Libraries at the Edge of Middle-earth: Fanworks, Archives, and Communities as Heritage by Dawn Walls-Thumma

Find the presentation slideshow here.

Listen to the audio of the presentation here.

Article 9 of the 1964 International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites states that restoration of heritage sites must "respect … original material and authentic documents" and "stop at the point where conjecture begins." But today, as we consider Tolkien as heritage, I want us to not stop where conjecture begins.

Tolkien himself articulated a theory of literary art that depended on the imaginative transgression of boundaries. He wrote eloquently to several correspondents, including Christopher Tolkien, about the allure of skylines barely glimpsed and stories only partly told. His own work is full of these "unattainable vistas," and the longing to see more of what lies over the next rise in the road is part of why many of us return over and over again to Middle-earth. Today, I want to consider a fan practice that treads that road to the edge of Middle-earth to reveal new horizons: fanfiction. Critical heritage studies see heritage as not only the preservation and presentation of the past but as identity-building among local communities. I hope to show that Tolkien fanfiction archives and writers have served both purposes: preserving the texts we all love but also acting as the locus of conversations about how Tolkien's works continue to find relevance in a rapidly changing world.

A Brief History of [Tolkien] Fanfiction Archives¹

Before considering how fanfiction archives function to preserve Tolkien fandom heritage and themselves can become heritage, it's important to clarify what exactly a fanfiction archive is, how it fits within the broader communities that arise around Tolkien-based fanfiction, and how these entities have evolved over the past thirty years.

When you hear the word archive, what comes to mind? Rows of shelves, echoing ceilings, and locked drawers? Hushed voices and white cotton gloves and blackout curtains drawn against the ravening glare of the sun? Archivists who speak dead languages and who softly tread amid byzantine filing systems?

Fanfiction archives are in fact none of these things, which is part of why they play a unique role in preserving, promoting, and expanding what we might consider "Tolkien as heritage." Or rather—fanfiction archives have evolved to be none of these things.

The primary difference, present across the entirety of the history of Tolkien fanfiction archives, is that archives do not exist in isolation but grow out of communities. As Abigail De Kosnik explains in her 2016 book Rogue Archives, these kinds of fanfiction archives, which she terms community archives, arise as a means to preserve the work of community members in a more permanent and accessible form.

Tolkien-based fanfiction, first documented in 1960, was collected in fanzines, amateur and low-budget publications produced by fans and often exchanged within social circles and fandom societies.

When home internet arrived in the 1990s, fandom moved online too, and fanfiction was quick to follow. The first online Tolkien fanfiction archive that I have been able to locate is the Valar Guild, established in 1997 and still online and active today. Like the ages of Arda, the eras of fanfiction archives can also be divided into three, with the first two ages likewise largely underwater, metaphorically speaking, by their end.

The first age of archives existed on nonautomated static websites. Although affiliated with communities—online mailing lists and forums were most common—the archive itself functioned to preserve fanworks. Because the pages were designed in static HTML, there was no community interaction. Pages had to be designed by hand. Stories likewise had to be marked up and uploaded to the site by hand, and all index pages had to be likewise updated, again by hand. If this sounds laborious, it was and largely explains why, like the First Age of Arda, this age of archives also came to an abrupt and dramatic end. In 2023, I collected data on fanfiction archives for a presentation at the Fan Studies Network North America conference and found that nonautomated archives were active for a median of just two years. Like First Age heroes too, they were short-lived.

During this era, however, fanfiction archives functioned more like what tends to come to mind when we think of an archive. An archivist generally chose an area of speciality and selected works that she—because most fanfiction archivists were and are women—felt represented that category of fanfiction well. In this way, the first nonautomated archives were akin to their fanzine predecessors in that they were more tightly bound by a finite number of resources available for their production, whether paper, webspace, or an archivist's time. It was relatively easy for anyone to set up a nonautomated archive, but the curation of stories and limited resources, namely time, meant the community itself had less input on what stories were preserved.

The second age of archives was the era of the automated archive. The first automated archives were built from custom code but, in 2003, the release of the open-source software eFiction made anyone a potential archivist. Now, authors could add their own stories without the help of an archivist. Furthermore, community and interactive elements such as comments, shoutboxes, and bridges to forum software meant that readers were not passively reading preserved stories but were able to actively discuss them.

