10 Important Moments in Tolkien Fanfiction History by Dawn Walls-Thumma

Last week was the Organization for Transformative Works' International Fanworks Day with the theme of 10. Specifically, they asked for "10 Things" essays related to fandom.

Well, it so happens that ten is a significant number for me this year as well. Ten years ago, I began my work as an independent scholar in Tolkien fan studies and history. I began collecting the first set of data for the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey and did my first fan studies presentation at Mythmoot III.

What follows are ten moments in Tolkien fanfiction history that my ten years of research have shown me are especially key to the fic fandom's development across more than seven decades now. While I've done a lot of work in this area, I offer just one fan/scholar's perspective. I encourage others to make their own lists or comment with what you think I've overlooked!

I've also opted not to include any individual fanworks on my list. In addition to being highly specific to individual communities (i.e., most Silm writers have never heard of Sansûkh), this seemed a fraught endeavor, like Wikipedia's notability requirement where you're stuck trying to quantify why something is important, with the fallback too easily the appeal to authority and the tendency of that to favor creators who are already favored by the Powers That Be. So I avoided that quagmire altogether (though if you make your own list, you certainly don't have to!)

Finally, this article owes a lot to the various people who were willing to talk to me about their fandom experiences, especially those who indulge me on the SWG Discord's #fandom-studies channel. This list owes a lot to the ideas and insights shared there.

1. Dangerous Business: The First Tolkien Fanfics Are Posted

In the 1960 fanzine I Palantir, Tolkien fanfiction began its dangerous business and stepped out the front door. The zine contained the first two known works of Tolkien fanfiction: a pair of fictional works by two male authors: Departure in Peace by George Heap and A Study of the Hithlain of the Wood-Elves of Lórien by Arthur R. Weir.

Yes, this was before Star Trek and the popularly assumed origin of fanfiction. (No, it was not before Sherlock Holmes and its fanfiction.) There is little evidence to suggest, however, that Tolkien-based fanfiction assumed the megafandom status of the Baker Street Irregulars and Trekkers in its early decades. It creaked along with the occasional fic work in a fanzine before internet fandom rocketed it to megafandom status. Nonetheless, Tolkien fanfiction has existed for more than sixty years and, as far as we know, started with these two stories.

Heap and Weir's stories couldn't be more different, yet both anticipate Tolkien fanfiction as it will look six-plus decades and hundreds of thousands of stories later. Heap's "Departure in Peace" is an alternate history told from the point of view of Sauron, who (as this list will go on to show) would rise again decades later, as Dark Lords tend to do, and become one of the fandom's most written-about characters. Heap, like many fanfiction writers, is not satisfied with assuming Sauron as merely evil and leans on the possibility of biased historical texts to complicate his character, which many decades later, we still like to do. Weir's "A Study of the Hithlain," on the other hand, masquerades as a research article—in fact, it wasn't identified as a fanfic until very recently, and by the SWG's own Lindariel—and very much hearkens forth to Tolkien fanfic writers' love of showing their work in authors' notes. ("Hithlain" quite possibly also contains Tolkien fanfic's first original female character or OFC.)

2. King under the Mountain: The Silmarillion Is Published

Published in 1977, The Silmarillion slumbered for decades without much significance for the world of Tolkien fanfiction. Its publication certainly didn't invite a wave of stories, but it did create the circumstance where The Silmarillion—in all its incomplete, morally complex, murderous glory—would sit tidily on bookshop shelves to be found by fans decades later, drawn by the films to The Lord of the Rings (LotR) and The Hobbit, to contemplate what to read next.

LotR and The Hobbit are the sprinters of the fanfiction world, largely due to the films. Story stats on Fanfiction.net show that both films produced bursts of stories in their respective fandoms before plateauing shortly after the third film left theaters. But what my research has also revealed is that, while fanfic writers often come for the films, they stay for the books, and more often than not, those books eventually include The Silmarillion: 75% of the time, in fact, according to the 2020 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey.

The Silmarillion, on the other hand, is the marathoner. The first Silmarillion fanfic was posted on Fanfiction.net in September 2000; the mailing list Silmfics opened in 2002. At no point has the Silmarillion fic fandom been a megafandom, but site data from Fanfiction.net¹ show that, between the first available data in November 2001 and this writing in February 2024, the Silmarillion section has trucked along. It is not impacted by the films and doesn't have bursts and plateaus. Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data shows that, the longer people write fanfiction, the more likely they are to use The Silmarillion and related works, like Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth series. The Silmarillion fandom, in other words, collects fandom olds.

