I read this Reactor.com article about how there is “no canon in Tolkien”. It’s been sitting in my head ever since. I have also been one of those people who worried that a TV show or movie was fundamentally changing the canon of some intellectual property. I am changing in how I view these things, slowly over the decades. I have been giving up on defending canon in Doctor Who or James Bond, as those have pretty much said every new actor in the role is a new set of stories. I came to accept Rings of Power more after Damien Walter pointed out that it is essentially fan-fiction. (I can’t track the video for that quote.)
The article discusses how Tolkien changed his own stories, rewriting part of The Hobbit to fit better with The Lord of The Rings which he was developing. There is good reason to say there is no Tolkien canon.
I recently decided I needed to read some Pratchett in defiance of my TBR shelf, and read in Guards Guards! how Lady Sybil Ramkin swatted misbehaving swamp dragons on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. Newspapers weren’t brought into Ankh-Morpork until The Truth, published many years later.
So I am seeing these stories I read more like mythology. I have no problem with myths being retold in new ways, and of course the whole idea can be saved for me by looking at Shakespeare.
I have been going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival since the mid-80’s. I have seen several productions of some plays, each one different in style and tone. No one goes to a production of Hamlet to be satisfied at the end with the newly-crowned Hamlet celebrating with Queen Ophelia and the Knight Protector of Denmark Laertes. We know Hamlet. We know how it ends. It’s a matter of how they tell the story. Shakespeare’s plays form a sort of mythology of their own. Joy McCullough’s Enter the Body takes several women in the plays and puts them together to tell their stories (great book, go read it!). We can retell Shakespeare in new ways. 10 Things I Hate About You is Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew in modern suburbs.
So if I can go to see a new production of an old play, I can watch a retelling of a story I know from other authors. Didn’t I like the way they updated Sherlock a few years ago?
I’ve also been absorbing and trying to fully understand John Truby’s premise that story is how we learn to be human, and this is why we tell each other myths and urban legends, to learn how to be humans in a society. My own writing has suffered because I didn’t feel like I had anything to say, but even that is beginning to change.
In the end, right now, I am determined to be more relaxed about these things. They really don’t hurt me at all, do they?
Except The Princess Bride. That movie is sacred and cannot be retold unless Fred Savage reads the story to his grand-daughter.