The impact of eFiction cannot be overstated. I have only been able to document two nonautomated archives from 2004 onward—and both of these eventually migrated to eFiction. Most importantly, by democratizing archival labor, automated archives far outlived their nonautomated predecessors, active for a median of ten years compared to two years mentioned earlier for nonautomated archives.

Automation and democratization of fanfiction archives produced two major changes that shifted how archives contributed to Tolkien as heritage. First, because stories were no longer being curated by a single person or few people, stories better represented the community's culture. Stories were more numerous and more diverse. Secondly, as archives came to include interactive features, such as commenting systems, the role of archives shifted from preservation to conversation. Previously, discussions were located in affiliated communities, apart from the archives. Automated archives allowed some of those discussions to shift onto the archive itself. Both the increased ease of sharing a story and the interaction that became an assumed—and cherished—part of the process meant that fanfiction was incorporated more fluidly into the conversation. A story may generate discussion in its comments or provoke other fanworks that respond to it.

As with nonautomated archives, the bar to creating an automated archive was drastically lowered with the introduction of eFiction: It took less than an hour from the software download to having a live archive. This meant the second era was one of peak democratization, with communities controlling not just the preservation of stories but the archives themselves.

The Second Age of Arda ends in cataclysm and a reshaping of the world. The second age of archives also ended in a reshaping of the fanfiction world, though it was subtler and less cataclysmic. In 2010, eFiction received its final major update. Going forward, web standards evolved, but eFiction did not. eFiction-powered sites began to show wear and tear, and many closed.

The third age of archives is distinguished by increasing consolidation onto large platforms, a trend observable in internet use overall. Many of these platforms are social media but not all. For example, the Archive of Our Own, or AO3, opened in 2008. It is not a community archive but a universal archive: the archive is the primary purpose, although AO3 includes community features, such as comments, that became predominant with the rise of automated archives. AO3's "About" page describes the archive's purpose as "preserv[ing] our fannish economy, values, and creative expression."

Against this backdrop of growing consolidation, the nonautomated and automated archives of past eras—most of which were Tolkien-specific—began slowly going dark as their fraying software became increasingly apparent. During 2024, only five Tolkien-specific fanfiction archives had any activity at all, and only one—the Silmarillion Writers' Guild—continued to have significant activity. At the same time, decisions by the corporations that owned Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal, both heavily used by Tolkien fanfiction writers, drove most fan activity from those platforms and onto large social media sites like Tumblr and Twitter that lacked the capacity to form discrete communities found in earlier social networking platforms.

The third age of archives, then, is one where fanfiction activity remains high but the number of archives has dwindled to only a few viable options, the most prominent of which, AO3, is unassociated with any Tolkien fan communities. Many communities came unmoored during this era, though fans—being adaptive as fans always are—have found ways to leverage AO3, Tumblr, and most recently Discord to meet their community needs. Democratization remains high in terms of what fanfiction can be easily shared with other fans. However, in terms of Tolkien fanfiction writers controlling the spaces where their works are shared, the fandom is the most undemocratic it has ever been, with very few archives run by the communities they serve.

Fanfiction as Heritage?

The thirty-year story of online Tolkien fanfiction archives, then, can be seen as one of shifts between authority and democracy, both in terms of the works shared and control of the archives where they are posted. Heritage studies, likewise, wrestle less with the question of how to define heritage as who gets to define heritage. Traditionally, heritage is defined to preserve the values and often nationalistic aims of the mainstream culture. Likewise, when we all first saw the title of today's seminar, "Tolkien as Heritage," what probably came first to mind as Tolkien's heritage? His books. In all the billions of words, images, and other artifacts that have been produced by and about Tolkien, most of us would probably agree that his books are those most deserving of preservation. They are the libraries at the center of Middle-earth

Heritage exists in tension between authorities vested with the resources to see their definition of heritage privileged and members of a culture or community for whom a text, artifact, place, or practice forms a part of their identity that is under active development, not simply an artifact from the past that deserves preservation. These two groups don't necessarily define heritage in the same way. Within fandom studies, the interests of those recognized as sanctioned authorities over a text—rights holders, for example—and those who value the text as part of their fannish identity are likewise at times in conflict. In 2009, the fan-scholar obsession_inc coined the terms affirmational fandom and transformational fandom, placing them on a continuum in terms of how fans perceive authority over a fannish text. Affirmational fans, according to her definition, are those who give high regard to sanctioned authorities over a text. In Tolkien fandom, these fans would value the views (and sometimes directives) of entities such as the Tolkien Estate, filmmakers and film studios, and of course Tolkien himself. Affirmational fans are often viewed as collectors, whether of books, action figures, games, or trivia facts about Tolkien's world. In other words, they elevate existing and sanctioned artifacts as heritage.

