Tolkien fan fiction
Scholars have discussed the validity of fan fiction, given Tolkien's apparent dislike of the genre, but noting that he had indicated the possibility of "other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.
[2] Tolkien fandom grew rapidly in many countries after the appearance of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film series in 2001–2003, to the extent that by 2006 it was described as "burgeoning".
[3] In the 21st century, the Internet offered many affordances to fans wishing to publish their own writing, with a wide variety of blogs, discussion groups, lists, live journals, role-playing games and other media formats.
[4] Some scholars have identified fan fiction more specifically as "a genre of resistance against and reparation of media products written by, for, and about heterosexual, cisgender, white, able-bodied males", implying that both authors and readers are women.
[6] Una McCormack comments that despite plentiful "excellent Tolkien fan fiction" by female authors, a small number of stories by men have gathered much of the attention: in particular, the 1999 The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov, and the 2010 Mirkwood by Steve Hillard.
So at last Elladan, after a time he could never reckon... came to Celebrian, slew her tormentors, and bore her still living though wounded with a poisoned dart and evilly tormented by the Orcs, to safety above ground.
"[6]The dark-haired farmer was slowly undressing too, but my eyes were upon the beautiful son of Fëanáro, his coppery hair spilling off of the rock, his pale skin radiant in Laurelin's light.
Long-fingered, graceful hands slipped from his chest to his belly--hollow, with ribs showing in a delicate ladder of shadows--to caress long, shapely thighs that spread open as the farmer stepped free of his trousers, stumbling rather gracelessly in his haste and nearly falling, and came to kneel between Telvo's knees.
This may help in promoting tolerance of homosexuality, though she notes that Tolkien fan fiction's heterosexual female authors may be "expressing their own sexual desires through their identification with attractive male characters".
[12] Between July and September 2020, the cartoonist Molly Knox Ostertag published an illustrated fan fiction story about Frodo and Sam, called "In All the Ways There Were".
[13][14] Una McCormack discusses Junot Díaz's 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, where the protagonist is Dominican-American like the novelist, and finds himself excluded from Tolkien's account of Middle-earth when he reads what seem to him to be the racist words "out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls...", and has "to stop, his head and heart hurting too much".
[7][T 2] Kirill Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer has variously been called fan fiction, a parody, and an alternate account of The Lord of the Rings, from the point of view of the race of Orcs.
[3] Other storytellers have worked from the small hints provided by Tolkien about women such as Finduilas, Denethor's wife who "died untimely", or Ioreth the talkative woman in Gondor's House of Healing.
Some fans have developed the Appendices-only Lord of the Rings character Lothíriel, daughter of Imrahil, wife of Éomer, and mother of Elfwine the Fair, who becomes King of Rohan.
She suggests that in this way the fan fiction writer "is arguably reinscribing a history that has somehow been lost in translation or transmission", since, she writes, quoting "Firerose", the civilisations of Middle-earth could not have survived with the sex ratios that Tolkien documents for the noble families in the Appendices.
[7] Firerose's story "Missing" creates Lóriniel, younger sister of Faramir, whose short and tragic life ends during the time described in The Lord of the Rings.
Faramir discovers from scraps and small clues that his father Denethor, mad with grief and despair, "has turned to Lóriniel for sexual comfort, eliding wife and daughter.
"[T 5] In a letter to another publisher, Milton Waldman of Collins, some years earlier, Tolkien wrote of his intended mythology for England that I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched.
[T 1] Megan Abrahamson, writing in Mythlore, comments that this "apparently rather magnanimously" opens the way to fans to create a range of materials to fill out gaps in the Tolkien canon: but that the next word in the letter is "Absurd!"
[19] Indeed, she comments, Tolkien's own writings can be seen as a fan author, both for the way he constantly developed elements of the Silmarillion myths, and for his reworking of medieval tales such as in his The Fall of Arthur.
He added that Mark Wolf's "decision to set aside fan fiction" in his Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, a book heavily based on Tolkien's writings, "because it is not authorized or 'canonical' seems likely to prove misguided in the long term.
[21] On the other hand, Fisher criticised Mark Bednarowski's "A Wizard for All Seasons" article for providing "nothing more than plot rehearsal, at times blooming purple and bordering on fan fiction.
Further, she argued, quality cannot be the criterion: the fact that Neil Gaiman wrote an unpublishable tale based on The Chronicles of Narnia did not make his writing "suddenly deteriorate".
Character analyses, rather than being constructed in a nonfiction essay, are constructed in a fictional environment ... Because both the producers and consumers of the fan works are aware of the source materials that are extratextual to the fan productions, a rich interpretive space is created...[22] Vink added that authors inevitably lose full control of a work once it is published, as readers can freely interpret whatever is written.
In Tolkien's case, she stated, his pretence of translating and of editing supposedly found manuscripts invites critical scrutiny and analysis; she noted that fan writers add "fore- or afterwords, footnotes or even essays complementing their stories".
[20] In 2019, Dieter Petzold described fan fiction, "grown to an enormous size thanks to the internet",[18] as one of several types of "sub-sub-creations", alluding to Tolkien's theory of sub-creation.
[24] With the availability of Internet media such as Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, and personal websites from 1992 onwards, fan fiction was increasingly shared online.
[24] The Many Paths to Tread archive is open to Tolkien fan fiction more generally;[24] it was founded in 2009 and run by moderators known as Cathleen, Dreamflower, Pearl Took, and Dawn Felagund.
Tania Su Li Cheng writes that Lenin's statement that "Art belongs to the people" is taken as an "excuse to translate and/or rewrite culturally important content from the West".
[31] She notes that this has empowered Russians like the microbiologist Nick Perumov to produce Tolkien fan fiction like his 1991 Ring of Darkness, and a publisher to print it, effectively ignoring Western copyright law.
