[...] I don't think that a short, unpublished letter to a young fan is enough to establish "canon" (whatever that is).
[..]but this letter does not confirm anything.
for what it's worth, it confirms Tolkien flipped from saying "it might have been a troll" to an emphatic "it was an ent", when asked by fans by letter two years apart, a decade after LotR was published. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of people asked him, and he had to make a decision at some point what to say. It also shows he didn't say "it was a giant", like the text literally says (if somewhat equivocatingly), hence putting another nail in the coffin for that fantasy race that he'd once included (cf Tinúviel hair-lengthening song in the early material, a serious mention in The Hobbit ch 6 by Gandalf).
If only two people asked him, in 1964 and 1966, I would be extremely surprised.
To Doug: all the letters were unpublished at one point, and what was included in the 1981 Letters was driven in part by the publisher's constraints, as we now well know, not purely by 'this letter's answer is "real" so we'll include it'. Also note that I checked the auction listing of TCG letter 544 and I disagreed that Tolkien confirmed it was a troll, so now after I pointed this out, the summary accurately reflects the direct quote; hence the "might have been" above.
Fair enough. I certainly agree that the letters included in the original volume of Letters (or the revised and expanded edition) have any more validity than letters that were not included.
Doug kane while you're here, I want to express my appreciation for the legwork you put into tracking the material for Arda Reconstructed, whatever my thoughts about the more editorially-tinged comments. I would love it if the book was not priced so eye-wateringly (unlike many collectors here, I am aiming merely for roughly "one of each", not first editions etc), but I appreciate that small-market academic books are often more expensive for reasons of economies of lack-of-scale.
Oh, thanks to site mods for including that link in my last comment, I was only finding copies on Amazon Australia for nearly AU$80 for a paperback copy (and hundreds for a hardcover!).
You're welcome, if you mention a book on the site by all means include the book widget, it is the picture that looks like a book in the editing area, or you can add it manually
36
