Long before I would have dared self-identify as a Tolkien scholar or ever imagined standing before you now, I voraciously read everything I could get my hands on about fanfiction, stuff written by both fans and scholars. I was, and am, a fanfiction writer myself and an owner of a fanfiction archive in the Silmarillion corner of the Tolkienfic fandom. I was, and am, monofandom. Most of the meta and scholarship I was reading was about fandoms other than my own, and while it was fascinating work, I rarely felt like it fully connected to my own experiences in the Tolkienfic fandom.

"Tolkien fandom is different." I wrote this a few years ago on my blog and was confronted by someone who asked me, "How? How it is different?" I had a sense, based on my observations over more than a decade in the fandom, but nothing much in the way of actual evidence. As I became a fan studies researcher in my own right, collecting quantitative data about the Tolkienfic fandom, I began finding my data added clarity to those observations.

Last summer, I was working on an article with my friend and coauthor Janet McCullough John, and in a conversation, the difference suddenly sprang forth. I had discovered a 2009 Dreamwidth post by obsession_inc that divided fandom into two types: affirmational and transformational. As I waxed eloquent to Janet about the transformational qualities of Tolkienfic fandom, she drew me up sudden and short: I wasn't giving the whole picture. The transformational fandom I was describing wasn't us. Not fully, anyway.

Obsession_inc is clear in her original post that "there is a certain amount of crossover" between the two types. Nonetheless, the tendency has been to treat affirmational and transformational fandoms as separate entities on opposite ends of a continuum, with fanfiction always assumed to be on the transformational side. Affirmational fandom, according to obsession_inc, involves restating the source material, establishing rules "on how the characters are and how the universe works," and valuing the authority of the original creator. Transformational fandom, on the other hand, "is all about laying hands upon the source and twisting it to the fans' own purposes." It is freewheeling and democratic and often flouts the original creator's authority in favor of investing that authority in the fan. This is where I realized the mismatch was happening between "fanfiction" as it had been described to me by fans and scholars alike and "Tolkienfic" as I knew it. Tolkienfic doesn't fall neatly into the transformational bucket. Rather, the Tolkienfic fandom occupies a space between the affirmational and the transformational in how it views authority, the role of media adaptations in fanworks, and the interests of and infrastructures built by its community.

In discussing this topic, I will be using primarily data from the Tolkien Fan Fiction Survey, which ran from December 2014 through November 2015. At the close of the survey, 1,052 valid responses were recorded, gathering information on demographics and the views and habits of both authors and readers. The complete data from the survey is now available on my website, linked at the end of my presentation.

One of the key distinctions between affirmational and transformational fandoms, originally identified by obsession_inc and perpetuated by scholars since, is demographic. According to the received wisdom, affirmational fandoms are primarily male; transformational fandoms are primarily female. Demographically, the Tolkienfic fandom fits what we'd expect from a transformational fandom. About 89 percent of survey participants identified as female; less than 4 percent identified as male. In 2013, CentrumLumina conducted an AO3 Census that found nearly the same gender demographics for AO3 users as a whole: 90 percent female and just over 4 percent male.

I intentionally lead with this demographic data. The idea of feminine creativity is deeply embedded in the definition of transformational fandom, and the result is the equation of transformational fandom with overturning traditional, masculine structures of power, authority, and privilege. In a 2014 article in Transformative Works and Cultures, Matt Hills expressed unease in complicating the definition of transformativity to acknowledge transformative elements in mimetic fandom: "It is not my intent here to suggest that already marginalized and disempowered fan practices should be further marginalized in favor of academically stressing sanctioned or potentially male-centered modes of fan productivity" (3.16). Tolkienfic fandom, I believe, goes in the opposite direction of the fandom Hills described: It is a predominantly female fandom working easily with both transformational and affirmational elements to produce creative works that celebrate, challenge, extend, and critique Tolkien's legendarium. The issue, in other words, is not one of sanctioning male fandom but in the need to recognize that "female fandom" is as diverse as the women who inhabit it and isn't confined to the transformational label as we know it right now.

