Silmarillion Writers' Guild

What is better than fandom data? MORE FANDOM DATA!!! This month's Cultus Dispatches column offers a rough, taken-with-a-huge-grain-of-salt comparison between the 2020 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey and the recent OTW 16th Anniversary Survey.

The surveys offer a few points of glancing comparison: time active in fandom, attendance at fan conventions, and use of fandom platforms. The latter offers some particularly interesting conclusions, offering evidence that Tolkien fans go all Galadriel when it comes to migrating from Lothlorien to new fandom sites and adopting new technology.

You can read "Duel of Surveys" here.

Although Star Trek and media fandom are often credited as the beginning of fanfiction, the first fanfiction texts are much older than that and oriented in book fandoms. (The first fanfics are older even than the term fanfiction!) The first two known Tolkien fanfics appeared in the 1960 fanzine I Palantir, and they couldn't be more different.

This month's Cultus Dispatches column analyzes these two old fics, in particular how they illustrate the fan studies concept of affirmational and transformational fandom. Transformational fandom is often depicted as the fertile field where fanworks grow, but Tolkien fanworks (and probably many other fandoms' fanworks as well) defy this, drawing on affirmational elements oriented in mastery of canon and consideration of Tolkien's authority. The earliest Tolkien fanfics not only show how both "types of fandom" can give rise to fanworks but how, even in fanworks that clearly belong to one or the other, elements of the other fandom approach are essential to making a particular story work.

You can read the article "Affirmational Fandom, Transformational Fandom, and Two Old Tolkien Fanfics" here.

Tolkien's canon is complicated. That's an understatement. There are dozens of books presenting multiple versions—some of them contradictory, difficult to date, and sometimes hard to even read—and that's before one considers the many adaptations, fanworks and fan interpretations, scholarship, and myriad other "takes" on Middle-earth.

This month's Cultus Dispatches column is one of our Fandom Voices columns, where we present a question or two to the community in an attempt to capture a range of fan experiences with a topic. We asked participants how they define canon and, if they make fanworks, how they use that canon in their fanworks. We received a record number of responses, many of them going into great depth, and so will be dividing this iteration of Fandom Voices into two columns, beginning with how fans define Tolkien's canon. However, you can read all of the responses now.

How Tolkien fans define canon mirrors the complexity of the canon itself. We agree on very little (although many people noted the value of different approaches and the importance of tolerance), but the result is a decades-strong fandom where vibrant discussion and creative interpretation of the legendarium have lulled but never completely ceased. Respondents wrangled with how to handle the canon's many contradictions, the place of Christopher Tolkien's editorial work, the historical and mythical framework of the legendarium and the impact of that approach, and where adaptations and fanworks belong in terms of canon, among many other issues raised and discussed.

You can read the first part of "Fandom Voices: Defining Canon and Using Canon in Fanworks" here.

Also note that our Fandom Voices surveys never close. If you didn't get a chance to share your views and want to, it is not too late! We will continue to add new responses to the collection as they come in (including pulling from new responses for the second part of the article. You can respond to the "Defining Canon" survey here.

Finally, we are in the midst of a series of Cultus Dispatches articles focusing on canon in the Tolkien fandom. Cultus Dispatches is always open to contributions from all members of the fandom, so if you know of a creator or fanwork that takes an interesting approach to canon, or if you have another idea related to canon and fandom, contact our moderators and pitch your idea! Our reference editors will support new researchers and writers through the process, so don't let unfamiliarity with research writing dissuade you from sharing your ideas with us.

Fans who have been reading and writing Tolkien-based fanfiction for more than ten years quite possibly remember a time when "femslash" wasn't even a term. While slash sites nominally accepted it, it really wasn't being written, and it's no wonder: As the last several Cultus Dispatches columns in our series on writing about women in fanfiction have detailed, the Tolkien fandom went through a pair of phases where writing about women and writing slash were controversial acts. Caught in the crosshairs of this dual intolerance (it was about ladies! and it was gay!!!), femslash really didn't stand a chance.

But, as we also detailed in last month's interview with Elleth, a concerted effort by fans to not just normalize but celebrate writing about women—and femslash in particular—has pushed back the tides of intolerance and introduced a whole new genre to the fandom. This month's column Femslash Is a Political Act (and Other Observations of Tolkien Fandom's Genre Non Grata) by Dawn Felagund looks at Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data about femslash: how many people write it, how many people read it, and who exactly are among those groups. The results show that femslash has skyrocketed in popularity among readers in recent years, portending that maybe it won't always be the new genre on the block (much less a "genre non grata"), possibly due to its use as a political expression by fans who feel marginalized based on gender, sexual orientation, or both.

If you have been writing or reading Tolkien fanfiction for any length of time, you probably remember Mary Sue. In the early-mid 2000s, she haunted the margins of our stories: the specter of a woman permitted into Tolkien's world to an extent that she changed the plot or even the characters. (Cue horror-movie scream.) Worry about Mary Sue—and whether our carefully crafted female characters were actually a Mary Sue, much like the slasher-film villain you only think is dead but is actually traipsing toward you with insidious purpose—permeated discussions of female characters and led some writers to abandon the idea of writing women at all. It just didn't seem worth it.

This month, in our Cultus Dispatches column, we begin a series on writing women in fanfiction. The first article in the series looks at data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey and what it shows us about the once fraught endeavor of adding a woman to your fanfiction.

Thankfully, the data shows, it is far less fraught today. Most fanfiction writers endeavor to add women to their stories, according to the data, and many use fanfiction as a vehicle to critique and repair Tolkien's depiction of women in the legendarium. But the fandom's historic distaste for seeing women in fanfiction lurks in the data as well.

You can read the article Writing Women in Tolkien Fanfiction: An Analysis of the Data here to learn more about what analysis of the survey data revealed. And if you create or read/view fanworks with women characters and wish to contribute to our latest Fandom Voices collection, you can contribute your memories of writing, creating, and reading about female characters here. Finally, don't forget that Cultus Dispatches is always open to contributions, so if you would like to contribute to our series about women characters in fanworks, comment here or email us and pitch your idea!

This month's Cultus Dispatches is a tribute to the Library of Moria, which is closing after twenty years online. In addition to a vibrant and active history, as the largest Tolkien slashfic archive online--and at a time when slash writers were often openly harassed in the fandom--they played a vital role in helping slash and femslash become mainstream genres.

Note that this is an open article, so if LoM was important to you and you want to contribute a reflection or share your memories about the site, I will continue to add them as they come in. (If you're not sure where to start, I have a list of questions I was using while interviewing people for this article.) Please leave a comment or reach out via email to moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org.