Many of these veteran fans are those who run events and maintain the "infrastructure" of the fandom. While The Silmarillion itself—which can serve as a gateway into the other posthumous works and all the deep analysis and questions they provoke—encourages longer-term engagement, so does that infrastructure. Events, challenges, and communities centered on fanfiction about Tolkien's world encourage people who might otherwise move on to more active fandoms to stick around.

3. Three Jewels: The Lord of the Rings Films

The LotR films are like the Silmarils. There are three of them. They are desired, beloved, and nearly unavoidable. And they changed the fannish world around them in significant ways.

The seismic impact of the LotR films on the number of people writing Tolkien fanfiction is their first impact. Many fanfiction writers today name the LotR films in their Tolkien origin story. But a fandom is more than just a lot of people doing a thing, and the LotR films impacted the Tolkien fandom—including its fic-writing communities—in ways that have endured beyond demographic shifts.

Fan studies scholar Amy Sturgis, in her 2004 article "'Make Mine Movieverse': How the Tolkien Fan Fiction Community Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Peter Jackson," makes the case that the films may provide Tolkien fanfiction writers with the "permission" needed to take their stories beyond the boundaries imposed by Tolkien's canon. By showing how a creator can both stay true to Tolkien—as most fans concur Peter Jackson and his team did in the LotR films—and make narrative choices that bend or even break the canon, fanfiction authors may come to see that it can indeed be done.²

She was right. While there was certainly tension between "movieverse" and "bookverse" fans in the early-mid 2000s, those divisions all but melted away in the ensuing years, and the fic fandom that emerged from the other side of the LotR films was one that was increasingly prepared to accept fanfiction exploring a variety of perspectives that pushed the boundaries of canon.

4. Comfort in Cirith Ungol: The Rise of Slash Pairings

Star Trek fandom is credited with the first slash fanfiction—in fact, the term "slash" comes from the slash mark that is the only thing to come between Kirk/Spock—with a vibrant fanzine culture dedicated to writing and sharing it. Although Tolkien fanfiction has been around longer, slash fiction does not seem to have been a part of its fandom's zines.³

This sure changed fast once Tolkien fanfiction hit the internet (a phenomenon described by Tolkien fandom historian John Lennard as equivalent to "throwing a tanker-load of gasoline on a camp-fire"⁴). The first Tolkien-specific archive, Least Expected, which was opened by Elwin Fortuna around 1999 as a Geocities site, was a slash archive. Another early slash author, Zhie was kind enough to talk to me about what early online Tolkien slash fandom looked like. Much was mailing-list-based: eGroups, OneList, and of course Yahoo! Groups (which eventually acquired the first two as well).

Slash fandom largely flew under the radar in those days—and deliberately so. "Much of it was, if you knew someone, you could be invited to places," Zhie told me. As Zhie recalls, this wasn't just being picked on by other fans but kicked out of groups and being "reminded of the moral or legal issues with what we were writing." Many Tolkien fanfiction groups banned slash, and objecting to same-sex pairings was seen as a reasonable stance in many places.

In 2024, it is impossible to imagine Tolkien fanfiction without slash. But perhaps more important than the pairings themselves is the way that slash writers—with their willingness to create content that, in some cases, they received death threats for—pushed Tolkien fanfiction and fandom in a new direction and prefigured the fandom we see today. As Zhie explained to me, slash groups tended to include all characters, groups, and pairings in a way that het groups did not. And of course there was the openness to pushing the boundaries of the canon and use fanfiction as a vehicle for social commentary. When you scroll through the #silmarillion tag on Tumblr today, much of that content is more closely connected with the early slash fandom than with the more venerable—and straight-laced—Tolkien fandom more generally.

5. The Fírima: eFiction Is Released … and Deceased

In 2004, web developer Rebecca Smallwood released an open-source automated archive script for the same reason people in fandom do a lot of things: a desire to share something they believe will benefit their community. Up to this point, most fanfiction archives were nonautomated and entirely coded by hand, a task that Rebecca described as "a massive pain in the behind" and sought to solve using a database. Rebecca was a hobbyist at the time (she's now a professional web developer) and, as she wrote to me in an email in 2022, "I really had no idea what I was getting into by releasing a script that would become so quickly popular—eFiction caused quite a splash when it was released, and there were quickly hundreds (if not thousands) of sites using the script."

Rebecca is also a Tolkien fan—she is the founder of The Council of Elrond—and the Tolkien fandom was one of the fandoms that seized her script and ran with it. After eFiction's release, not a single nonautomated Tolkien fanfiction archive that I have been able to document⁵ was built; all of them used some form of automated archiving software, and most of them (73% of Tolkien-specific archives opened in 2004 or later) used eFiction.

