand, whose prophecy foretells of Turin's temporary return at the end of the First Age), is either unknown to the faithful or disputed in some fashion.

Of course, Turin and Morgoth have little relevance to The Lord of the Rings, as they are barely mentioned in it. But the Second Prophecy is not mentioned or referred to in any way in The Silmarillion. It's not even pointed to in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, but there are pious souls who reverently insist it is a vital part of the canon. Woe unto he who points out that the Turin of The Silmarillion cannot become a Vala, even at the end of Time. And never mind the fact that all references to a Last Battle are obscure and incomplete, making no mention of Turin.

Other bizarre ideas have gotten thrown into the canonical soup, such as the "fact" that Elves have pointed ears. There is nothing in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Road Goes Ever On, The Silmarillion, or Unfinished Tales which suggests or hints that they might have pointed ears. From 1937 until 1987, the world of Tolkien scholarship had no reason to believe or suspect that any Tolkien Elf might have an ear which didn't look like the ear of a man. Tolkien's characters distinguished between Elves and Men by looking at their eyes, their faces, or listening to their voices.

But in 1987, Christopher Tolkien published The Lost Road and Other Writings; included in its profound revelations was "The Etymologies", an attempt by JRRT to document the Elven languages he was using in the pre-LOTR years. He updated some portions of "The Etymologies" in the first years of writing The Lord of the Rings, but eventually abandoned the work. And in "The Etymologies", one finds the bombshell "las-" entry where are inscribed the fateful words "Some think this is related to the next and *lasse ear. The Quendian ears were more pointed and leaf-shaped than [?human]."

That "[?human]" construction at the end of the sentence is not from J.R.R. Tolkien. It's from Christopher Tolkien. In his introduction to "The Etymologies", Christopher writes "My own contributions are always enclosed within square brackets. A question mark standing within such brackets indicates doubt as to the correctness of my reading, but in other cases is original." Well, some people insist, if JRRT didn't mean to write "human", what could he have intended? Who knows? It's not clear from the text that he intended the remark to stand. He was certainly introducing his own doubt about the allegation with the first sentence "Some think this is related to the next and *lasse ear." Little did the old boy know how seriously his philologist's sense of humor would be taken.

Whether Tolkien's Elves have pointed ears is not a question of canon. One canon may have pointy-eared Elves and another might not. But whether one canon rules all, and in the darkness binds them, is a question of canon. Since Tolkien never bothered to refer to Elven ears again, how important was this idea (of their relative pointedness compared to something else)? Years later, while expounding upon the Elvish ancestry of Prince Imrahil (in another note intended only for himself), Tolkien made a remark, now immortalized in Unfinished Tales, concerning the beardlessness of Men descended from Elves. Christopher's casual mention of this note has been taken as the final authority on whether Elves should have beards. Consequently, there are numerous occasions where people ask how Cirdan can have a beard, since Elves don't possess them. In order to preserve the canon of beardless Elves, some people jump through some intricate hoops to explain the gaffe.

The simplest explanation is that Tolkien forgot about Cirdan's beard when he was working on the Imrahil material. Had he realized he had already put a beard on an Elf in a published work, he undoubtedly would have felt bound to abide by that. So the beardlessness of Elves should be considered a moot point. Elves can have beards because that is the way Cirdan is portrayed. However, the simplest explanation seldom wins favor in a canonical debate. The more elaborate and contrived a canon seems to be, the more fervent its adherents are in propounding it to the masses. It seems to always be a case of "the most effort justifies the canon." Well, it is a bit disheartening to have the wind taken out of one's sails, after staying up all night working out how Cirdan alone among the Elves can have a beard.

