Tolkien fan fiction

Tolkien fan fiction is fantasy fiction, often published on the Internet, by Tolkien fans, in enormous quantities. It is based either directly on some aspect of J. R. R. Tolkien's books on his fantasy world of Middle-earth, or on a depiction of this world, especially in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film series or other film depictions of that world. A wide range of types of writing have resulted, such as homoerotic slash fiction and several strands of feminist storytelling.

Much fan fiction, including slash, is written by women. They often select as subjects Tolkien's minor female characters, where the limited detail provided affords them wide freedom to write as they please. An alternative is to invent non-canonical characters, again often women; a danger is of creating Mary Sue characters embodying their personal wish-fulfilment. Scholars have discussed the validity of fan fiction, given Tolkien's apparent dislike of the genre, but noting that he had indicated the possibility of "other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama."^{[T 1]} Scholars have begun to accept fan fiction as one of multiple genres within the Middle-earth tradition.

Early fan fiction was published in fanzines, followed by mailing lists and other Internet platforms. The genre accelerated with the arrival of the World Wide Web and specialised websites for fan fiction. These had rules governing what could be written, which may however have helped to ensure that writers were well read and insightful. Much fan fiction is potentially in breach of copyright law, even on non-commercial websites.

J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar of English literature, a philologist interested in language and poetry from the Middle Ages, especially that of Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Europe. His professional knowledge of poetical works such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shaped his fictional world of Middle-earth. His intention to create what has been called "a mythology for England"^{[T 1]} led him to construct not only stories but a fully-formed world with its own languages, peoples, cultures, and history.^[1] He is best known for writing the fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.^[2]

Tolkien fandom grew rapidly in many countries after the appearance of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film series in 2001–2003, to the extent that by 2006 it was described as "burgeoning".^[3]

Fan fiction arguably existed in the Middle Ages with the production of diverse explorations of Arthurian legend.^[3] In modern times, significant production began in 1967 with a Star Trek fanzine, Spocknalia.^[3] In the 21st century, the Internet offered many affordances to fans wishing to publish their own writing, with a wide variety of blogs, discussion groups, lists, live journals, role-playing games and other media formats.^[3]

Susan Booker, writing in the 2004 scholarly collection Tolkien on Film, notes that her own experience of interacting with fans bears out the general belief that "the fan fiction universe is composed mainly of the female sex".^[4] Some scholars have identified fan fiction more specifically as "a genre of resistance against and reparation of media products written by, for, and about heterosexual, cisgender, white, able-bodied males", implying that both authors and readers are women. Dawn Walls-Thumma states that this may cause the genre to be discounted by scholars. Another assumption is that fans choose such feminist or slash genres to criticise or amend Tolkien's perceived worldview; but the goals are not necessarily linked, and women's fan fiction is not always "fully resistant" either.^[5] Karen Viars and Cait Coker write that while Tolkien was certainly not a misogynist, "the vast majority of the main characters" in Middle-earth are male, while many Tolkien fans, possibly a majority, are women.^[6] Una McCormack comments that despite plentiful "excellent Tolkien fan fiction" by female authors, a small number of stories by men have gathered much of the attention: in particular, the 1999 The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov, and the 2010 Mirkwood by Steve Hillard.^[7]

At least one fan fiction writer, Marion Zimmer Bradley, became a successful novelist.^[6] Early in her career, she wrote the 1961 The Jewel of Arwen, filling in how Arwen came to have the jewel that she gave to Frodo, beyond what Tolkien narrates.^[8] Also in 1961, she wrote the essay "Of Men, Halflings, and Hero Worship", analysing Éowyn's supposed love for the hero Aragorn, and "the strong love between Frodo and Samwise".^[9] This was first published in a fanzine, Astra's Tower, and later reprinted in a scholarly collection.^[6] In 1962 she wrote another story, "A Meeting in the Hyades", bringing Aragorn into the world of her 1962 novel The Sword of Aldones.^[6]

Fan attention has, Karen Viars and Cait Coker write,^[6][10]

unsurprisingly focused on many of those topics Tolkien scholars are fond of today—homosexual overtones..., racism..., Tolkien's literary sources and forebears, and the roles of women in his world."^[6]

Slash fiction imagines homoerotic relationships between Middle-earth characters, such as Sam Gamgee with Frodo Baggins or other partners.^[3] Anna Smol notes that the "enormous outpouring of fan fiction and fan art" has greatly increased discussion of sexuality in The Lord of the Rings.^[12] Tolkien's account of the male intimacy between Frodo and Sam, mirroring his wartime experience of the officer-batman relationship, has, Smol writes, "provoke[d] an active engagement with the story that can lead to a questioning of ideas about adult male and female sexuality, heroic masculinity, and the possibilities for male intimacy."^[12] She adds that such engagement can equally be through fan fiction. This may help in promoting tolerance of homosexuality, though she notes that Tolkien fan fiction's heterosexual female authors may be "expressing their own sexual desires through their identification with attractive male characters".^[12]

