Fortyish teacher, Tolkien scholar and Anglo-Saxonist, founder of the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, Tolkien fandom historian. Woman (she/her), Vermonter, heathen. This blog is 99% Tolkien and mostly meta.
When I first became interested in fanfiction studies, I would hear the statement a lot that “90% of fanfiction is written by women.” The closest I’ve been able to track down a citation for this statistic was an article by Johana Cantor in a 1980 Star Trek fanzine that states that 90% of (presumably Trek) fanfiction is written by women.
So when the data for the 2015 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey became available, I was kinda stoked when it confirmed this oft-quoted fact: 89% of participants in that survey identified as female. In 2013, CentrumLumina’s AO3 Census had similarly confirmed that “90% female” was canon.
Subsequent Tolkien Fanfiction Surveys show, however, that while this likely was canon for many decades, it is changing. In 2020, the number of female participants dropped to 74%, and in 2025, it dropped again to 65%.
Does this mean that more dudes are reading and writing Tolkien-based fanfiction? Nope! It means more nonbinary folks are!
Here are the corresponding data for nonbinary participants:
2015: 6% nonbinary
2020: 15% nonbinary
2025: 22% nonbinary
The number of men involved with Tolkien-based fanfiction, in contrast, has remained relatively steady: 4%, 6%, and 4% in 2015, 2020, and 2025, respectively.
This is the biggest demographic shift I’ve been able to document so far for the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey. While most demographic data stays relatively steady over the years, this change is dramatic in comparison. Is the explanation that more nonbinary people feel interested and welcome in Tolkien fandom? Or were people more able in 2025 to be open about their nonbinary identity?
Communities Do Comment: Expanding the 3C's of Commenting with SWG Data
Fanfiction authors almost universally enjoy receiving comments on their work, and in my twenty-two years in the Tolkien fanfiction fandom, I have never known a time where there is not some angst over comments among writers. As an author, I too care about comments because they make posting (which I honestly despise, despite the fact that it is what I am doing right now) worth it. As an archive owner, I care even more because I want the creators who share their work on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild (SWG) to feel wanted and welcomed there—and that sentiment tends to come from receiving comments.
In 2018, I wrote an article called Why People Don't Comment: Data and History From the Tolkienfic Fandom at the behest of a project called Long Live Feedback. Comments (at least on AO3) were tailing off, to the despair of authors who already felt their work went largely unnoticed. As I looked at various data from the @tolkien-fanfiction-survey and collected from different archives, I developed a theory of commenting that I call the 3C’s: commenting depends on confidence, community, and commenting as a skill.
Last year, I revisited this article for the SWG’s fan history column Cultus Dispatches and updated it with some new data. Good news: AO3 is no longer sliding into a commentless abyss! I intended to follow up the next month with more data from the SWG, but planning Mereth Aderthad 2025 took over my life at that time, and once that was past, I put Cultus Dispatches on hiatus until I had the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data in hand. More than a year later, I have the SWG data at last, and it lends further support to the 3C’s theory of commenting, especially the importance of community.
I hope you’ll read the full article Communities Do Comment: Expanding the 3C’s of Commenting with SWG Data but here are two key takeaways:
Looking at comment data in the context of fan history shows that commenting dropped off when community platforms were not widely available, i.e., the years between the heyday of Yahoo! Groups and the rise of Discord.
On the SWG, challenge fanworks receive about twice the comments as those that weren’t created for challenges. I suggest that participation in challenges signals community involvement, driving up comment counts.
Confidence and commenting as a skill remain important—my 101 Comment Starters have more notes by far than anything I’ve ever posted on Tumblr—but their force is diminished when an author and reader share a community. And this makes sense, the equivalent of complimenting a friend’s outfit versus a stranger on the street.
For more analysis and discussion of the data, see my article Communities Do Comment: Expanding the 3C’s of Commenting with SWG Data.
And if you enjoy the unholy three-way Venn diagram that is my work on Tolkien studies, fan studies, and quantitative humanities, check out Tolkien by the Numbers on Substack.
In the 2020 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, Maria and I added a question: Do you identify as part of a marginalized group? The item included a checklist of options, as well as a space for “Other.” Seven people used the latter option to add “neurodivergent” … and just like how teachers always say, “If you have a question, that means five other people do too?” I took those seven forward-thinking responses to mean that way more likely would have checked that option if it existed.
So this year, we added it! And 48% of participants checked it.
The phrasing of this item is important too. We are missing from the data neurodivergent folks who don’t find that their neurodivergence causes them to be marginalized.
A likely conclusion is that at least half—and maybe way more than half—of people who write and read Tolkien-based fanfiction are neurodivergent. While I’m trying to keep the survey from growing too much more, I wonder if asking about neurodivergence minus marginalization would be valuable to add in 2025.
I will be sharing a snippet of data each week from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey here and on the Tolkien by the Numbers Substack. Let's start with demographics!
