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.
Since the release of The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, the One Book for fanfiction writers has been The Lord of the Rings. The past two Tolkien Fanfiction Surveys documented this, showing it to be the source used most often by fanfiction writers in crafting their stories.
In the 2025 data, this fact remains unchanged—but the gap is narrowing. The Silmarillion is very close to being the source used most often by fanfiction writers.
In 2015, 89% of authors used The Lord of the Rings. Only 78% used The Silmarillion.
In 2020, that gap widened: 91% of authors wrote stories using The Lord of the Rings. 75% used The Silmarillion.
In 2025, there was motion in the opposite direction. The number of authors using The Lord of the Rings dropped to 87%, while the number writing based on The Silmarillion rose to 84%.
Past analysis of survey data shows that Tolkien fanfiction writers expand their use of books the longer they write in the fandom, which might partly explain these data as well. Tolkien fanfiction is aging with a reduced influx of new authors, so it makes sense that those who stuck around since 2020, who may have been Lord of the Rings or Hobbit writers, have possibly expanded into The Silmarillion. What these data don’t explain is the drop in interest in writing based on The Lord of the Rings.
One year’s worth of data does not make a pattern, so it will be interesting to see if the 2030 survey continues this trend, maybe even with The Silmarillion overtaking The Lord of the Rings.
A friendly reminder that Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data is posted weekly on @tolkien-fanfiction-survey and on the Substack Tolkien by the Numbers.
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Saturday Data! "Rings of Power" Is a Ripple among Fanfic Writers
One of the pieces of data I was most excited to get my hands on when the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey closed concerned the impact of the Rings of Power television series. In 2022, amidst rising anxiety that the show would overtake Tolkien fanfiction fandom, I wrote to “expect a new wave of fans eager to read and learn and write about Middle-earth … from the books.” That was the effect of the two trilogies produced by Peter Jackson and his team. Both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit had a massive effect on the fanfiction fandom, but neither became sources for fanfiction in their own rights, absent the books.
Data from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey shows that the influence of The Rings of Power is so far significantly less overwhelming. The film trilogies didn’t just create a splash; they kicked up a tsunami. In the 2020 and 2025 surveys, 45% of authors agreed that they started writing fanfiction because of these films. 45%! Nearly half! Even ten years after the last Hobbit film rolled credits in the last theater showing it!
In comparison, 9% of authors agreed with the statement, “I started writing Tolkien-based fanfiction because of the Rings of Power television series.” And this is while the series is airing.
Furthermore, 85% of authors disagreed with the same statement. (69% strongly disagreed.)
I’m excited to unpack these data further. For example, do those 9% of fans follow authors inspired by the film trilogies in turning to the books? Or is this a splinter fandom, using a media adaptation as its sole source? Among those who strongly disagreed, is this because they’re fandom olds, like me, who started writing fanfiction while the showrunners were still being carded? Or is their choice of “strongly” intended as commentary on the show itself?
The show has many seasons left to air, and it’s possible that it will capture the interest of fanfiction writers in seasons to come, but so far, it is not making a tsunami, wave, or splash—just a ripple.
A friendly reminder that Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data is posted weekly on @tolkien-fanfiction-survey and on the Substack Tolkien by the Numbers.
Saturday Data! Yes, People Comment on the Work of Friends
Last week, I posted an article in the SWG’s fan studies column, Cultus Dispatches, called Communities Do Comment: Expanding the 3C's of Commenting with SWG Data. Part of an eight-year-long conversation in why people do and do not choose to comment, I concluded that community looms particularly large as a reason why people do comment, i.e., when authors and readers are part of a shared community, they tend to comment more on each others’ work.
For this week’s Friday nibble of data, I want to look at a Tolkien Fanfiction Survey item that was new to the 2025 survey. Readers were asked to respond to the statement, “I am more likely to comment on fanfiction if I have interacted with the author before”; two-thirds of participants agreed or strongly agreed with that statement.
Only 17% disagreed or strongly disagreed. The same percentage either don’t comment on fanfiction or weren’t sure.
Digging deeper into that two-thirds (and the 17% who disagreed) will likely prove interesting, but as a quick Friday flyover of this single item, the results are unsurprising. The vast majority of us would rather speak to a friend than a stranger, and these data show this holds true in fandom as well.
In my Communities Do Comment article, I noted that the slump in commenting on AO3 between the fall of Yahoo! Groups and the rise of Discord is likely explained in part by people simply not knowing each other because Tumblr and AO3, for all the advantages they offer, are not community platforms. Of course, for authors eager for more comments on their work, this either raises the bar to achieving that or lowers it, depending on who you are. If the thought of socializing in fandom causes you to break out into a cold sweat, this is not good news for you. But if, like many of us, you do like talking with fellow fans and getting to know them as people, the data suggest there may be additional benefits to that.
A friendly reminder that Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data is posted weekly on @tolkien-fanfiction-survey and on the Substack Tolkien by the Numbers.
Two women creating stories based on their favourite characters
I was recently interviewed by the BBC for their programme The Conversation, along with Boys Love fandom scholar Kristine Michelle Santos. I spoke about my own experience as a fic writer in the Tolkien fandom, as well as the history and current practice of Tolkien fanfiction. This was a really exciting opportunity, and I hope you get a chance to listen to my conversation with Kristine!
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?
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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!
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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.
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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. 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!
~ Dawn
Dawn Felagund @dawnfelagund - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