One area where transformational fandom is relatively clear is authority. According to obsession_inc, "there's a central disagreement there about Who Is In Charge that's very difficult to ignore" in transformational fandom, going on to term these the "wild west" fans. In other words, the original creator does not necessarily hold much power and authority in these communities. Instead, it is the fans themselves who hold the authority to change the canon as needed to suit their purposes.

This idea, of course, did not originate with obsession_inc. Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith recognized similar tendencies in their 1991 studies that inaugurated the fan studies field. But I would argue that authority is more complicated in the Tolkienfic fandom because many fans actually do recognize and respect Tolkien's authority—or the authority of other stakeholders, like Christopher Tolkien or the Tolkien Estate—to varying degrees.

I presented authors with three statements related to authority in the survey. As with most survey items, they were given five choices of response: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, and No Opinion/Not Sure. The item that most explicitly referenced Tolkien's authority stated, "It is important to me to write stories that I think Tolkien would have approved of." Fifteen percent of participants agreed. When presented with a survey item stating, "It is important to keep my stories consistent with Tolkien's moral beliefs," the number jumps to 22 percent.

At first glance, these numbers seem small, but in the context of viewing transformational fandom as inherently defiant of authority, I believe they are nonetheless significant. One in five authors, for example, takes Tolkien's moral values into account when crafting fanfiction. Fill in any other creator from any other fandom into that same statement, and the significance of one in five becomes more apparent. For example: "It is important to keep my stories consistent with J.K. Rowlings'/Joss Whedon's/Gene Roddenberry's moral beliefs" all sound too absurd to present to their fandoms with any hope of a serious response.

The third item, about sticking to the canonical facts, sees exactly half of fans agreeing. Here, we see how Tolkienfic fandom begins to shade into the affirmational. Canon matters, and deeply, to this community. Kristina Busse summarizes the difference between affirmational and transformational fandoms as "Man Collect/Women Connect," and here, we see how this simplification quickly falls apart. (To be fair, Busse acknowledges that this is an oversimplification.) Tolkienfic fans deeply study—and yes, collect from—the canon.

The value of the canon becomes apparent when considering the impact of Peter Jackson's two blockbuster film trilogies on the fandom. The films have undoubtedly impacted the fandom, with both trilogies generating spikes of interest in the fandom and serving as a point of initiation for new fans. And certainly fans have used elements from Jackson's films in their fanfiction: 72 percent of survey participants acknowledged that the films "encouraged" their writing. However, movieverse fandom has not subsumed bookverse fandom; in fact, quite the opposite is evident.

As noted, many fans got their start during either of the two waves of increased interest that happened during and shortly after Jackson's two trilogies. These fans did not, however, remain strictly movieverse fans. In fact, only three authors out of 642 who took the survey used only the films as sources—and the survey was circulated in the midst of the Hobbit film trilogy! If ever there was a moment to capture fans enthused by the films but not particularly driven to pick up the book on which it was based, this survey circulated in the midst of it.

Instead, what the survey shows happening is that the longer authors remain in the Tolkienfic fandom, the more sources they read and use in their fanfiction. After three years of writing, most authors are using The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—the books—but not necessarily any of Tolkien's posthumous works. At five years, most are also using The Silmarillion. At six years, most are also using texts like Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth series.

What seems to be happening here is the films serve as an initiation point into a book-based fandom. It's important to realize that this is not a guarantee. The Sherlockian fandom is perhaps the most salient example of what the Tolkienfic fandom could look like. Like the Tolkien fandom, the Sherlockians are a venerable fandom with affirmational beginnings and highly oriented toward mastery of the canon. With the introduction of BBC's Sherlock, however, the fandom underwent a shift to where it is predominantly a media fandom, transformational, and with little interest in the original texts. The original literary Sherlockian fandom has been described to me, by members of that community, as an entirely different—and very small—branch on the Sherlockian tree. Tolkienfic fandom could have gone that way. It did not, and when Busse claims that "Man Collects" and obsession_inc observes of affirmational fandom that "the source material is re-stated," then they are describing the normal trajectory of a Tolkienfic fan.

Instead, the Tolkienfic fan does just what Busse and obsession_inc assign to male, affirmational fans: They collect and develop a mastery of the book canon. This asserts itself in the infrastructures they build and in the interests they express.