All three Tolkien Fanfiction Surveys asked participants about their age. Quick conclusion: Tolkien fandom is getting old!
Let’s just look at the median for that data:
In 2015*, the median age of participants was 25.
In 2020, it edged up a little to 27.
In 2025, it leaped to a median age of 33!
Put another way, in the last decade, the age of the average Tolkien fanfiction reader/writer has increased by eight years.
I suspect this is explained by the lack of influx of new, young fans of the sort who were drawn in by the Hobbit films around the time of the 2015 survey. It also likely speaks to the relative lack of attrition among Tolkien fanfiction readers and writers. I’m curious to see what the numbers look like for the years participants have been involved in the fandom. I suspect the median will have increased here as well.
Although I have not looked at data about the Rings of Power show yet, I suspect we’ll also see that it does not have the same draw as the Hobbit films did.
(*For those of you who have known the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey for a long time and have a very good memory, note that I’ve dropped the under-18 data from the 2015 set. The IRB in 2015 allowed us to accept responses from minors, but it was not allowed after that, so to make the three sets compatible, I’ve removed it from the 2015 data.)
I am excited to share that I will be posting data and analysis from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey beginning this week!
The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey began in 2015 and is a longitudinal survey, now run in collaboration with Maria K. Alberto, released every five years. This means that we now have three datasets and ten years of data describing the history and culture of Tolkien fanfic fandom.
I will be posting a snippet of data at least once per week, as well as longer analyses as part of the @silmarillionwritersguild's Cultus Dispatches column. If you'd like to follow my discoveries as I dive into the data, there's two ways to do it:
Subscribe to my Tolkien by the Numbers Substack (this will include my Tolkien studies research as well as TFS data)
Follow the @tolkien-fanfiction-survey tumblr
The first runs of data I've done are proving very interesting, and I look forward to sharing what I find with you all!
IDK how you can simultaneously say you stand for the ordinary folks of middle earth and critique Tolkien, yet blame in world historian character like Pengoloth for not writing Feanorians as glorious as you’d like them to be depicted, aren’t the ordinary people (especially those who died in the third kinslaying) who died under their blade enough reason? It feels like you’re just finding a easy way out for the characters you favor more
Thanks for your question, Anonymous Person!
Regarding what you read as a "critique of Tolkien" in my essay How Tolkien Presents Ordinary People in The Silmarillion, I'm just going to quote the first paragraph of the conclusion:
None of this is a critique of Tolkien. I can hear the critics now—who have attacked other "woke" scholars for writing about gender and race and disability and sexuality—using words like "man of his times" and "21st century ideals" and clutching their pearls that I think Tolkien has done something wrong and that I will somehow rewrite the texts to banish his Christian white guy sentiments. (I don't and I won't.)
I then go on to say that The Silmarillion can be read as an indictment of authoritarian systems, with The Lord of the Rings the culmination of the arc toward democracy, showing the power of ordinary folk, and how this was intentional and clever on Tolkien's part. As a social studies teacher and union representative, i.e., a big fan of democracy, I think this is awesome!
Regarding Pengolodh, he is entirely reasonable in his hatred of the Fëanorians. You mention the third kinslaying, which he likely witnessed. That's reason enough right there! In fact, I think it's odd that he is as generous as he is toward Maedhros and Maglor. He's a narrator, offering one perspective of a fictional history. I don't "blame" him for anything, and again, I find Tolkien's use of his point of view to be quite subtle and clever, given that Pengolodh is barely mentioned in "The Silmarillion" and not at all in the published text, yet his point of view looms so large throughout. My interest in the Fëanorians (among others) comes from this carefully sustained point of view, as I tend to enjoy considering the perspectives of characters that I don't find represented in the text. For instance, I named myself after Finrod but find I don't actually like his character much (I really just found using "lord of caves" in reference to myself incredibly funny when I picked the name twenty-odd years ago) but I do find Orodreth fascinating because he's a blank unless he's being used as a scapegoat.
Again, thank you for your engagement with my work!
How Tolkien Presents Ordinary People in "The Silmarillion"
This essay was written for the Silmarillion Writers' Guild challenge Everyman. It was also posted on the SWG, Tolkien by the Numbers (Substack), and my website. I welcome comments in all locations!
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"... without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless."
~ Letter 131 to Milton Waldman
J.R.R. Tolkien described the arc of his three great tales—The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and finally The Lord of the Rings (LotR)—as descending from the high mythic mode to a more vulgar, earthly narrative. This occurred not just through plot but was a key theme of The Lord of the Rings as well: no less than the ability of the humble and powerless to change the world. It was not princes with their lengthy lineages and storied weapons who would overthrow Sauron but two Hobbits, one of the working class. In the same letter to Waldman, Tolkien described this theme as follows:
But as the earliest Tales are seen through Elvish eyes, as it were, this last great Tale, coming down from myth and legend to the earth, is seen mainly through the eyes of Hobbits: it thus becomes in fact anthropocentric. But through Hobbits, not Men so-called, because the last Tale is to exemplify most clearly a recurrent theme: the place in ‘world politics’ of the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great (good as well as evil).
