II: Canon

I've been listening to Bart Ehrman's podcasts about the Bible, provocatively entitled Misquoting Jesus. Prof Ehrman has forgotten more about the New Testament than I am ever likely to know, and I have learned a lot from them. His explanation of how the "lost chapter" of Mark's Gospel was discovered; and why it is very probably a forgery is great fun.

But occassionally, his language wrankles slightly. Ehrman has a tendency to refer to the apocryphal gospels -- the Christian texts by people other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and sometimes Paul -- as "books which never made it into the Bible."

Which is literally true. Oliver Twist is a book that never made it into the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and Sailor on the Seas of Fate is generally excluded from the Harry Potter series. But there is a danger that a listener could infer that Judas and Thomas and Peter and that huge body of second and third century fan-fic might have become of the Bible.

I suppose there could have been a world where "the Bible" never stopped growing: where books written by the disciples of the disciples of the disciples had the same status as the big Four (or sometimes Five). Maybe the Sermons of John Wesley and the Broadcast of C.S Lewis might have been canonised as part of the Twenty Eighth Testament. Don't the Quakers have something like that -- a collection of "testimonies" that each generation adds to? 

But the phrase "never-made-it-into" plays into the story that Once Upon a Time (TM) there was a big pile of books, all equally valid or equally invalid, and then one day an unruly mob armed with surprise, fear, nice red uniforms and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope unexpectedly burst in and arbitrarily deleted the ones they happen not to like.

Ehrman, obviously, doesn't remotely believe this story. He is clear and interesting and helpful about where the canon actually came from. The catholic church didn't have an official list of all the books that were definitively in the Bible until as late as the sixteenth century. But everyone who called themselves a Christian had been working from the same list for about thirteen centuries before that. The 1546 decree only came about because Martin Luther was making noises about excluding James and Revelation. 

But I think it's the story Richard Dawkins and Dan Brown and the journalists who got excited about the Gospel of Mary hoax believe in. Thomas and Mark are "the same kind of thing" and only random chance or inquisitorial suppression put one between big black leather covers and relegated the other to the Loeb Ancient Greek Texts series.

When Ronald Knox started to talk about the Sherlock Holmes "canon" in the 1930s he was making a scholarly religious joke. But once you've stopped laughing, the Holmes canon isn't particularly hard to define: it's whatever Conan Doyle wrote. Fifty something stories and a handful of novels. I am told that some people play a meta-game where, for example, Laurie King's Mary Russel books are treated as canon, but that's all part of the joke.

Comic book canon is quite a bit more fiddly. There are an awful lot of Spider-Man comics out there and it takes a monumental act of faith to believe they are all true at the same time. But if I say "Is Captain America canonically Irish?" or "Is Jimmy Olsen canonically gay?" I think you understand the question. Captain America's heritage has been alluded to in the comic books themselves; Jimmy Olsen has only been said to be Superman's Very Special Friend in fan-fiction.

You might very well say that it doesn't make any difference; but you understand the question. 

So: how, as readers, scholars, and adaptors, should we define the Tolkien canon?

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I - Gatekeeping

My mother went to the opera all her life: as a young woman she used to queue to get cheap back row tickets at Covent Garden ('the gods'); she went the Paris Opera during her honeymoon; and in later years she had a season ticket for the English National Opera. So she was understandably annoyed when a work colleague bought a single of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and thereafter claimed to be a Devotee. I don't think she ever said that there was anything wrong with listening to fat Italians singing the famous bits. She certainly didn't say that people shouldn't be allowed to do so. But it annoyed her.

If I went out in public wearing a Motorhead tee-shirt, there is a real danger that someone would approach me and ask how many times I heard them perform live and the title of my three favourite albums. If I couldn't answer, there is a good chance that they would accuse me of being a Dyson Airblade. (*)

There used to be a comic book writer called Neil Gaiman. He wrote a comic called Sandman. Lots of people who never thought they would like comics really, really liked Sandman. As a matter of fact I really, really liked it. But some of the people who really, really liked it really really really liked it. It wasn't just the best fantasy comic of the early 1990s. It was the best fantasy comic of all time. It was the best comic book of all time. The first good comic book. The only good comic book

I am still a little surprised that people who didn't like comics managed get to the end of the first graphic novels, what with the constant references to Golden Age vigilantes, aborted Jack Kirby strips, Martian Manhunters and 1950s horror narrators. But that was part of Neil Gaiman's cleverness. Sandman was a dense web of fannish in-jokes; but the in-jokes weren't told in such a way as to lock anyone out. His stuff on Satan plays pretty well if you know your way around Milton and the Bible but equally well if you don't.

I am afraid I became rather insufferable around this point. Perhaps it was fair enough to feel irritated when people who had (by their own admission) never read any other comic book fansplained to me that prior to Sandman, all comics were puerile, disposable rubbish about people in brightly coloured underwear who said SOK and KAPOW a lot, and that Neil Gaiman had single-handedly turned them into serious English literature. But this very easily shaded in to my saying out loud that if you hadn't read Doctor Strange or Little Nemo you had no darn right to like Neil Gaiman.

A lot of the people who really, really, liked Sandman have recently discovered that they never liked it to begin with. 

In recent times, the argument has started to go the other way. I really, really like Cerebus the Aardvark, while acknowledging that it is really, really, really problematic. But when I point out the very great strengths of Dave Sim's artwork and story telling, some people are inclined to reply "I expect if I had read as many comics as you have, I would be able to see this skill and innovation that you talk about, but since I haven't I won't."

Gatekeeping is definitely a thing; and it's a very silly thing; although sometimes it is a very understandable thing. "Your opinion doesn't count because you know less than me" and "Your opinion doesn't count because you know more than me" are both forms of gatekeeping. "I don't think this is very good" should never be taken to imply "You are not permitted to enjoy this."

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Digression

I must not digress.

Digression is the blog-killer.

Digression is the general point which brings total excursus.

I will ignore my digression. 

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past, I will fire up scrivener and read my notes. 

When the digression has finished there will be nothing. 

Only content will remain.