Transformational fans, on the other hand, locate authority within readers, viewers, and fans of a text. They privilege the unique experiences and perspectives that each fan brings to a text over the sanctioned authority of the original creator and subsequent rights holders. Fanworks creators are typically classified as transformational fans, although I also hope to show, in Tolkien fandom, that this is in no way an uncomplicated conclusion. Transformational fans are those who, if a text does not provide all that they want or expect from it, have no problem with reimagining or even reworking the text until it does. For these fans, Tolkien's heritage is under constant evolution as new generations of fans make sense of his works within a constantly changing world. They don't just long for Tolkien's unattainable vistas; they traipse out to find them.

It is important to recognize that affirmational and transformational impulses occur along a continuum, not a binary. Fans and fan communities constantly negotiate their place on this continuum, and no fan is purely one or the other.

Fanfiction archives contribute to the discussion around Tolkien as heritage in several ways. First, they sustain interest in Tolkien's books. At a time when newcomers to Tolkien can enter Middle-earth through films, games, or by turning on the television, fanfiction authors almost unequivocally turn to the books. In 2015 and 2020, Maria K. Alberto and I ran the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, in which we collected data on the values and practices of readers and writers of Tolkien fanfiction. In the 2020 survey, 44% of authors claimed that they began writing fanfiction because of Peter Jackson's films. Yet, in both surveys, less than 1% of authors used only the films as sources for their fiction. Both surveys show also that the longer Tolkien fans write fanfiction, the greater number of Tolkien's books they engage with.

This is why I said earlier that pigeonholing fanfiction writers as authority-defying, transgressive and progressive transformational fans is too simplistic. Their interest in Tolkien's heritage—as in the books and the wealth of details about the legendarium that they contain—precedes their use of those details to build beyond the storyscapes that Tolkien gave us. Fanfiction writers, as a whole, highly value mastery of what they term "the canon" and work hard to achieve it. I sometimes joke that The History of Middle-earth would probably be out of print if not for fanfiction writers.

Next, fanfiction itself is a form of heritage, an artifact documenting how Tolkien's fans interpret and engage with his work across the decades. Archives themselves embody specific values in the work that they feature. The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey also showed that, based on the archive they used, authors differed in how they regarded Tolkien's authority, social justice in Middle-earth, the use of fanfiction to explore sexuality, and the appropriateness of fanfiction as a mode of criticism. An archive, as the public face of a community, documents that community's engagement with such questions through the fanfiction it preserves.

Finally, along these lines, fanfiction archives press beyond simple preservation to provide the space for a conversation to unfold between fans concerning how to read and interpret Tolkien's works. Here, heritage is living and constantly evolving as fans negotiate how their experiences shape their reading of Tolkien's books and how Tolkien's books can continue to find relevance in a changing world.

Heritage Practices among Fanfiction Writers

In summary, fanfiction archives serve the dual purpose, in terms of heritage, of preservation and evolution. My own fanfiction archive, the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, or SWG, serves as a case study on both points. The SWG was founded in 2005 to serve as a writer's workshop for Silmarillion fanfiction writers. It was initially hosted on Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal. Initially, it did not have an archive. In 2007, its archive opened, built using eFiction software.

Since then, the SWG's archive has remained online and active, with hundreds of stories posted each year. In 2021, we switched from eFiction to Drupal as the software that runs the site in order to avoid the fate of other eFiction archives that slowly became unusable as web standards drew further away from the aging eFiction codebase. The community that supports the archive has undergone far more significant changes due to platform shifts and closures, with its original community spaces on Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal now closed and most interaction occurring on Discord.

In 2024, the SWG was the most active of the five Tolkien-specific archives that had new stories posted. The SWG's survival when other Tolkien-specific archives have faded is explained by community activities that encourage the creation of new stories. The group hosts monthly challenges and regular events on its Discord. This community activity is one of the major practices that promote Tolkien as heritage, specifically preserving the books as the canon texts in a field crowded with adaptations. While many fanfiction writers, including me, were brought into the fandom by adaptations such as films and shows, fanfiction communities almost unequivocally point new fans to the books. Part of this is cultural—the value placed on reading and having a strong working knowledge of the books Tolkien wrote—but fanfiction groups also directly foster engagement with the books.

