Obsessive question, smart answer.

Re trees and needles, the kitties’ fave season approaches…

I think she never really thought about it. It probably took all her restraint to not reply loudly “Is sex all you people ever think about? There’s a world that needs lots of help out there! HELLO! Get a life!”

That she didn’t burst out laughing was a remarkable feat of self-control. Fixation on one’s coffee does sometimes tide one over ignorant stupidities in progress without further embarrassing the ignorant.

I think Melissa may have missed the whole point of the snogging episodes………….

When talking about Dumbledore’s sexuality (yes I know…), Jo, in response to a question from Melissa:

“Does that mean he (Dumbledore) was a one hundred-fifty-year-old virgin? I don’t know” she said softly, peering into her coffee cup as though it held the answer.

Here are a couple of additional links discussing the question of “canonicity” for Tolkien’s books:

http://tolkien.slimy.com/faq/External.html#Canon
http://tolkien.slimy.com/essays/TolkParish.html

As you can see, there is hardly any agreement in Tolkien fandom about what constitutes canon. Although revgeorge did speak of Tolkien “scholarship”, rather than “fandom”; I honestly have no idea what, e.g., Tom Shippey or Verlyn Flieger would say on the subject.

Personally, I do draw a distinction between what I consider canon when thinking in “fandom” mode and what I accept as canon when in “literary analysis” mode. That is, if I’m taking part in one of the unending arguments about how Sauron retrieved the Ring from the downfall of Númenor or how Snape entered Hogwarts to consult Dumbledore’s portrait while he was a wanted man, I do consider the author’s extra-textual statements to be valid – as long as they don’t contradict the text or each other! But when looking for deeper meanings in any book, I consider the author to be, at best, primum inter pares.

I’m not quite sure where to put it (Dumbledore’s commentary) yet. I guess it would depend on where one puts the Tales in terms of canon. I see things like the Tales & the schoolbooks as somewhat subsidiary to the main 7, i.e. being an extension of the HP series but not necessarily providing us any information that contradicts anything in the main books or gives us enough data to interpret what’s going on in the main books.

Reading through John’s other post on JKR saying that Tales is a distillation of themes found in the main books, I found it interesting that everything Jo said about the main books & about the points the Tales will make can be already drawn out of the main texts & in many cases have already been drawn out. In other words, her commentary through Dumbledore won’t really be telling us anything new or anything we couldn’t have picked up from the books themselves. It will simply be a summary or condensation for us. Not something unimportant, then, but also not something that will somehow give us a new perspective on the series.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not buying it & reading it & probably will be joining in the discussion of the various tales here.

In light of the fact the Jo has said the Bard Tales are a distillation of the themes in the novels, wouldn’t it be natural to assume that the Tales are a lens though which we can view the novels, and therefore Dumbledore’s commentary is especially relevant?

John, you bring up an interesting point that the Scottish book could be considered superior canonically to even the novels. Since a lot of what we know from the novels is usually filtered through the perspective of character, and oftentimes a character that is very much in-the-dark about what is really going on around them (Harry), would not the version of events straight from the author, unfiltered by a character’s perspective, in fact be more accurate?

OK, now am I contradicting myself from earlier saying that Jo writing through a character’s voice is some form of canon?

Curiouser and curiouser….

I think the golden day of Tolkien discussion has passed me by, though. I was big into trying to pursue that back in the ’80’s & early ’90’s. But those were the Dark Ages, before the coming of the Internet.

Nice to know, though, that the Tolkien scholars & debaters are just as intense as we Harry Potter ones. Just goes to show that Tolkien still has some legs in this day & age.

And who would’ve thought that some of the greatest & most read fantasy/classical literature of our day would’ve been written by two stuffy English professors, Tolkien & Lewis, & one English/Scottish lady trained in the classics!