But, as Tolkien himself states, if LotR depicts "the ennoblement … of the humble," then The Silmarillion is the opposite (Letter 181 to Michael Straight).
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild's Everyman challenge sought to elevate ordinary people, who are often obscured in the text. As the moderator who developed the prompt list for that challenge, I reread The Silmarillion, looking for the "small, ungreat, and forgotten" amid the bold speechification and sweeping swords of Tolkien's pre-Ring War heroes. (Perhaps the high mortality rate of those heroes—even the immortal ones—hint at the later ascendency of those whom we would assume are easily quashed.) The prompt collection didn't include every mention—and one particular quandary arose again and again that I will discuss below—but it included a lot and meant that, in the space of a few days, my brain was peppered with all of the different ways that "everyman" characters move, barely seen, through the text.
All the same, this is a very preliminary analysis of the topic. When I study "instances of x in The Silmarillion" for a more finished presentation or publication, I read one or two chapters per day, closely and carefully. In compiling the challenge prompts, I breezed through the entire book in a few days, skipping sections where I knew the story didn't even allude to the lowly. This essay is based on my work on the challenge, using the prompt collection I generated as the raw materials for my conclusions, so there are going to be gaps and omissions that a closer read will find.
Textual Ghosts, Revisited
Dwimordene's 2008 term "textual ghost"—actualized by Elleth into the Textual Ghosts Project—has become a well-known term in the Silmarillion fandom. It refers to "the women who litter the Tolkien histories as textual ghosts, artifacts deduced by the presence of offspring or perhaps a name." Elleth notes that "the lives and presences of the 'common people' are not often recorded or explored in detail," accounting for a lack of women outside of the noble ranks, an observation I recently corroborated in a paper currently in-press, which found that women permitted to speak in The Silmarillion are not only generally noble but divine.
The same concept underlying textual ghosts can be applied to common folk in The Silmarillion. There are many points in the text where people must have existed but go unnamed at best, left entirely to inference, or as I will discuss below in the "Taking Credit" section, their labor and skill subsumed by the whim of a named noble.
The word servant(s) is used sixty times in the pages of The Silmarillion. Only once is it used singularly to refer to a specific person (the "old servant" who tells Túrin that Morwen has fled), and only once does it refer to a named person (Sauron relative to Melkor). Aredhel once refers to herself not as a servant of her brother Turgon. Servant is a fitting example because it implies a hierarchy, but ordinary folk populate the text, gathered within nouns that can evade our notice:
130 times: host(s)
60 times: servant(s)
45 times: folk
40 times: messenger(s)
26 times: company/companies
24 times: mariner(s)
22 times: spy/spies
14 times: smith(s)
2 times: masons
1 time: workers
Nor are these unnamed folks always ordinary. In some cases, they are people who play pivotal roles in the history before the Ring War and likely should be named in a historical text: the messengers who delivered word of Finwë's death; the companions of Finrod and Beren, eaten alive by wolves; the mariners from Gondolin who perished, sent by their king to reach Valinor.
In fact, as I was collecting quotes to use as prompts for the Everyman challenge, I encountered a conundrum on multiple occasions that led, in part, to me wanting to write about this topic. I have probably read The Silmarillion two hundred times by now: not two hundred deep, immersive readings-for-enjoyment but gone through the text that many times for various research purposes. Point being, I know the book well, and when I started collecting prompts for the challenge, I knew places where "everymen" would be located and anticipated adding those whom I thought might provide particularly interesting perspectives.
Except that I found that, when I reached of those passages, the common people were often so ancillary to a named, noble character that the sentence or passage became hard to justify as a prompt because it seemed that the prompt was inviting fanworks about the named character. While we don't "check work" on the SWG challenges and keep things loose and would not have disbarred such a work, it still felt like it didn't set creators up for success—or did set them up for confusion.
Take this sentence, which was one that I was eager to include—until I read it, that is: "Maedhros was ambushed, and all his company were slain; but he himself was taken alive by the command of Morgoth, and brought to Angband" ("Of the Return of the Noldor"). "All his company," who did not return home to their loved ones that night, are buried in a sentence that is about Maedhros. Syntactically, they are rendered as an aside. Even the ambush is directed toward Maedhros alone, even though everyone present bore the brunt of it.
