The Encyclopedia: Is It Canon?
Jul. 27th, 2007 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icarusAbout 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-28 12:05 pm (UTC)The fact she couldn't fit these in and wanted to is all the reason to share them with everyone - they were edited out, but to me they are still canon. So the fact her epilogue was more in depth and talked of the Hogwarts staff, occupations of the Trio, other peoples kids etc just means she gets to share with readers what she wanted to originally.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-28 12:24 pm (UTC)Sorry. I have lots of notes for many of my stories. In one case I have a follow-up conversation to Beg Me For It (http://www.icarus.slashcity.net/stories/begmeforit.html) where Ron tells Harry about what happened with Draco.
I may, in my mind, think that's what happened. But it wasn't included for good reason. It didn't fit the story, it dragged the story out too much and diminished the ending, turning it into a story about Harry and Ron's friendship rather than Ron and Draco. That's a darn good reason to not include it, and the story itself drew those lines.
The lines of canon are drawn by the story itself, not by the author.
So no matter what I may imagine for my stories after I write the last word, the canon ends when the story does.
Heh. If that weren't true, no story would ever end because an author is never done.
Icarus