The canons often become intertwined under the strangest circumstances. The pointy-ears crowd, for example, will often cite a letter Tolkien wrote in 1938 to the Houghton Mifflin Company, his American publishers. They wanted to know how to draw a Hobbit. Tolkien told them "A round, jovial face; ears only slightly pointed and 'elvish'; hair short and curling (brown)." The letter is treated with the respect accorded a Papal Bull. All well and good, I suppose, but the reference to "elvish" is certainly not to a Tolkien Elf, which no one at Houghton Mifflin had ever seen. There is nothing in the text of the book which suggests that the Elves do (or don't) have pointed ears. Tolkien's comment was intended to be taken in the context most familiar to the publishers that is, everyone knew that Elves had pointed ears. At the time, there was no connection between The Hobbit and Tolkien's Elvish legends (which the HMCo people hadn't read), except for a few borrowings Tolkien had made to liven up the story.

Nonetheless, we are told with great solemnity how this letter proves that Tolkien's Elves have pointed ears. The complete and total lack of reference or relevance to any Elf in any Tolkien story aside, the letter must prove that Tolkien's Elves have pointed ears. Why else would he have used the word "elvish"? It couldn't possibly be that he knew a popular conception about Elves would provide a convenient reference, could it? The canon of the pointed ear has even been extended to allege that Tolkien was the first person to use "Elves" and "Elvish". I have occasionally pointed out that Shakespeare used those words, too.

Well, all this must seem like nothing more than a case of sour grapes to those whose sophisticated elocution and professional demeanor have been insulted time and again by my impish wit and disregard for the canon. Perhaps. I admit to having little reverence for any particular canon. I am a canon impurist. I obliterate canons with barrages of counter-canons. I debilitate profundities with objections. I deserve no better than to be ignored and treated with the utmost contempt, because I choose not to be swayed by a hodge-podge of unrelated citations. I laugh in the face of canon. I live on the edge of heresy. I look at when the books were published and ask, "Why does 50 years of literary canon vanish with one obscure reference in a text never intended for the light of day?"

The silliness of canonical arguments undoubtedly is responsible for more head-shaking than anything else in the world of Tolkien fandom and scholarship. We do take our Balrog debates seriously, seriously enough that more than one FAQ has been written about the poor beasts and their wing(edness/lessness). Nothing brings out the fangs and claws faster than a Balrog wings discussion. But mention canon in the midst of a Balrog discussion, and people are apt to reply, "Eh! Who cares?" There is simply very little passion about canon. Marriages have probably been arranged on the basis of who believes in Balrog wings (clap your hands if you do!), but what effect has the study of canon had upon our lives?

And the winged nature of Balrogs is very much a question of canon. The reason is that Tolkien changed his Balrogs. So if you're going to talk about Balrogs, it's important to note which Balrogs you're discussing. The Balrogs of The Book of Lost Tales are not the same as the Balrog of "The Bridge of Khazad-dum". A good canonist will concede this, while still arguing for or against wings. Of course, keeping the canons separate makes it difficult to argue against wings.

Nonetheless, every camp has its battery of canons which are drawn up and arrayed for battle. We're almost to the point of devising a canon numbering system. We may change them frequently, but we know our canons like we know the backs of our enemies' hands. A good canon is well-tended with loving care. It is nourished and fed with only the richest detail from the most intricately researched of debates. The Care and Feeding of the Tolkien canon may one day appear on bookstore shelves, and only someone who has never asked, "Were the Silvan Elves really the Avari?" will laugh.

The neatness of one's canon is all too easily disturbed by the rowdy intrusion of someone else's canon. That is most likely why there will never be a single, accepted universal Tolkien canon. Never mind the fact that there could never be such a thing. If we all agreed on one canon for anything, too many people would have to admit to being wrong about something. All the ambiguity with which we have laced Tolkien's words would vanish in a puff of reality. All the fun would be taken out of the debates, and we'd have nothing left to argue over, except whose fault it was for bringing us to such a pass.

Michael Martinez is the author of Visualizing Middle-earth, which may be purchased directly from Xlibris Corp. or through any online bookstore. You may also special order it from your local bookstore. The ISBN is 0-7388-3408-4.