The Encyclopedia: Is It Canon?

[icarus]

About eight years ago I stumbled across a debate about Christopher Tolkien's collection of J. R. R. Tolkien's 13 volumes of notes The History of Middle Earth. The question: is it canon?

At the time I didn't understand the debate. What? Tolkien wrote it, right? So it counts as canon. Of course it does!

Or does it?

Now with the impending Encyclopedia of Harry Potterness, I understand why it's a question.

In the case of Tolkien's notes, they were compiled by his son, not Tolkien, and many of the working notes were at odds with what ended up in the actual Lord of the Rings. Because they were notes. And nothing more.

J. K. Rowling on the other hand will be overseeing her own project. Tying up all the loose ends of canon in her own way, on her own terms.

My answer to that: Nuh-uh. No way. She's alive, she can still write more books. In this case the Encyclopedia is an end run around expanding her own canon. It's cheap, spurious, and easy to throw out answers in an interview or slap together entries for an Encyclopedia. She can write all the stories she wants in her mind -- without giving us full and complete actual stories. She doesn't have to go through the hard work of processing the complete universe that creates a canon.

I think it was Orson Scott Card who pointed out that a story starts to write itself, it begins to take off of its own accord and run with your pen. The reason why she's contradicted some of her own answers from interviews in the past is because the creation of a story, of a canon, is this process. Writing will change what you "mentate" and "think through" with your purely intellectual faculties.

I don't accept this cheap shortcut of hers. Unless she takes the time to pick up her quill pen and write us a real story, I do not accept the Quik-Quotes Quill version of a canon.



P.S.: Whether or not the Encyclopedia agrees with my fanfic doesn't affect me in the least, because the vast majority my HP fics were written pre-Half Blood Prince and aren't canon compliant in any way. This is just my little manifesto on what is and isn't canon.

Comments

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, Orson Scott Card is brilliant. Ender's Game is a marvelous ethical masterpiece and I've forced it onto many people. But Card is also a creative writing professor and has a few books out Characterization and Point of View which taught me most of what I know about writing.

Icarus