Taking Credit
Along similar lines is a common structure in The Silmarillion, where a named, noble character "causes" something to be built that in fact would have required the skill and labor of hundreds if not thousands of engineers, craftspeople, and laborers (and probably resulted in the injury and death of at least some of them). Yet credit for the achievement is located entirely upon the noble character whose primary contribution seems to have been thinking a thought and then giving an order. An example:
But Sauron caused to be built upon the hill in the midst of the city of the Númenóreans, Armenelos the Golden, a mighty temple; and it was in the form of a circle at the base, and there the walls were fifty feet in thickness, and the width of the base was five hundred feet across the centre, and the walls rose from the ground five hundred feet, and they were crowned with a mighty dome. (Akallabêth)
This passage is particularly apt because it negates the possible counterargument that those dozens/hundreds/thousands of workers would take up too many words, given the lush description of Armenolos that follow. The gold appointments matter more than the minds and hands that devised them.
And lest one claim that we should expect nothing less of Sauron, who of course doesn't see his workers as contributors to his glory, even saintly Finrod Felagund is credited similarly: "And after three days’ journeying they came to Amon Ethir, the Hill of Spies, that long ago Felagund had caused to be raised with great labour, a league before the doors of Nargothrond" ("Of Túrin Turambar"). Thingol, Turgon, and the kings of Gondor also claim credit for, respectively, the house of Lúthien, the sealing of Gondolin, and Minas Anor using the "caused to" construction.
Subject-Object
Common people in The Silmarillion are frequently identified in the genitive case: the watchers of Morgoth, the people of Celegorm, the mariners of Círdan (among many, many others). Like the word servant, this construction emphasizes a hierarchy where a single person is permitted at the top, with a vast, unnamed rabble of subjects underneath.
In other instances, the unnamed people belonging to a leader are discussed using language that portrays them as … well, belongings or objects that can be used and manipulated as needed. "[Thingol] gave [Finrod] guides to lead him to that place of which few yet knew," we are told, as Finrod seeks to establish his own Menegrothesque realm ("Of the Return of the Noldor"). In the Akallabêth, "[Amandil] took with him three servants, dear to his heart, and never again were they heard of by word or sign in this world, nor is there any tale or guess of their fate."
It is possible that the people in these passages being "given" and "taken" had some choice as to their fates, but the use of verbs that serve equally well when describing the handling of objects reinforces the power differential between he who uproots and the one who is uprooted.
A Murmuration of Servants
In my presentation for Oxonmoot 2024, Death, Grief, and the Other in the Quenta Silmarillion, I noticed a tendency in The Silmarillion for Orcs to be described as moving in herd-like, driven masses:
In scenes involving Orcs or other enemies, they are often driven to their deaths, again evoking a brutish mob incapable of individual action or resistance. This also positions the driver as superior to the driven: a person effortlessly shepherding a horde of the enemy unto death. Note also that these scenes often involve the enemy being driven into an environment that is hostile to life, such as a desert or a river. This negates even the drama of battle, implied in other scenes where characters aligned with the forces of good are driven forth from their homes, and simply sends these Orcs en masse, in a terrified clamor before a superior foe, to be quietly gulped up by the landscape.
Everyday people in groups in The Silmarillion aren't as blatantly dehumanized—nor would we expect them to be—but they do have a singularness, a herd-like aspect, moving in concert with each other like birds in murmuration. Decisions seem to be arrived at unanimously and without dispute. The verb debate is used only once where it might imply disagreement among a group of ordinary people: "Therefore Fëanor halted and the Noldor debated what course they should now take" ("Of the Flight of the Noldor"). Debate and argu* are otherwise used only for disagreements among named characters; discuss does not occur in the text at all.
Perhaps no passage illustrates this better than the scene where the people of Nargothrond banish Celegorm and Curufin: "Therefore the hearts of the people of Nargothrond were released from their dominion, and turned again to the house of Finarfin; and they obeyed Orodreth" ("Of Beren and Luthien"). As one, they were swayed by the brothers to abandon their king. Now, like a wheeling flock of starlings, they are "released" en masse and "turned again" to their previous overlords. There is a lot of motion in this sentence, which does indeed wheel and flow like a murmuration; there is no (in the entire arc of this episode) discussion or debate among these people who seemingly move as a single entity.
Views contrary to those of the named authority are represented in the text almost always as murmurs or whispers. The words cried out never refer to groups of characters, and the words protest, outcr*, and complain do not appear. Again, we have a monolithic group of people who muster, at most, a murmur or whisper conveying forbidden information that rarely ends to their glory. These murmurs and whispers, we understand, show the folly of the common person compared to the wise authority. It hints at their power—these murmurs and whispers have the power to overthrow the wisest of kings—but that power is understood to be undermining, conniving, and often foolish.
We know that the systems of government in The Silmarillion are authoritarian with varying degrees of benevolence. The actions permitted to ordinary people underscores the deep lack of democratization, not just in governance but in the history of pre-Ring War peoples. Democracy is loud, messy, and contentious. In not allowing the voices of the peoples of Arda to rise above a whisper, the text indicates that they don't have much that's worth saying.
Conclusion
None of this is a critique of Tolkien. I can hear the critics now—who have attacked other "woke" scholars for writing about gender and race and disability and sexuality—using words like "man of his times" and "21st century ideals" and clutching their pearls that I think Tolkien has done something wrong and that I will somehow rewrite the texts to banish his Christian white guy sentiments. (I don't and I won't.)
