Corey Olsen via Rings and Realms YouTube

Corey Olsen, who has dubbed himself the Tolkien Professor, recently made an absurd claim “that there’s no such thing really as canon in Tolkien” while defending The Rings of Power.

Ian McKellen as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), New Line Cinema

In a clip uploaded to The Lord of the Rings on Prime’s official account on X, Olsen states, “First thing to specify is that there’s no such thing really as canon in Tolkien. Tolkien’s ideas were ever evolving.”

Ironically, he then cites the text of The Lord of the Rings, “In the text of The Lord of the Rings, we are told that Gandalf, with the other Wizards arrived at around year 1000 of the Third Age. And in his later years, he was playing with the of maybe Gandalf coming sooner, maybe some of the Wizards coming in the Second Age, and taking part in the Wars of The Rings of Power.

Olsen’s claim is completely absurd on its face. He makes it even more absurd by immediately citing the canon.

In fact, in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories” he makes it clear that one becomes a successful sub-creator by indeed adhering to the canon of the story. Tolkien explained, “What really happens is that the storymaker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.”

“The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside,” he continued. “If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.”

J.R.R. Tolkien via Sidh Aniron YouTube

Furthermore, Tolkien specifically noted that there is canon in The Lord of the Rings in a letter sent to Forrest J. Ackerman wherein he provided comments on a film treatment for The Lord of the Rings by Morton Zimmerman.

In Letter 210, Tolkien wrote, “If [Zimmerman] and/or others do so, they may be irritated or aggrieved by the tone of many of my criticisms. If so, I am sorry (though not surprised). But I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.”

Next, he declared, “The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.”

Sean Astin as Samwise Gamgee and Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), Warner Bros. Pictures

From there Tolkien lampoons the script and its deviations from his canon. At one point he even notes, “Why on earth should [Zimmerman] say that the hobbits ‘were munching ridiculously long sandwiches’? Ridiculous indeed. I do not see how any author could be expected to be ‘pleased’ by such silly alterations. One hobbit was sleeping, the other smoking.”

He even criticized how the Tower of Orthanc was depicted, “The spiral staircase ‘weaving’ round the Tower [Orthanc] comes from [Zimmerman’s] fancy not my tale. I prefer the latter. The tower was 500 feet high. There was a flight of 27 steps leading to the great door; above which was a window and a balcony.”

Clearly, there is canon in Tolkien. He explained in an essay why staying true to the canon is important and meticulously rebuked a treatment for a film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings for not staying true to his canon.

Bernard Hill as King Theoden in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), Warner Bros. Pictures

What do you make of Olsen’s claim about canon?