Kulturkampf

[Uncle]

yes, and if the ideas are in flux and then you die, whatever the state is you left the ideas in when you died is canon

this feels like the achilles and the tortoise paradox, where the finish line means "fully established canon" and the argument is that you're always halfway there and never really there

the book says there's a wizard who many people referred to as gandalf

that is canon

if he had written a later work that said actually he was fred all along, then that would be canon, but he didn't write that, so it's not canon

the answer isn't "there's no canon"

it also doesn't matter what tradition he was writing from because he intended to tell a story about things that happened, not things that may have happened from one point of view

yes the story grew in the telling but (for example) if he had had the foresight to initially write Riddles in the Dark the way he ended up revising it, clearly he would've preferred that option, rather than needing to retcon it

he didn't intentionally write it wrong so he could go back and correct it as a nod to ancient literature