In reality, I do this work because I think it shows a few important things. First, whenever I do textual analysis and close reading, I am blown away by the subtlety in Tolkien's work: grand ideas communicated at the word level or syntactically. This makes sense given his profession, but it still never ceases to amaze me to watch the layers of meaning emerge. He clearly had the larger arc in mind: a microcosm of the movement of our own history through monarchy and into democracy—the doomed king Fingolfin through to the democratically elected gardener-mayor Samwise Gamgee. Yet that overarching idea, traversing three books, is fractalized, the "immeasurable vastness" of that three-book arc distilled to "more bitter than a needle," to borrow from the Ainulindalë, into single phrases and words.
As a fanworks creator, of course, it is this sense of the missing or unspoken that makes The Silmarillion such a rich text to create transformative works about. This was the entire point of the Everyman challenge: to draw attention to those unnamed characters subsumed in the tales of noble and famed.
Most importantly is the meaning of the whole arc, which as a Silmarillion fan and scholar, I rarely consider in its entirety. The Silmarillion has its nobility and beauty, but it is the Northern aesthetic, the same beauty found in autumn leaves that pour forth their full splendor in order to die. I could speak of our ability to admire such stories—with their glorification of leaders whose only qualification was being born to the right father in the right order—and the fact that most of us barely notice the everymen of The Silmarillion as our own weaknesses, but that misses the point of the full arc. The Silmarillion is so spectacularly disastrous that it is hard to read it as anything but a critique of its underlying system—where full authority is narrowly bestowed—especially when it is held up alongside the story of Samwise Gamgee.
"... help came from the hands of the weak when the Wise faltered."
~ Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age
Fanworks fandom in 2026 is not a culture defined by boundaries. Generally, fans accept that all manner of fanworks (even if not to their personal liking) have a right to exist. AI-generated fanworks, however, have pushed the limits of even fanworks fans' considerable levels of tolerance.
When Dawn and Grundy were recently tasked with presenting about how the SWG developed its AI policy, they ended up taking a deep dive into the impacts of generative AI within the broader Tolkien fanworks fandom, finding that communities that are generally resistant to boundaries have set up firm limits on how AI can be used in their spaces. Social justice, ethics, and community governance all play roles in how fan communities have responded to generative AI—and how larger fandom institutions have not.
You can read the article "Fandom Draws the Line: Fanworks, AI, and Resistance" here.
@grundyscribbling and I wrote this, and it was a tale that grew in the telling, beginning with detailing how the @silmarillionwritersguild developed our AI policy and out from there to consider the historical context surrounding that work (we started drafting our AI policy the day before the Organization for Transformative Works took a slog through the mud for their expressed support for AI-generated fanworks) and then how other small fandom communities—mostly events run right here on Tumblr—have created a groundswell of resistance to the incursion of AI into fandom spaces.
Things often feel bleak and hard and overwhelming right now. What we discovered in doing this work is a lot like another story we all know and love—you know, the one where a few ordinary, small people save the world. It is a reminder that what we do as individuals and the communities we build and support very much do matter.
If you haven't taken the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey yet and you want to, time is almost up! We will close the survey on January 1.
So yes, those of you who liked it for later ... or see it and think, "I need to do that" ... or are 78% through and just need to finish, this post is for you!
Thank you to everyone who has taken the survey so far. Your participation will help us to understand Tolkien fanfiction fandom (one of the oldest and more prolific fic fandoms on the planet!) and how it has changed over time.
If you haven't taken it yet, what are you waiting for? Come help us make history!
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Do you read or write fanfiction based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien or a Tolkien media adaptation like the film trilogies or Rings of Power series? If so, we'd love to hear from you!
The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey first ran in 2015 and has run every five years since. It is run by Dawn "Felagund" Walls-Thumma, an independent scholar, and Maria K. Alberto, an assistant professor at Richland Community College. Both of us are also readers and writers of fanfiction ourselves. We are excited to introduce the third edition, which will give us insight into how the fandom has changed across the last decade!
If you choose to participate, we will collect basic demographic information and ask you about your beliefs and habits regarding reading and/or writing Tolkien-based fanfiction. Most questions are multiple choice, but there is also a space on each page where you can elaborate on any of your answers if you want to share more information with us. You can skip any question you don't want to answer and quit the survey at any time.
The survey will take about 20-30 minutes to complete.
Who can participate?
Participants must be 18 years or older.
We want to hear from both readers and writers of Tolkien-based fanfiction.
All levels of experience and involvement with Tolkien are welcome.
Readers and writers of fic based on Jackson's film trilogies, The Rings of Power, and other Tolkien-derived media are welcome as well.
If you read and/or wrote Tolkien-based fanfiction in the past but don't any longer, we still want to hear from you!