When I speak of infrastructure, I refer to the formalized sites, archives, and communities where fans share Tolkienfic. Like many fandoms that experienced their start—or in the case of Tolkienfic, their surge—in the early 2000s, the Tolkienfic fandom spent the better part of a decade building infrastructure, including dozens of independent fanfiction archives. Nearly all of these sites included some feature intended to collect and master the canon. This might be informal, such as a list of links and resources, but other sites, like the Henneth-Annûn Story Archive and the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, expend great effort on generating edited resource collections for authors on their sites to use. Nor should I neglect the literal collection of books, familiar to nearly any Tolkienfic author, which includes an underground exchange of unauthorized digital copies. Although some fans use the unauthorized copies because they cannot obtain the printed books, many others use them for their ease in, again, collecting facts from the canon.

Other sites included discussion groups as part of their infrastructure. On early sites, these were often forums built into the site itself or an affiliated Yahoo! Groups mailing list; today, discussions more often occur on a site like Dreamwidth or Discord. While the content of these discussion groups is varied, a significant component involves collecting and mastering the canon. Fans seek help with canon questions, debate various interpretations, share resources, and synthesize the canon with real-world subjects like medicine or botany. These are purely affirmational tendencies but for the fact that their purpose is ostensibly to write fanfiction. Nor are they the norm in the broader fandom. The data below shows a comparison between the discussions on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild Yahoo! Group and Metafandom in 2007. Nearly half of the discussions on the SWG specifically concerned Tolkien's canon, while the Metafandom discussions reflected the typical (transformational) concerns of the fanfiction writer: sex and social justice.

I want to close by looking closer at the reasons authors self-identify for writing Tolkienfic. Much of the survey concerned these motives, and here again, it is helpful to return to obsession_inc's original definition of transformational fandom, where she talks about reworking the source to fix problems, especially a lack of sex. She uses the term "radical reinterpretation" and notes that "everyone has their own shot at declaring what the source material means."

Here, I want to emphasize that all of these transformational elements are present in the Tolkienfic fandom. However, they are not only not universal but often don't even describe a majority of writers. First is the fix-it fic: the use of stories to correct perceived problems with the original text. Only 41 percent of authors identified this as a motive in a survey item that stated, "Writing fan fiction lets me fix parts of the story that I think Tolkien did wrong," the third least agreed-with author motive in the survey. Interestingly, a second item asked essentially the same thing but removed the challenge to Tolkien's authority: "Writing fan fiction lets me tell the story how I wish it had been told." Fifty-seven percent of authors agreed here—#6 out of twenty-three motives—again illustrating the outsized role Tolkien's authority plays in this fandom.

Tolkienfic writers often aren’t entirely comfortable with using their fanfiction for a critical purpose. Two survey items asked about this, with about half of authors agreeing. Again, however, when the challenge to authority was toned down in an item that stated, "Writing fan fiction lets me express my views or interpretations of Tolkien's world," 95 percent of authors agreed. Clearly, authors are using fanfiction as a critical and interpretive form; they are not, however, always comfortable depicting their work in those terms.

To conclude, I'd like to take a step back and consider the big picture here. I am not asserting that Tolkienfic fandom is affirmational. However, I also do not think that it neatly fits the definition of a transformational fandom that, whether using that term or not, has been the assumption of fic fandoms since the advent of fan studies.

Instead, what I see—both in my data and in my experiences as a member of this fandom—is a community with strong affirmational tendencies that are directed toward the transformational production of creative work. That work is very often interpretive or critical, but it employs canon in a way that many other transformational fandoms do not. Canon mastery—which implies curative tendencies assigned to affirmational fandom—is a prerequisite to interpreting the canon through story.

In 2004, Susan Booker found that 10 percent of fanfiction websites were Tolkien-related. In 2019, Tolkien fandoms are the fourth largest book fandoms on Fanfiction.net and AO3. Tolkienfic fandom has existed in some form for more than fifty years and been a major online fandom for nearly twenty. The way we construct our stories matters and complicates traditional understandings of transformational female fandom.