dawnfelagund

[dawnfelagund]

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

[dawnfelagund]

Hello!! A while ago, I read your article on the transformational + affirmational values in the Tolkien fandom while I was researching for my thesis :P And just now I’ve very randomly stumbled upon your blog and I saw your post about your new article with JTR (congrats!!), and I realised, “wait hold on, I know this person”. So that’s vv cool!

I feel like the rest of this ask is more the kind of thing people do over email, but, well, chance brought me here, so… I’m wondering if you, as a published (!!!) Tolkien scholar, have any advice you’d be willing to share with someone (me!) who wants to get their work published as well? I’m also a bit lost about what the best, reputable journal for something Tolkien-related would be. Off the top of my head, I can think of Mythlore, JTR, and Tolkien Studies — except I’m very confused about whether Tolkien Studies is peer-reviewed or not… Any help at all would be appreciated!

What a fabulous question, and I LOVE to see Tolkien fans interested in presenting and publishing their work. I started as fan before I was a fan-and-scholar, and I currently keep a foot in both pools, and I think it's important to recognize that many Tolkien fans are discussing ideas that are not currently part of the scholarship. Many of us are engaging with the texts deeply and in ways that align well with scholarly work, and dare I say that many of us know the more obscure texts (like the HoMe, for example) better than many Tolkien scholars who are coming from the more academic side.

So Tolkien fans who want to become involved in Tolkien scholarship absolutely should. You have the ideas, the knowledge, and the skills!

There are a few steps that I'd recommend for the Tolkien fan-turned-scholar:

1. Familiarize yourself with the published scholarship. In fandom, we tend to engage with other fans, their fanworks, and their meta, and of course, we spend a lot of time in the books. While Tolkien studies has not traditionally been a field that leans heavily on familiarity with the published scholarship, that is changing. There is growing awareness that scholarship is being published that is rehashing ideas that have already been written, or published works are leaning too heavily on outdated literature, so I expect that journals will be increasingly rigorous in their expectations here.

Thankfully, of the four peer-reviewed Tolkien studies journals, three of them are open-access (only Tolkien Studies is not). Even if I do a search through Google Scholar or my alma mater's library, I always visit these three as well and do a keyword search, as anything published in them, being open-access, is really going to be seen as doing a bare minimum of due diligence: Journal of Tolkien Research | Mythlore | Mallorn

Of course, the state of academic publishing is still unfriendly to independent scholars, though it is better than it was ten years ago. Some publishers let you check out a small number of articles per month. I have luck finding academic books in Archive.org. If you live near a good public library system or a college/university library, interlibrary loan may be an option for books and articles. (Note that this is US-centric.) If you can find contact information for the author of an article, they will often share it with you. Scholars and academics want their work read and cited. They do not benefit from the status quo in academic published. (With three peer-reviewed articles and three book chapters to my name, I have netted a total $0 for my publishing efforts!)

Belonging to fan communities that tend to welcome scholarly approaches is another resource, as members who have access to academic databases and libraries are often willing to help find hard-to-source materials. @silmarillionwritersguild is one; I have definitely asked for help myself on our Discord server! If there are others, please recommend them!

2. Present your work at a Tolkien conference. This can occur at the same time as Step 1 and certainly isn't required, but beginning to attend and present at Tolkien conferences will give you access to feedback from other scholars and help you to refine your work for publication. There are a number of hybrid events that are primarily fannish and so tend to be friendly, approachable venues for your first presentation: Oxonmoot, Mythcon, and Mythmoot (which also has smaller regional moots) are three that I would recommend for first-time presenters coming from fandom. Local Tolkien societies may also put on occasional conference-like events, which are increasingly hybrid. When the SWG's newsletter editor (*cough* me ...) remembers to include it, we do a monthly round-up of calls for papers and proposals in our Around the World and Web section of our weekly email newsletter. This would include the events listed above, as well as more academic-oriented conferences, as well as calls for proposals for book chapters, journal special issues, etc. (Which reminds me that I need to post the June roundup ...)

We just did a three-part series as part of our Master Class column called "So You Want to Present at a Tolkien Conference?" that covers writing a proposal, putting together a paper and presentation, and actually giving the presentation.