Arriving as it did in the lull after the films, eFiction is one key factor that sustained Tolkien fanfiction. Fans with minimal technical skills could open archives, most of which were affiliated with communities on Yahoo! Groups, LiveJournal, forums, or other platforms. In addition to archiving fanworks, these communities ran events and challenges, produced resources, and created social spaces for their members. (You are reading this on one of them—the SWG originated as an eFiction archive that arose from a Yahoo! Group and LiveJournal community.)

Rebecca handed off eFiction in 2004, and it has since changed hands several times. It has slowly deteriorated in the way that an unlived-in house will slump and fade over time, as web standards have evolved beyond its codebase. The ultimate result of this is the closure of those archives that once backed vibrant fan communities, ushering in a new era where most Tolkien fandom activity occurs on large, multifandom spaces.

6. Dip the Ladle: An Alphabet Soup of Big Events

To those used to fic fandom as it exists as of this writing, dominated by Archive of Our Own (AO3) and several large social sites (namely Tumblr), the Tolkien fandom of yore can seem fragmented. In fact, I often encounter that word when the topic of single-fandom independent archives comes up. The reality is that people typically belonged to multiple communities and read and posted to multiple archives. Archives and communities typically had very specific cultures, varying in importance they found the canon, Tolkien's authority, social justice, fanfiction-as-criticism, sexuality in fic, and more.

In addition to myriad small archives and communities, however, another phenomenon emerged from the first decade of the 2000s: the big fanfiction event. Most of these events are known just as readily by their abbreviated names: LotR Secret Santa (LotRSESA, started in 2003), Slashy Santa (2004), My Slashy Valentine (MSV, 2004), Middle-earth Fanfiction Awards (MEFAs, 2004), and Back to Middle-earth Month (B2MeM, 2006), among others. Where archives and communities were often highly specific, focusing on a single genre, character, or pairing, these events broadened their focus and attracted wide participation from across other fanfiction groups. The collaborative nature of most of these events, along with the anticipation of assignments and reveals, generated high levels of excitement in the fandom and helped to cohere a fandom that, otherwise, might have actually become fragmented. That isn't to say that all emotions associated with big events were positive. For example, the ending of the MEFAs was at least partly predicated upon its ongoing need to exclude explicit-rated fanfiction in a fandom that was quickly evolving to see such fic as harmless and that recognized that such policies impacted stories with LGBTQ+ content to a disproportionate degree.

But by and large, big events created a celebratory atmosphere and created cohesion at a time in Tolkien fandom history where debates around canon, slash, and the role of women in fanfiction could reach a fever pitch on discussion communities, and archive policies were sometimes perceived as exclusionary.

Most of these events continue to exist today, opposite of most Tolkien fanfiction archives, which have closed, speaking to the influence of deprecated software, namely eFiction, and the rise of AO3 on the survival of independent Tolkien-specific archives. The issue is not interest from Tolkien fans or a shortage of people to run projects but the technology to do so. Events are typically hosted on other platforms—most have migrated to AO3 from platforms like LiveJournal—negating the need to maintain software.

The mid-2000s did not mark the end of big Tolkien events. The Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang (TRSB, 2017) and Scribbles & Drabbles (2021) are two recent examples that similarly invite participation from across multiple smaller Tolkien fanfiction communities. Again, the desire to collaborate with other fans, celebrate Tolkien's work and fanworks based on it, and cross boundaries of genre and source can be seen in the ongoing interest generated by events old and new.

7. Dark Lords in Action: Sauron. And Angbang.

As noted above, the very first known Tolkien fanfiction was an apologia for Sauron. Fascination with Sauron has persisted across the entirety of Tolkien fanfiction—and probably not surprisingly. Sauron is central to the stories across multiple ages yet enticingly marginal and almost never seen.

To get a better handle on how Sauron has appeared across multiple decades of fanfiction, I asked Cameron Bourquein, an independent scholar specializing in Sauron's character and fandom reception of Sauron. Cameron was kind enough to answer my questions (mere hours before presenting at the Mythopoeic Society's Online MidWinter Seminar!) about how Sauron's depiction in fanfiction has changed over the years and, especially, how the Angbang pairing emerged.

Cameron notes that major works involving Sauron emerged in the late 1990s from Russian fandom, namely The Black Book of Arda (1992-1993) and The Last Ringbearer (1999). In English-language fandom, there was a "Sauron boom" in 2007-2009 on the SWG. But Sauron—and Angbang—didn't really take off until 2012-2013, years "coinciding with the FanFiction.net and LiveJournal purges, the release of the first Hobbit film, and the exodus of fans to sites like Tumblr and AO3," Cameron writes, going on to note: "This is the point at which the ship name 'Angbang' is coined."