Between July and September 2020, the cartoonist Molly Knox Ostertag published an illustrated fan fiction story about Frodo and Sam, called "In All the Ways There Were".^[13][14]

Una McCormack discusses Junot Díaz's 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, where the protagonist is Dominican-American like the novelist, and finds himself excluded from Tolkien's account of Middle-earth when he reads what seem to him to be the racist words "out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls...", and has "to stop, his head and heart hurting too much".^{[7][T 2]}

Kirill Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer has variously been called fan fiction, a parody, and an alternate account of The Lord of the Rings, from the point of view of the race of Orcs. Laura Miller, writing in Salon, likens the book to Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a slave's retelling of Gone with the Wind. She comments that it "may be the most persuasive example yet" of the fan fiction genre.^[15]

The small amount of detail about several of Tolkien's female characters has left much of the backstory of these women in particular as a blank canvas, allowing fans to reimagine Middle-earth's women as they like.^[6][3] Much attention has been given to Rosie Cotton, Sam's girlfriend. Some fans explore "the skill, patience, and wisdom of Rosie the healer and helpmeet."^[3] Others look at "Rosie the sensual hobbit", adventurous in the bedroom, with the possibility that Sam is at the same time involved sexually with Frodo; and indeed that Rosie too has other lovers, making her relationship with Sam symmetrical.^[3] The "Pretty Good Year" series features polyamory with Rosie, Sam, and Frodo.^[3] Yet another strand sees Rosie as a "vampire hobbit" with supernatural powers; or, she gets hold of the One Ring,and begins to wield it.^[3]

Other storytellers have worked from the small hints provided by Tolkien about women such as Finduilas, Denethor's wife who "died untimely", or Ioreth the talkative woman in Gondor's House of Healing. Una McCormack notes that Ioreth is a servant, a working class woman, the kind of person missing from Tolkien's recorded history.^[7] When women write about such characters, in her view, they "perform acts of transformation, reparation, and radicalization on The Lord of the Rings, establishing female presences, queer presences, and urban working class presences, in a text chiefly concerned with the masculine and the heroic".^[7]

Some fans have developed the Appendices-only Lord of the Rings character Lothíriel, daughter of Imrahil, wife of Éomer, and mother of Elfwine the Fair, who becomes King of Rohan.^{[6][T 3][T 4]} Since Tolkien has said so little about her, she forms in Viars and Coker's words "the perfect space for the fan writer to play in Middle-earth", since "she may be beautiful or plain, clever or foolish, obedient or rebellious", according to the writer's taste.^[6] They note that fan versions of Lothíriel often render her either as a "contemporary romance novel heroine", or as a "neo-Victorian".^[6]

Another strategy, described by McCormack as "the simplest... available to a writer attempting to make up for the lack of women in The Lord of the Rings", is to invent women and to write about them. She suggests that in this way the fan fiction writer "is arguably reinscribing a history that has somehow been lost in translation or transmission", since, she writes, quoting "Firerose", the civilisations of Middle-earth could not have survived with the sex ratios that Tolkien documents for the noble families in the Appendices.^[7] Firerose's story "Missing" creates Lóriniel, younger sister of Faramir, whose short and tragic life ends during the time described in The Lord of the Rings. Faramir discovers from scraps and small clues that his father Denethor, mad with grief and despair, "has turned to Lóriniel for sexual comfort, eliding wife and daughter."^[7]

Sirpa Leppänen writes that some women intentionally compensate or correct for the paucity of women in Tolkien. She gives as example the story "Letters from Bree" by "Arwen Imladviel", in which Estella Brandybuck brushes her adopted daughter Eowyn "of Brandy Hall"'s hair: she isn't surnamed Brandybuck as she was born out of wedlock. Leppänen comments that the female author skilfully imitates Tolkien's prose style, but creates a "much more diffuse" narrative with female characters who lead domestic lives and conduct "personal and intimate discussions with each other", in marked contrast to Tolkien's epic narrative and "heroic adventures".^[17]

The creation of new, "original" or non-canonical characters brings dangers; one is that fan fiction groups especially despise so-called "Mary Sue" characters.^[7] These represent wished-for personalities of their authors, and are accordingly unnaturally perfect and idealised.^[7][18] Yet another genre is "Middle-earth tourism", escapist fantasy in which someone is transported from normal life into an adventure in the imagined world.^[18]

"I would ... leave scope for
other minds and hands"^{[T 1]}

Tolkien's attitude to adaptations	Media
Approved of	Painting Y Music Y Drama Y
Actively disliked	Film N
Disliked an instance; Not in 'approved' list	Fiction ?