3. Publishing your work. As noted above, there are four peer-reviewed journals with a heavy Tolkien studies focus: the Journal of Tolkien Research, Mythlore, Mallorn, and Tolkien Studies. Of course, journals with a broader focus (such as scifi/fantasy or British authors) might be viable as well, as would journals of other disciplines that may overlap with your focus (e.g., fan studies, narratology, film studies, etc.) And there are generally several calls for proposals each year for chapters in anthologies with a specific focus (e.g., I am currently working on a paper for an anthology on women and Tolkien). Robin Reid is a retired academic and Tolkien scholar and an incredible advocate for new and fan scholars. Her Substack publishes CFPs as she becomes aware of them.

Other advice and resources, please add as a reblog or comment! But, to wrap up, I want to say one more time to Tolkien fans who want to present or publish their work:

We, as fans, are talking about ideas right now that scholarship has not yet dreamed of.

We, as fans, engage consistently with the texts in deep and detailed ways.

We, as fans, are not less or inferior to those scholars who took a more traditional academic route. We have important contributions to make to the field of Tolkien studies! You can do this!

[dawnfelagund]

Love kidnap fam? Hate it? Ambivalent? Great! Your thoughts are wanted.

I am collecting survey data as part of my research on the "Living Legendarium", i.e., how the legends of Arda, from their earliest drafts by Tolkien to the posthumously published Silmarillion edited by Christopher Tolkien to the creative engagements by fans, are inherently indeterminate and mutable, inviting many and diverse interpretations. 

This portion of the study focuses on the various ways that fans of the Silmarillion understand and imagine the relationship between Maedhros, Maglor, Elrond, and Elros: the "kidnap fam". 

The resulting paper will be presented at Mereth Aderthad on July 19 2025 and published afterwards on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild. 

COMPLETE THE SURVEY until June 27, 2025.

Even if you're not completing the survey, reblogs are appreciated!

[dawnfelagund]

I'm psyched that my paper "Grief, Grieving, and Permission to Mourn in the Quenta Silmarillion" is out in a special edition of the Journal of Tolkien Research, "Tolkien and Psychology"!

Here is the abstract:

Tolkien asserted on multiple occasions that death was a primary theme of his work, and there are over ninety deaths of named characters in the Quenta Silmarillion alone. In reading the Quenta Silmarillion as historiography, the universality and psychologically powerful experience of death, grief, and mourning allows the narrators of the Quenta Silmarillion to shape how readers perceive characters, events, and themes in the text. Assuming Pengolodh as the primary narrator, this paper investigates how Tolkien used a limited, flawed, and biased narrative point of view as a strategy to shape reader responses and theme. Characters who die in the Quenta Silmarillion vary in whether they are grieved and how they are mourned such that some characters are aggrandized and their negative deeds deemphasized, while others conspicuously lack any mention of grief or mourning, drawing attention to their negative actions and essentially dehumanizing them as people capable of being loved and grieved (or in some cases, capable of the normal human emotions of love and grief). The biased treatment of death by the Quenta Silmarillion narrator not only uses psychology to shape readers' perceptions but stands as moral guideposts to the fictional audience of later ages in the legendarium and creates the sense of untold stories that Tolkien used to create the impression historical depth in his work.

This paper started as a presentation at the 2024 Tolkien at UVM conference and kicked off 2024's obsession with Silmarillion death stats. (This year is Silmarillion dialogue stats.) In addition to the data, it considers in some depth the death scenes of Fëanor, Aredhel, Fingolfin, Finrod Felagund, and Elu Thingol.

[dawnfelagund]

Registration for Mereth Aderthad is open!

Signal boosting because this is big and I want to make sure as many people as may want to attend know about it!

Mereth Aderthad 2025 is open to both in-person and virtual attendees, and registration for both is free. Registration will remain open through the day of the event, so there is no deadline to register!

Some key points:

You will be asked for a name and an email address at registration. Pseudonyms are fine!

We will use your email to contact you about event updates only.

Please do not register if you cannot attend, and cancel your registration if circumstances change and you are no longer able to attend. In-person seating is limited, and we pay costs per person and cannot afford to pay for empty seats. Contact a moderator if you need help canceling a registration. We are leaving registration open through the day of the event, so if you decide you can join us last-minute, please do!

There is an OPTIONAL donation to help us cover costs of the event. It really is optional! We want you there more than we want an extra few bucks! If you want more information on how donations will be used, see our Donation Policy.

