Interview with polutropos by Dawn by polutropos, Dawn Felagund

At Mereth Aderthad 2025, polutropos will be presenting a paper titled “'Kidnap Fam' and the Living Legendarium" about how Christopher Tolkien's insertion of Gil-galad into The Silmarillion alters the story and especially complicates the reading of Maedhros and Maglor's fostering of Elrond and Elros. I had a chance to talk with polutropos about her upcoming presentation, how fiction and scholarship intertwine, the appeal of kidnap fam stories, and of course, Maglor!

Dawn: Do you have existing work (scholarly, fannish, or both!) that you would like us to highlight?

polutropos: Well as you know my presentation is on kidnap fam and I have been working on my own story about Maglor and the Peredhel twins since late 2023, which is very close to being done. Partly why it's taken me so long is because of how hard it's been to fit all my thoughts about this relationship into a story. The story is called And Love Grew and follows the journey of Maglor and the survivors of the third kinslaying from Sirion to Amon Ereb. I am also very proud of my Maglor bio for the SWG. It actually spends very little time analysing his relationship with Elros and Elrond because the bio was not about interpretation of the text, it was about presenting the facts of the text and leaving others to do what they would with them. When you reduce "kidnap fam" to the facts, there isn't actually that much to say. I left that for fic, and for this presentation.

Dawn: One of the things I am most looking forward to in your presentation is this idea of the "living legendarium": of seeing the texts not as reaching a finished "canon" so much as having undergone decades of evolution that was still ongoing when Tolkien died. Can you speak to this a bit as it relates to kidnap fam?

polutropos: I’ll start with a bit of backstory of how I ended up here and interested in these topics. While I discovered the existence of fanfic fairly soon after I fell in love with The Silmarillion, I came to it as a book reader first. I don't even remember how teenage me, riding the Jackson films high in the early aughts, stumbled upon Fanfiction.net or what got me writing my first fanfic. I remember I was working on a screenplay of the tale of Túrin Turambar and sharing it on a forum, so I was already creating fanwork of a sort, I just didn't know it. However, I took to it immediately upon finding out it was a thing people did, and it transformed how I saw the text. Now, my teenage fandom years were brief and I never expected that I'd be back here almost twenty years later with a MA in the humanities and a whole heap of life experience, looking at fandom from a new perspective.

In my academic years, I became very interested in adaptation, translation, orality ... the mutability and universality of stories. No one owns a story; everyone owns a story. Dante wrote Virgil fanfic who wrote Homer fanfic, who wasn't even a guy but an oral tradition belonging to a whole culture that was built from bits and pieces of other cultures. And now I look at Tolkien's legendarium (a product of all the stories he was exposed to!) and the creative community that has blossomed out of it, and I see the same thing happening. People keep telling and retelling stories for various reasons but I think a major reason is that the story leaves us with questions. Tolkien died with questions about his world unanswered even by himself. No wonder we fans have so many! And what fruitful place for the imagination to play!

Kidnap fam is just the story I am using to explore this. I think it's a great example because it's almost an aside in the published Silmarillion, but it's an aside that has generated so many stories and artworks and meta because there's so much in that one sentence—"For Maglor took pity upon Elros and Elrond, and he cherished them, and love grew after between them, as little might be thought; but Maglor’s heart was sick and weary with the burden of the dreadful oath"—that just make you go: What? How? Why? As I elaborate on in my presentation, I believe that part of the reason is because this particular story is especially "alive". Its "aliveness" begins with Christopher Tolkien as editor, and an editorial decision he made that I think makes an already complicated relationship even more complicated.

Dawn: As a fellow fan with an MA in the humanities, I have found my fiction and research both shaped by my academic training. Do you think your academic training influences how you approach Tolkien's works?

polutropos: Yes, and no. I think my love of Tolkien influenced my academic interests. And then my academic study allowed me to love Tolkien in new ways.