In 1966, Tolkien wrote to his publishers complaining that a male fan had sent him an "impertinent contribution to my troubles", a draft of a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. He described the fan as "this young ass" and the sequel as "tripe". He went on: "I once had a similar proposal, couched in the most obsequious terms, from a young woman, and when I replied in the negative, I received a most vituperative letter."^{[T 5]}

In a letter to another publisher, Milton Waldman of Collins, some years earlier, Tolkien wrote of his intended mythology for England that

I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.^{[T 1]}

Megan Abrahamson, writing in Mythlore, comments that this "apparently rather magnanimously" opens the way to fans to create a range of materials to fill out gaps in the Tolkien canon: but that the next word in the letter is "Absurd!" She notes that the thing Tolkien was calling absurd was his own wish to create a mythology; but that all the same, the word "also makes suspect fans' use of his quote as a kind of letter of marque to write music and fanfiction" based on his Middle-earth writings.^[19] Renée Vink notes both Tolkien's "young ass" remark, and the ambiguity of his "Absurd!", adding that fiction was not among the media he listed in his scoping of extensions by other hands, and that he disliked dramatic (film) adaptations of his works, as recorded in his letters.^[20]

Abrahamson argues that while Tolkien may have seemed hostile to fan fiction, at least if it was not good, Tolkien's own views about leaving freedom for the reader, rather than having the author dominate using allegory, leave open the possibility that readers might choose to write.^[19] Indeed, she comments, Tolkien's own writings can be seen as a fan author, both for the way he constantly developed elements of the Silmarillion myths, and for his reworking of medieval tales such as in his The Fall of Arthur.^[19] Further, she writes, his discussion in "On Fairy-Stories" about the way a storyteller uses many sources, "the bones of the ox out of which [the soup] had been boiled", admits that each author's story is only partly original, and that other authors cannot be blamed "for using nearly the same bones as he has [done] to make their soups".^[19]

In 2012, Merlin DeTardo, writing in Tolkien Studies, commented that readers would learn more by reading Tolkien fan fiction than from the "half-humorous" The Unofficial Hobbit Handbook. He added that Mark Wolf's "decision to set aside fan fiction" in his Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, a book heavily based on Tolkien's writings, "because it is not authorized or 'canonical' seems likely to prove misguided in the long term."^[21] In the same place, Jason Fisher wrote that Lynnette Porter's The Hobbits: The Many Lives of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, which looked "more thorough[ly]" than some other texts at Tolkien adaptations in film, had included hobbit fan fiction.^[21] On the other hand, Fisher criticised Mark Bednarowski's "A Wizard for All Seasons" article for providing "nothing more than plot rehearsal, at times blooming purple and bordering on fan fiction."^[21]

In 2013, Renée Vink argued that Tolkien fan fiction should be treated as a form of literary criticism. She stated that "the only reason"^[20] why the many literary prequels, sequels, and portraits of characters from works such as Homer's Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphoses, Jane Eyre (as in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), not to mention Tolkien's own The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún from Norse myth, are not called fan fiction is that the works on which they are based are out of copyright, so the novels are legal. Further, she argued, quality cannot be the criterion: the fact that Neil Gaiman wrote an unpublishable tale based on The Chronicles of Narnia did not make his writing "suddenly deteriorate".^[20] Vink called fan stories "the ultimate form of readers' response", as in reader-response criticism.^[20] She quoted the screenwriter Deborah Kaplan:^[20]

The same fans who analyse character in the source text so closely will be writing fan fiction that plays into that interpretive and critical activity. Character analyses, rather than being constructed in a nonfiction essay, are constructed in a fictional environment ... Because both the producers and consumers of the fan works are aware of the source materials that are extratextual to the fan productions, a rich interpretive space is created...^[22]

Vink added that authors inevitably lose full control of a work once it is published, as readers can freely interpret whatever is written. In Tolkien's case, she stated, his pretence of translating and of editing supposedly found manuscripts invites critical scrutiny and analysis; she noted that fan writers add "fore- or afterwords, footnotes or even essays complementing their stories".^[20] One of her examples of such "interpretative fanfic" is the story "Like the Heathen Kings of Old". This, she wrote, suggests that Denethor's attempt to burn his son Faramir alongside himself is a human sacrifice, and that the heathen kings were the "renegade Númenoreans who made human sacrifices in the temple of Melkor in Armenelos with Sauron as a high priest – the same Sauron under whose shadow Denethor had fallen", in her view a non-obvious but logical conclusion.^[20]