Angbang—a term for the Melkor/Sauron pairing—wasn't invented in 2012; Cameron found the earliest example of it in 2002, on the first online Tolkien fanfiction archive, Least Expected. Its rise in 2012 again linked English- and Russian-language fandoms (and Japanese-language fandom as well), through the influence of the artwork of Russian artist Phobs.⁶ The pairing developed the kind of gravitational pull where fans remember becoming interested in The Silmarillion because of it. (Cameron appears on a two-hour episode about Angbang on the podcast Queer Lodgings if you want more of this history!)

But the fascination with Sauron, more widely, forms a thread stitched across the entirety of Tolkien fanfiction history, drawing together fans of all of the big three books and now multiple media productions, as well as fans who speak different languages and rarely interact.

8. The Tol Eressëans: Migration to Tumblr

In The Silmarillion, the Teleri are the ones who "tarried on the road." While the Noldor and Vanyar were eager to be off to bright new things, the Teleri were the ones who busied themselves picking wildflowers when they were supposed to be walking, cultivating a paralyzing terror of mountains and the sea, and investing wholeheartedly in lost causes like lingering around for their lovestruck missing king. When they do finally creak across the ocean, they don't even make it all the way. They can see the light of Valinor, but they still aren't quite willing to dive fully into it. Even once they arrive on mainland Aman, they never settle past the Pelóri.

Asking a Tolkien fanfiction writer to migrate platforms is like asking a Teler to hustle on to Valinor. If it happens, it will probably be slow and incomplete. (And I do not mean this as an insult. I have, after all, poured thousands of hours of effort into keeping a Tolkien fanfiction archive afloat even after most have closed. I still prefer posting to Dreamwidth than Tumblr and wish Tolkien fandom would go back to using it more. I'm Telerin too.)

In a recent article for this column, I highlighted evidence that Tolkien fanfiction writers and readers remain on older platforms longer than fanfiction writers and readers overall. We like our starlight (or LJ-like user interface) and know it and are not afraid to embrace this.

Lori Morimoto and Louisa Ellen Stein identify 2012 as the year that fanworks-centered communities began to migrate en masse to Tumblr. Migrations had happened before, spurred by purges, Terms of Service changes, and other fandom-hostile actions by the owners of various platforms; Tolkien fandom had largely stayed put. 2012 was different. As with many other major shifts in fandom, the change was due to no single factor but the synergy of multiple simultaneous events. In 2012, fandom's shift to Tumblr coincided with the release of the first Hobbit film so that Hobbit film fanfiction writers mostly entered the fandom via Tumblr.

Not all Tolkien fans were so moved. Like the Teleri, they tarried on the road. I remember many conversations with fellow fandom olds adamantly insisting that they would not use Tumblr or would do so only in conjunction with LiveJournal or, less commonly, Dreamwidth. And they did. But when the Russian owners of LiveJournal changed their Terms of Service in 2017 to ban "pro-gay propaganda," that was a breaking point for many of the lingering Teleri Tolkien fanfiction writers on LiveJournal … and there was by this point a lot of Tolkien content being posted on Tumblr. It was hard to resist going there, and almost everyone did.

Tumblr, as a platform, differs vastly from LiveJournal, and these differences shifted what fanfiction fandom looked like. Tumblr is more image-centric and less conducive to discussions. It is harder to limit one's content to a single community or group of fans, resulting in more viral controversies. Tumblr also put Tolkien fandom content side-by-side with posts from other fandoms in a way that mailing lists and journal platforms did not. If you were following a Tolkien fan's blog who picked up a new fandom, you suddenly saw that content on your dash, sprinkled amid your Hobbits and Elves. It became harder to be monofandom, and the ideas and practices of other fandoms began to influence Tolkien fandom as a result.

Chief of these influences was increased attention to social justice issues. Tolkien fanfiction writers have always used their work to comment on social justice, but discussions of social justice were less common—even verboten—in many Tolkien fandom spaces compared to other and multifandom communities. While RaceFail raged across fandom in 2009, for example, we were discussing the appropriateness of modernisms in Tolkienfic on the SWG's mailing list. As discussions of race, gender, sexuality, and disability become increasingly common in Tolkien fandom, it is hard not to see this shift as driven at least partly by the migration to Tumblr.