Click here to start the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey!
This is the last call for participants in the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey! We will close the survey on January 1. Signal boosts on other Tolkien communities, if appropriate, are much appreciated.
Do you read or write fanfiction based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien or a Tolkien media adaptation like the film trilogies or Rings of Power series? If so, we'd love to hear from you!
The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey first ran in 2015 and has run every five years since. It is run by Dawn "Felagund" Walls-Thumma, an independent scholar, and Maria K. Alberto, an assistant professor at Richland Community College. Both of us are also readers and writers of fanfiction ourselves. We are excited to introduce the third edition, which will give us insight into how the fandom has changed across the last decade!
If you choose to participate, we will collect basic demographic information and ask you about your beliefs and habits regarding reading and/or writing Tolkien-based fanfiction. Most questions are multiple choice, but there is also a space on each page where you can elaborate on any of your answers if you want to share more information with us. You can skip any question you don't want to answer and quit the survey at any time.
The survey will take about 20-30 minutes to complete.
Who can participate?
Participants must be 18 years or older.
We want to hear from both readers and writers of Tolkien-based fanfiction.
All levels of experience and involvement with Tolkien are welcome.
Readers and writers of fic based on Jackson's film trilogies, The Rings of Power, and other Tolkien-derived media are welcome as well.
If you read and/or wrote Tolkien-based fanfiction in the past but don't any longer, we still want to hear from you!
Click here to start the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey!
Art: "The Lonely Mountain" by MissMachineArt (CC license)
Last call! Signal boosts appreciated, especially in hard-to-reach Tolkien communities. (Even if the community is no longer active, this can sometimes reach people who aren't active on Tumblr.)
Do you read or write fanfiction based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien or a Tolkien media adaptation like the film trilogies or Rings of Power series? If so, we'd love to hear from you!
The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey first ran in 2015 and has run every five years since. We are excited to introduce the third edition, which will give us insight into how the fandom has changed across the last decade!
What is it like to participate?
If you choose to participate, we will collect basic demographic information and ask you about your beliefs and habits regarding reading and/or writing Tolkien-based fanfiction. Most questions are multiple choice, but there is also a space on each page where you can elaborate on any of your answers if you want to share more information with us. You can skip any question you don't want to answer and quit the survey at any time.
The survey will take about 15-20 minutes to complete.
Who can participate?
Participants must be 18 years or older.
We want to hear from both readers and writers of Tolkien-based fanfiction.
All levels of experience and involvement with Tolkien are welcome.
Readers and writers of fic based on Jackson's film trilogies, The Rings of Power, and other Tolkien-derived media are welcome as well.
If you read and/or wrote Tolkien-based fanfiction in the past but don't any longer, we still want to hear from you!
Who are you and what do you plan to do with the results?
We are Dawn "Felagund" Walls-Thumma and Maria K. Alberto, and we are both readers and writers of Tolkien fanfiction! Dawn is an independent scholar in Tolkien and fan studies, and Maria is an assistant professor at Richland Community College.
We hope this survey will help us to better understand how our fandom interacts with fanfiction, the texts and adaptations, and one another as fellow readers and writers. We will aggregate survey responses to look for trends and changes across the past decade of survey results. This data will be used in conference presentations, papers, and articles about Tolkien fandom and Tolkien-based fanfiction, but we will also share our data and findings in fandom spaces. We will also make data available to other researchers who want to do similar research.
If you have questions or concerns about this survey, you can contact either of us: Dawn Walls-Thumma at [email protected] or Maria K. Alberto at [email protected].
Click here to start the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey!
Please signal boost this survey to other Tolkien communities.
Do you read or write fanfiction based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien or a Tolkien media adaptation like the film trilogies or Rings of Power series? If so, we'd love to hear from you!
The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey first ran in 2015 and has run every five years since. We are excited to introduce the third edition, which will give us insight into how the fandom has changed across the last decade!
What is it like to participate?
If you choose to participate, we will collect basic demographic information and ask you about your beliefs and habits regarding reading and/or writing Tolkien-based fanfiction. Most questions are multiple choice, but there is also a space on each page where you can elaborate on any of your answers if you want to share more information with us. You can skip any question you don't want to answer and quit the survey at any time.
The survey will take about 15-20 minutes to complete.
Who can participate?
Participants must be 18 years or older.
We want to hear from both readers and writers of Tolkien-based fanfiction.
All levels of experience and involvement with Tolkien are welcome.
Readers and writers of fic based on Jackson's film trilogies, The Rings of Power, and other Tolkien-derived media are welcome as well.
If you read and/or wrote Tolkien-based fanfiction in the past but don't any longer, we still want to hear from you!
Who are you and what do you plan to do with the results?
We are Dawn "Felagund" Walls-Thumma and Maria K. Alberto, and we are both readers and writers of Tolkien fanfiction! Dawn is an independent scholar in Tolkien and fan studies, and Maria is an assistant professor at Richland Community College.
