Dawn Walls-Thumma - Libraries and Middle-earth: Fanworks, Archives, and Communities as Heritage

"Tolkien wrote eloquently throughout his letters about the appeal of ""unattainable vistas"" in literature: hints at a story that extends beyond the words present on the page, drawing the reader imaginatively deeper into a Secondary World. While all fans of Tolkien's work likely peer into these vistas and imagine what lies there, a subset of Tolkien fans respond with creative works of their own, mostly fanfiction and fanart, and bring these vistas to life.
This paper will consider fanworks as heritage using two methodological approaches. First, it will draw on the longitudinal Tolkien Fanfiction Survey. This IRB-approved survey shows that fanworks, for fans who engage in them, function to preserve and promote engagement with Tolkien's works. Fans who make fanworks build and join communities centered on these activities, where they support newcomers just beginning to engage with Tolkien's texts, share resources, and deepen their own knowledge of the legendarium. Furthermore, as Abigail De Kosnik shows in her study of fanfiction archives, fan communities often spur the creation of fanworks archives, which preserve the creative and scholarly texts of community members.
Additionally, the paper will draw on my experience as the founder and owner of the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, one of the largest Tolkien fanfiction archives still online that will turn twenty years in July 2025. Those twenty years have shown that fanfiction communities and archives not only preserve heritage but form a key locus for its interpretation and evolution by community members. Fanworks have been used, for example, to engage with recent important questions about race, gender, religion, and adaptations of Tolkien's works, ultimately pressing beyond the borders Tolkien himself drew and into new vistas. Fanworks, therefore, both preserve Tolkien's heritage as received by fans and deepen and extend our understanding of it."

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the chat during this one was so fun