9. The Aftercomers: The Hobbit Films

As noted above, separating out the Hobbit films from wider trends in platform use is impossible. But even aside from that, the Hobbit films brought a wave of new fans. Similar to the movieverse LotR fans of the early 2000s, these fans were eager to engage with the content in different ways from the existing Tolkien fandom.

The Hobbit films also increased creative engagement with The Hobbit as a text in general. Prior to the trilogy's debut in December 2012, The Hobbit was the text least engaged with by Tolkien fanfiction writers of the big three (Silmarillion, Hobbit, and LotR). The Hobbit films, therefore, not only jumpstarted a fandom with flagging numbers but also opened a new area of the canon for critical and creative engagement.

10. Seven for the ____: Appreciation Weeks

If the big alphabet events defined the Tolkien fanfiction fandom in the mid 2000s, appreciation weeks represent the mid 2010s. In many ways, the two event formats are opposites. The big alphabet events were complex affairs, often managed by a team of mods with schedules, procedures, and policies and using a platform that allowed for archiving fanworks. They staked out a spot on the calendar each year and, as noted already, have in some cases continued uninterrupted for two decades. Appreciation weeks, on the other hand, are more loosely organized, casual, and ephemeral. An appreciation week on the calendar this year doesn't mean it will be the next. They also lean more heavily on tagging than archiving as a means to collect fanworks for the event with nearly all (maybe all?) Tolkien appreciation weeks centered on Tumblr, occasionally with an AO3 collection.

Fanlore documents that the first "fanweeks" originated in the early 2000s on DeviantArt. Tumblr fanweeks began in the mid 2010s, which holds true for Tolkien fandom as well. As far as I can tell, Tolkien-related appreciation weeks began in 2014 with Fëanorian Week. That year, there was an effort to organize further Silmarillion-themed appreciation weeks, which lasted for about two years before the lead admin stepped down. While no one took over this particular blog, appreciation weeks continued, sometimes organized on a fan's personal blog. When I looked back at our notes for the 2017 SWG challenges, we recorded Fëanorian, Silm, and Femslash Appreciation Weeks on our calendar and even offered challenge stamps for participants who used our challenge prompts as part of an appreciation week. As of this writing, in February 2024, the SWG's Around the World and Web section has ten appreciation or themed weeks queued in its schedule for the coming months.

Ultimately, appreciation weeks show Tolkien fanworks creators' commitment to promoting creativity in the fandom. They stake a positive approach, highlighting characters, pairings, time periods, genres, and other themes that their organizers want to see more fanworks for. Along with the larger events, they ensure that a day rarely goes by without something happening somewhere in the Tolkien fic fandom.

 

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When I decided to try the OTW's 10 challenge for my column this month, I thought it would make for a pretty relaxed topic. It certainly didn't! Deciding on ten "moments" that changed the Tolkien fanfiction fandom and nudged it toward where it is today was difficult in and of itself, and some of these "moments" were not those I was very familiar with from my own research and experience.

In the end, if I were to draw a theme across all ten, it is how they show a fandom history much in line with Tolkien's imagined history. Across sixty-plus years, we see more and more (and more diverse) fans writing fanfiction. We see decades of creativity and community-building. And we see the big fandom-changing moments in history take a eucatastrophic turn, welcoming more people and fanworks into Tolkien's world than ever before.

Notes

1. Why FanFiction.net and not AO3? FanFiction.net only allows a fanwork to belong to one fandom, where AO3 allows multiple fandom tags to be applied to a work. This makes analyzing trends on AO3 more difficult, as some fans tag for even minor details from a particular source, i.e., a Bagginshield fic that includes background from The Silmarillion tagged for The Hobbit and Silmarillion.
2. Sturgis, Amy H. "'Make Mine Movieverse': How the Tolkien Fan Fiction Community Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Peter Jackson" in Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, ed. Janet Brennan Croft (Mythopoeic Press, 2004), 283-305.
3. I checked with Elwin Fortuna and Zhie on this point; both are pre-internet fanfiction writers and part of the Tolkien slash community, and neither was aware of pre-internet Tolkien slash.
4. John Lennard, Tolkien's Triumph: The Strange History of The Lord of the Rings. (2013), Part Four.
5. When I say I "document" an archive, I mean that I have been able to confirm a year when the archive opened, the final year of activity (defined by at least one fanwork posted on the site), and the year of closure. See my Fan Studies Network North America 2023 poster presentation (Re)Archive: The Rise and Fall (and Rebound?) of Independent Fanfiction Archives for more.
6. I am intentionally not linking to this artist's gallery, as it includes Nazi ship art that I'm not interested in using the SWG to direct traffic towards. It's easy enough to find, if interested, and you've been forewarned.