We hope this survey will help us to better understand how our fandom interacts with fanfiction, the texts and adaptations, and one another as fellow readers and writers. We will aggregate survey responses to look for trends and changes across the past decade of survey results. This data will be used in conference presentations, papers, and articles about Tolkien fandom and Tolkien-based fanfiction, but we will also share our data and findings in fandom spaces. We will also make data available to other researchers who want to do similar research.
If you have questions or concerns about this survey, you can contact either of us: Dawn Walls-Thumma at [email protected] or Maria K. Alberto at [email protected].
Click here to start the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey!
Please signal boost this survey to other Tolkien communities.
Many thanks to Heraldo Mussolini for permission to use his art!
Hi hi! Some previously awful experiences in other fandoms keep me mostly a reader (short comments/kudos) rather than a writer, hence anon for now but I had an idea and wanted to know what people think.
I've been having a lot of fun in the last year or so messing around with dictionaries in Quenya/Sindarin, and committing linguistic crimes by translating approximations of various English phrases, such as 'tongue-punched in the fart box'. Would there be any interest from the SWG or anyone else in a Tumblr blog that takes requests to do that sort of thing?
Thank you for your time!
Throwing this out to the crowd! Please signal boost and help anon out!
Hello!! A while ago, I read your article on the transformational + affirmational values in the Tolkien fandom while I was researching for my thesis :P And just now I’ve very randomly stumbled upon your blog and I saw your post about your new article with JTR (congrats!!), and I realised, “wait hold on, I know this person”. So that’s vv cool!
I feel like the rest of this ask is more the kind of thing people do over email, but, well, chance brought me here, so… I’m wondering if you, as a published (!!!) Tolkien scholar, have any advice you’d be willing to share with someone (me!) who wants to get their work published as well? I’m also a bit lost about what the best, reputable journal for something Tolkien-related would be. Off the top of my head, I can think of Mythlore, JTR, and Tolkien Studies — except I’m very confused about whether Tolkien Studies is peer-reviewed or not… Any help at all would be appreciated!
What a fabulous question, and I LOVE to see Tolkien fans interested in presenting and publishing their work. I started as fan before I was a fan-and-scholar, and I currently keep a foot in both pools, and I think it's important to recognize that many Tolkien fans are discussing ideas that are not currently part of the scholarship. Many of us are engaging with the texts deeply and in ways that align well with scholarly work, and dare I say that many of us know the more obscure texts (like the HoMe, for example) better than many Tolkien scholars who are coming from the more academic side.
So Tolkien fans who want to become involved in Tolkien scholarship absolutely should. You have the ideas, the knowledge, and the skills!
There are a few steps that I'd recommend for the Tolkien fan-turned-scholar:
1. Familiarize yourself with the published scholarship. In fandom, we tend to engage with other fans, their fanworks, and their meta, and of course, we spend a lot of time in the books. While Tolkien studies has not traditionally been a field that leans heavily on familiarity with the published scholarship, that is changing. There is growing awareness that scholarship is being published that is rehashing ideas that have already been written, or published works are leaning too heavily on outdated literature, so I expect that journals will be increasingly rigorous in their expectations here.
Thankfully, of the four peer-reviewed Tolkien studies journals, three of them are open-access (only Tolkien Studies is not). Even if I do a search through Google Scholar or my alma mater's library, I always visit these three as well and do a keyword search, as anything published in them, being open-access, is really going to be seen as doing a bare minimum of due diligence: Journal of Tolkien Research | Mythlore | Mallorn
Of course, the state of academic publishing is still unfriendly to independent scholars, though it is better than it was ten years ago. Some publishers let you check out a small number of articles per month. I have luck finding academic books in Archive.org. If you live near a good public library system or a college/university library, interlibrary loan may be an option for books and articles. (Note that this is US-centric.) If you can find contact information for the author of an article, they will often share it with you. Scholars and academics want their work read and cited. They do not benefit from the status quo in academic published. (With three peer-reviewed articles and three book chapters to my name, I have netted a total $0 for my publishing efforts!)
Belonging to fan communities that tend to welcome scholarly approaches is another resource, as members who have access to academic databases and libraries are often willing to help find hard-to-source materials. @silmarillionwritersguild is one; I have definitely asked for help myself on our Discord server! If there are others, please recommend them!
2. Present your work at a Tolkien conference. This can occur at the same time as Step 1 and certainly isn't required, but beginning to attend and present at Tolkien conferences will give you access to feedback from other scholars and help you to refine your work for publication. There are a number of hybrid events that are primarily fannish and so tend to be friendly, approachable venues for your first presentation: Oxonmoot, Mythcon, and Mythmoot (which also has smaller regional moots) are three that I would recommend for first-time presenters coming from fandom. Local Tolkien societies may also put on occasional conference-like events, which are increasingly hybrid. When the SWG's newsletter editor (*cough* me ...) remembers to include it, we do a monthly round-up of calls for papers and proposals in our Around the World and Web section of our weekly email newsletter. This would include the events listed above, as well as more academic-oriented conferences, as well as calls for proposals for book chapters, journal special issues, etc. (Which reminds me that I need to post the June roundup ...)
