How Tolkien Presents Ordinary People in "The Silmarillion"
Inspired by collecting the prompts for the SWG's Everyman challenge, this essay considers how ordinary people are subsumed and silenced in The Silmarillion, which begins a three-book arc that ends with the rise of the humble and ordinary.
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(Re)Archive: The Rise and Fall (and Rebound?) of Independent Fanfiction Archives
Published on 9 October 2023 | Conference Paper
Early online fandoms had multitudes of small, often highly specialized fan-run archives. Presented at the Fan Studies Network North America 2023 conference, this presentation looks at archive trends in the Tolkien and Harry Potter fandoms, considering what factors lead to the proliferation, decline, and closure of small archives, including what it means to "rearchive" after an era of high archive closure and consolidation.
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Topic: Fandom History
Characters: No characters listed.
Fanfiction Archive Timeline
Published on 16 September 2023 | Research
The Fanfiction Archive Timeline is a visual record of archive activity, closures, and preservation for the Tolkien and Harry Potter fandoms. It is updated annually.
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Topic: Dataset, Fandom History
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A Fanworks Ecumenopolis: Tolkien Fanfiction Archives and the Implications of Consolidation
Published on 14 October 2022 | Conference Paper
Presented at the Fan Studies Network North America conference in 2022, this presentation uses the concept of the "world city" or ecumenopolis as a metaphor for the infrastructure for archiving fanworks in the early 2020s, taking Tolkien fanfiction as a case study. As the extreme archival fragmentation of the Tolkien fandom gave way to growing consolidation onto the Archive of Our Own, questions arise concerning the future of fandom archiving and whether this consolidation poses risks of not just data loss but cultural loss as well.
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Topic: Fandom Culture, Fandom History
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The Pillar and the Vastness: A Longitudinal View of the Tolkien Fanfiction Fandom
Published on 3 June 2021 | Conference Paper
Using the 2015 and 2020 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data, this presentation reviews fandom demographics, use of sources, influence of the films, and use of sites and archives to post fanfiction, reviewing changes across the two data sets.
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Topic: Fandom Culture, Fandom History
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As I Say and As I Do: Negotiating Transformational Impulses in Tolkien-Based Fanfiction
Published on 2 June 2021 | Conference Paper
This paper challenges the idea that Tolkien fanfiction is primarily transformational, using data from the 2015 and 2020 Tolkien Fanfiction Surveys to argue that fanwriters instead engage in a much more complex negotiation between the urges to expand (and challenge) the canon and to cede to Tolkien's authority over the world he created.
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Topic: Fandom Culture, Fandom History
Characters: No characters listed.