Dawn: You say that kidnap fam is just one possible story to explore the complexity of Tolkien's canon through questions of transmission, orality, and so on. So why did you choose kidnap fam specifically?

polutropos: Kidnap fam's popularity among fans—in terms of how many words Tolkien wrote about it versus how many fans have written about it, it's entirely disproportionate—makes it fertile ground. There is just so much material I can use to demonstrate how one story can branch in a thousand directions and take on as many meanings for as many people. From one seed we have planted a forest. And it is a diverse, lively forest: in places as beautiful and peaceful as Lothlórien, in others as unsettling as Mirkwood. And do watch out: Old Man Willow might snap you up if you say something he disagrees with! Of course, I've also loved the character of Maglor since I was fourteen, so that's undeniably influenced my choice of subject matter.

Dawn: What about Maglor appeals to you?

polutropos: Oh no, what a question! I will try to keep it brief. I love that he's a storyteller within the story. Tolkien really went and made a son of Fëanor the composer of The Song about the first kinslaying! That's absolutely fascinating to me. As a storyteller, I read his unexpected optimism (such a rarity in The Silmarillion), his questioning of the oath, his final rejection of the Silmaril and of his own finality/death (let’s not talk about Tolkien's revisions in which he dies) so appropriate to him. He refuses the confines of a doomed narrative, and that is so appealing to me.

Dawn: Aside from Maglor, what draws you to Tolkien?

polutropos: A lot draws me to Tolkien, and it changes depending on where I am at in life, but at this moment what's coming to me is his deep understanding of grief and the various ways in which his characters face their grief, and the grief that permeates his whole world. It is the grief that makes it beautiful. There is so much empathy in his work: empathy for people, empathy for the physical world. No matter how dark, no matter how tragic, he writes about it with beauty and compassion. This holds true for all of his writings in my opinion, but I am drawn to the epic and elegiac way in which it is treated in the Quenta Silmarillion, unquestionably the Tolkien text closest to my heart.

Dawn: In your abstract, I was really intrigued that you spoke of the "cross-pollination between scholarship and fanworks to offer new insights" into Tolkien's works, which is really one of the goals behind Mereth Aderthad! And you're clearly a skilled fiction writer and a skilled researcher. How do fiction and research interplay in your own work?

polutropos: Thank you, though I feel like a rather new fiction writer. I never could have predicted I'd fall into this craft—I still struggle with identifying myself as a fiction writer. But I think one of the reasons I did fall into it was because I burned out on academic research, but when I rediscovered The Silmarillion I still felt that longing to engage with the text in a critical way. So, at least in intent, many of my stories have something to say about the source text. Whether that's reconciling different versions of canon (as in "And Love Grew"), exploring themes like fate and free will and the symbolism of water (as in my Daeron/Maglor piece Hearken Still Unsated), or exploring motivations (like in my letters between Elwing and Maedhros, Friendship and Stern Demand), or questioning the logic of the oath of Fëanor (as in the explicit and rather outrageous fic Everlasting Darkness). I realised early in adulthood that my brain is an almost even split between analytical and creative and it's hard to find activities that satisfy both. I seem to have discovered in fanfiction writing and in fandom generally a way to keep both halves engaged that I haven't found in anything else.

Dawn: Your topic touches on so many issues that are important to creating fanworks about Tolkien's world and are growing in importance in scholarship as well: how to handle multiple conflicting drafts, Christopher Tolkien's role as editor of the published Silmarillion, and in-universe historical transmission. What do you hope your audience will take away from your presentation?

polutropos: I am so excited that these topics are finding a place in Tolkien scholarship! I've gotten the impression that The Silmarillion hasn't been much studied academically because it's not a "complete" work of literature, having been put together posthumously. But who says that makes it incomplete? Who says incomplete works can't be studied? (You and I certainly know they can be, coming from Classics and Anglo-Saxon studies.) So, I think that's something I would like people to take away: the very aspect of The Silmarillion that at first seems like a barrier to literary study is, on the contrary, an opportunity. I think fanworks creators intuitively get that, but I hope this presentation affirms the legitimacy of fanworks as modes of inquiry and worth academic study in their own right.