We just did a three-part series as part of our Master Class column called "So You Want to Present at a Tolkien Conference?" that covers writing a proposal, putting together a paper and presentation, and actually giving the presentation.
3. Publishing your work. As noted above, there are four peer-reviewed journals with a heavy Tolkien studies focus: the Journal of Tolkien Research, Mythlore, Mallorn, and Tolkien Studies. Of course, journals with a broader focus (such as scifi/fantasy or British authors) might be viable as well, as would journals of other disciplines that may overlap with your focus (e.g., fan studies, narratology, film studies, etc.) And there are generally several calls for proposals each year for chapters in anthologies with a specific focus (e.g., I am currently working on a paper for an anthology on women and Tolkien). Robin Reid is a retired academic and Tolkien scholar and an incredible advocate for new and fan scholars. Her Substack publishes CFPs as she becomes aware of them.
Other advice and resources, please add as a reblog or comment! But, to wrap up, I want to say one more time to Tolkien fans who want to present or publish their work:
We, as fans, are talking about ideas right now that scholarship has not yet dreamed of.
We, as fans, engage consistently with the texts in deep and detailed ways.
We, as fans, are not less or inferior to those scholars who took a more traditional academic route. We have important contributions to make to the field of Tolkien studies! You can do this!
Love kidnap fam? Hate it? Ambivalent? Great! Your thoughts are wanted.
I am collecting survey data as part of my research on the "Living Legendarium", i.e., how the legends of Arda, from their earliest drafts by Tolkien to the posthumously published Silmarillion edited by Christopher Tolkien to the creative engagements by fans, are inherently indeterminate and mutable, inviting many and diverse interpretations.
This portion of the study focuses on the various ways that fans of the Silmarillion understand and imagine the relationship between Maedhros, Maglor, Elrond, and Elros: the "kidnap fam".
The resulting paper will be presented at Mereth Aderthad on July 19 2025 and published afterwards on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild.
COMPLETE THE SURVEY until June 27, 2025.
Even if you're not completing the survey, reblogs are appreciated!
Tolkien asserted on multiple occasions that death was a primary theme of his work, and there are over ninety deaths of named characters in t
I'm psyched that my paper "Grief, Grieving, and Permission to Mourn in the Quenta Silmarillion" is out in a special edition of the Journal of Tolkien Research, "Tolkien and Psychology"!
Here is the abstract:
Tolkien asserted on multiple occasions that death was a primary theme of his work, and there are over ninety deaths of named characters in the Quenta Silmarillion alone. In reading the Quenta Silmarillion as historiography, the universality and psychologically powerful experience of death, grief, and mourning allows the narrators of the Quenta Silmarillion to shape how readers perceive characters, events, and themes in the text. Assuming Pengolodh as the primary narrator, this paper investigates how Tolkien used a limited, flawed, and biased narrative point of view as a strategy to shape reader responses and theme. Characters who die in the Quenta Silmarillion vary in whether they are grieved and how they are mourned such that some characters are aggrandized and their negative deeds deemphasized, while others conspicuously lack any mention of grief or mourning, drawing attention to their negative actions and essentially dehumanizing them as people capable of being loved and grieved (or in some cases, capable of the normal human emotions of love and grief). The biased treatment of death by the Quenta Silmarillion narrator not only uses psychology to shape readers' perceptions but stands as moral guideposts to the fictional audience of later ages in the legendarium and creates the sense of untold stories that Tolkien used to create the impression historical depth in his work.
This paper started as a presentation at the 2024 Tolkien at UVM conference and kicked off 2024's obsession with Silmarillion death stats. (This year is Silmarillion dialogue stats.) In addition to the data, it considers in some depth the death scenes of Fëanor, Aredhel, Fingolfin, Finrod Felagund, and Elu Thingol.
Mereth Aderthad 2025 is open to both in-person and virtual attendees, and registration for both is free. Registration will remain open through the day of the event, so there is no deadline to register!
Some key points:
You will be asked for a name and an email address at registration. Pseudonyms are fine!
We will use your email to contact you about event updates only.
Please do not register if you cannot attend, and cancel your registration if circumstances change and you are no longer able to attend. In-person seating is limited, and we pay costs per person and cannot afford to pay for empty seats. Contact a moderator if you need help canceling a registration. We are leaving registration open through the day of the event, so if you decide you can join us last-minute, please do!
There is an OPTIONAL donation to help us cover costs of the event. It really is optional! We want you there more than we want an extra few bucks! If you want more information on how donations will be used, see our Donation Policy.
Ready to register? You can register for Mereth Aderthad 2025 here!
