- Crossover point: I'm not the nominator for this tag, but I would argue there is at least some shared worldbuilding implicit across many of Tolkien's works. For example, Ilbereth, the Elf in The Father Christmas Letters, signs his name in Tengwar at one point, which is the script used by the Elves of Middle-earth; Roverandom is taken to the edge of the world to see a land heavily implied to be Valinor from the Middle-earth legendarium; The Adventures of Tom Bombadil contains some poems that are explicitly set in Middle-earth and some that are not. I would have taken this tag to be an invitation to explore these connections, some of which are more obvious than others.
Tolkien's view on The Hobbit, LOTR and the Silm was that they represented a lost historical period for our own Earth, so theoretically any of his fictional works set in our world or a version of it (which is most of the smaller canons) could be linked to Middle-earth.
- Silmarillion disambiguations - no strong feelings either way. HoME technically also includes The Book of Lost Tales, but I deliberately nominated BoLT separately, because that version of "canon" is so wildly different from the drafts that followed and many of the characters never appear again. (ETA - it technically also includes early drafts of LOTR, but realistically I think most LOTR fans would just look to the LOTR tag set for prompts.)
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- Crossover point: I'm not the nominator for this tag, but I would argue there is at least some shared worldbuilding implicit across many of Tolkien's works. For example, Ilbereth, the Elf in The Father Christmas Letters, signs his name in Tengwar at one point, which is the script used by the Elves of Middle-earth; Roverandom is taken to the edge of the world to see a land heavily implied to be Valinor from the Middle-earth legendarium; The Adventures of Tom Bombadil contains some poems that are explicitly set in Middle-earth and some that are not. I would have taken this tag to be an invitation to explore these connections, some of which are more obvious than others.
Tolkien's view on The Hobbit, LOTR and the Silm was that they represented a lost historical period for our own Earth, so theoretically any of his fictional works set in our world or a version of it (which is most of the smaller canons) could be linked to Middle-earth.
- Silmarillion disambiguations - no strong feelings either way. HoME technically also includes The Book of Lost Tales, but I deliberately nominated BoLT separately, because that version of "canon" is so wildly different from the drafts that followed and many of the characters never appear again. (ETA - it technically also includes early drafts of LOTR, but realistically I think most LOTR fans would just look to the LOTR tag set for prompts.)