The SWG provides multiple examples here. The SWG has hosted a rereading of The Silmarillion and readings of Sigurd and Gudrun and The Father Christmas Letters. The archive hosts chapter summaries designed to aid first-time readers of The Silmarillion and regularly publishes newsletter content, such as character biographies, that synthesize complex texts at a level accessible to new Tolkien fans. All of these efforts are aimed at making Tolkien's works more accessible and encouraging SWG members to explore books they might not otherwise consider.

On a more informal level, members informally mentor each other as they tackle new and challenging texts or inquiries. For example, the SWG's Discord server has a channel called #ask-a-loremaster for members to ask each other for research help. For new fans, who sometimes don't have all of the books, these discussion spaces encourage engagement with and make accessible Tolkien's more challenging and hard-to-source works.

These functions of fanfiction archives, which align closely with affirmational fandom, follow the typical definition of something from the past that is passed down to future generations. In this case, new fans gain access to Tolkien's books through events, resources, and mentorships that occur as part of the communities associated with fanfiction archives. However, there is no single heritage, and just as every viewer to behold a work of art sees it slightly differently, so each person to engage with Tolkien's works will define its heritage differently.

As noted earlier, the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey documents how Tolkien-specific archives in the first and second eras developed distinct cultures centered not on the personal identities of their authors but their authors' positions on issues of how to appropriately use Tolkien's books to craft new stories. At this time, when archive democratization was at its peak, what we see are fans self-selecting communities—and therefore archives—based on the community's cultural values. By fans self-selecting communities that align with their own values, they are better positioned to define Tolkien's heritage in their own terms.

The SWG again serves as an example. In the 2015 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, SWG authors indicated that they valued using fanfiction as a mode of criticism and specifically to engage with issues of social justice. The resources available on the site support these interests. The late Janet McCullough John, the SWG's lead character biographer for over ten years, intentionally focused her work on female characters, so while we have a biography of Hareth of the Haladin, we don't yet have one for Curufin. Likewise, the SWG hosts resources, such as Elleth's "Textual Ghosts Project" that identifies the unnamed women who must have existed in the legendarium, that encourage fanwriters to push beyond the storyscapes Tolkien presents. Events and challenges frequently encourage fanfiction that focuses on groups we don't get to see much of in the books, whether in-universe identities (such as Dwarves, Orcs, or Avari) or our-world identities (such as queer characters, characters with disabilities, people of color, or women). The SWG's current challenge, for example, includes prompts encouraging fanfiction about women, queer women, and traditions related to Hanukkah. Authors receive small digital postage stamps to commemorate the challenges they have completed, and throughout the year, there are special stamps for fanworks that feature women, queer characters, characters of color, and characters with disabilities. The implication of such prompts is that shifting attention to these neglected perspectives is of value—and the perspectives of fans who themselves identify as part of these groups also have value.

If we define Tolkien's heritage in traditional terms, none of this matters. The books are not changed when fanfiction writers shift the spotlight to characters and topics that Tolkien didn't consider. They are the libraries at the heart of Middle-earth. However, those multiple heritages begin to gain clarity amid communities that expressly encourage engaging with Tolkien as heritage not in terms of simple preservation or celebration but as a means by which diverse readers connect to the legendarium. Based on the works, both creative and scholarly, shared on these archives, fans gain a sense of their own heritage within Tolkien's world. Engagement around topics such as gender, race, sexuality, and disability in Tolkien's works can sometimes be misconstrued as holding Tolkien accountable to 21st-century priorities. Instead, these multiple heritages developed on fanfiction archives find the lack and fill them in, using Tolkien's own words to point to Middle-earth and say, "I may not see myself in the stories as they were written, but right here? This is where I would have fit." This act makes the unattainable vistas attainable, and the archives that preserve the fruits of these ventures become the libraries at the edge of Middle-earth.

Notes

1. See my Fanfiction Archive Timeline for a more detailed breakdown of how archives arise, fade, and disappear. This was created for my poster presentation (Re)Archive: The Rise and Fall (and Rebound?) of Independent Fanfiction Archives at the Fan Studies Network North America's 2023 conference. This timeline is available for anyone to use. Credit Dawn Walls-Thumma if you use it in your own work. Make a copy and play with the data here.