In 2019, Dieter Petzold described fan fiction, "grown to an enormous size thanks to the internet",^[18] as one of several types of "sub-sub-creations", alluding to Tolkien's theory of sub-creation. He sets it alongside parodies such as the 1969 Bored of the Rings, "pastiches or imitations" such as Terry Brooks's 1977 The Sword of Shannara, and indeed the whole of modern fantasy fiction.^[18]

The first Tolkien fan pieces were published in fanzines: a poem in 1959, a piece of fiction in 1960.^[24] Until the early 1990s, publication was in copied sheets or fanzines distributed by mail or handed out at meetings.^[24] With the availability of Internet media such as Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, and personal websites from 1992 onwards, fan fiction was increasingly shared online.^[24] From 2000, fans were posting poems, stories and humorous pieces to the FanFiction.net website.^[24][25] Growth was greatly accelerated by the appearance in 2001–2003 of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.^[24]

Soon after Jackson's films came out, mailing lists started to be replaced by specialised archives. For example, the Silmarillion Writers' Guild provides an archive of fan fiction based on The Silmarillion; it was founded by Dawn Walls-Thumma ("Dawn Felagund").^[24] The Many Paths to Tread archive is open to Tolkien fan fiction more generally;^[24] it was founded in 2009 and run by moderators known as Cathleen, Dreamflower, Pearl Took, and Dawn Felagund.^[26]

Walls-Thumma writes that the "insularity, the sometimes high degree of specialization, the almost xenophobia" of the mailing lists towards people who saw things differently "were kept in place by the archives."^[24] In addition, some archives imposed rules to exclude "the most egregious" genres.^[24]

Walls-Thumma's 2015 analysis of rules imposed by fan fiction archives^[24]

Archive	Boundaries	Approach
Open Scrolls Archive[27]	Modern characters, film actors, Mary Sue stories, slash fiction all excluded	Bold, unsubtle, effective
Stories of Arda[28]
Henneth-Annûn Story Archive[29]	"academic, professional, masculine, objective" style	"More subtle", effective

Walls-Thumma suggests that these barriers, and the resulting fragmentation of fans into groups that functioned as communities, has helped to create fan fiction writers "who are not only well read but also insightful and critical of Tolkien's texts."^[24] Web access has enabled extensive public dialogue between fan fiction creators and other fans. An analysis classified community responses into praise; challenge and multi-person discussion of interpretation; discussion of (romantic) relationships; and references to Tolkien's original text, as authority. The study noted that those involved were probably already keen Tolkien fans, and had nearly always read Tolkien's Middle-earth books.^[30]

A different boundary is copyright, with enormous numbers of published stories from fan authors who have become able to communicate with a large audience.^[32] Smol describes fan writing in the Western world as "on the fringes of copyright law", noting that Tolkien fan authors know they cannot sell their work, but instead shelter behind the anonymity of pseudonyms and "disclaimers stating that they acknowledge the copyrights and are writing only out of respect for the original."^[12] Booker describes fan fiction on the Web as an "outlaw practice", since "most fan fiction sites do actually violate strict copyright interpretations, despite posted disclaimers."^[4]

Brittany Johnson suggests in the Minnesota Law Review that fan authors generally "presume that their use of the underlying copyrighted work is fair", while "creators often see fan fiction as infringing and send takedown notices to prompt its removal."^[33] She quotes George R. R. Martin's instruction: "don't write in my universe, or Tolkien's, or the Marvel universe, or the Star Trek universe, or any other borrowed background ... Using someone else's world is the lazy way out."^[33] In her view, copyright law needs to be adapted to cope. She proposes a two-level licensing scheme, which would permit non-commercial publication on a website, but would retain current owner's rights for commercial uses if a fan author wanted to go beyond free web publication.^[33]

Fan fiction has a special status in Russia. Tania Su Li Cheng writes that Lenin's statement that "Art belongs to the people" is taken as an "excuse to translate and/or rewrite culturally important content from the West".^[31] She notes that this has empowered Russians like the microbiologist Nick Perumov to produce Tolkien fan fiction like his 1991 Ring of Darkness, and a publisher to print it, effectively ignoring Western copyright law.^[31] The zoologist and paleontologist Kirill Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer has similarly been successful in Russia.^[7] It has been translated into several European languages, but has not been released commercially in English, for fear of legal action by the Tolkien Estate.^[15]