Ready to register? You can register for Mereth Aderthad 2025 here!

[dawnfelagund]

I'm signal-boosting this too! This event is a celebration of fanworks and the research fans do, so each research/meta presentation will have fanworks that accompany it. We'd love a variety of of creators sharing their perspectives!

Mereth Aderthad 2025 is a hybrid event held in honor of the Silmarillion Writers' Guild's twentieth birthday that seeks to celebrate the creativity and insightfulness of the Tolkien fandom. The event will feature presentations of meta, research, and scholarship. Each presentation will be accompanied by fanworks on the same topic or theme.

We are currently seeking fanworks creators who are interested in creating fanworks to be shared at Mereth Aderthad 2025.

Schedule/Timeline

If you are interested in creating a fanwork for Mereth Aderthad 2025, you should first complete the interest form. We will be in contact after that with next steps.

January 12 - February 15: interest sign-ups for fanworks creators open

January 15: call for meta/research/scholarship closes

February 7: presentation list sent out to all creators who have submitted an interest form

February 15: sign-ups for fanworks creators open

April 15: progress check-in

Fanwork Due Dates: TBD

Here is a more detailed breakdown of how the process will work and which fanworks are eligible.

Fanworks Creator Sign-Up

If you are interested in creating a fanwork for Mereth Aderthad, use this form to share an email address where we can reach you. You will hear from us on February 7 with the presentation list and more information on sign-ups, then again on February 15 with a link to the sign-up form. Filling out the interest form does not require you to sign up.

[dawnfelagund]

Tolkien Connections #1

I am hooked on the New York Times game Connections and have been messing around with making Tolkien-themed Connections boards. I've featured my first one in this week's newsletter for the @silmarillionwritersguild and wanted to put it out there for anyone else who wants to give it a try!

[dawnfelagund]

We don't often think of The Silmarillion as a text that uses modern literary strategies, like indirect characterization through dialogue. However, Tolkien absolutely characterizes using dialogue. Some characters have distinctive patterns in their dialogue, for instance. Námo Mandos is one such character.

Námo is a man of few words. The Silmarillion states that he speaks his judgments at the bidding of Manwë ... not only that, but he speaks very few words, even when pressed to do so.

Námo speaks eight times in the text with a median of twelve words per instance of dialogue. Across the entire book and all characters, the median number of words per instance of dialogue is thirty-one words, so Námo is well below average.

Until he isn't. As the Noldor leave Aman, "they beheld suddenly a dark figure standing high upon a rock that looked down upon the shore. Some say that it was Mandos himself, and no lesser herald of Manwë" ("Of the Flight of the Noldor"). This guys churns out 259 words, more than three times his next longest speech and twenty-one times longer than Námo's median dialogue length. It is the longest dialogue by a single speaker in The Silmarillion.

What is happening here? There are a few possibilities:

Tolkien uses this single long speech in contrast to Námo's seven other much shorter instances of dialogue to emphasize the importance of this speech. Along those same lines,

the Doom of the Noldor, along with the Oath of Fëanor, form the "explanation of history" used by the narrator of The Silmarillion. Just about everything bad that happens, the narrator finds a way to tie back to these. Again, the length of the speech—especially coming from a character who is succinct verging on terse—emphasizes the centrality of the Doom of the Noldor. We understand that Námo only speaks when it's important, and he says a lot here, so it must be really important.

Is the speaker even Námo? The language "some say" creates doubt; it relegates the identity of the speaker to the realm of rumor. Again, thinking about the narrator, the uncertainty allows for the possibility that the narrator elevated a theory that confirms his understanding of history without having firm evidence.

Or maybe the anomaly is a characterization strategy. Tolkien writes a character who speaks very little. In this scene, he speaks a lot. And I do mean A LOT. What does this say about Námo's frame of mind in this scene? He suddenly unleashes a torrent of dialogue where he spoke minimally or not at all before, perhaps an indication of distress, sorrow, frustration? It is further interesting, considering that his second longest instance of dialogue was also Fëanor-related, to consider what this shows of his feelings toward Fëanor. Is this the Silmarillion version of the modern comedy trope where the strong, silent type suddenly lets loose the outpouring he's been holding in all this time?

Regardless of the theory you prefer, Tolkien uses dialogue here to raise questions about characters and about history.

---

This is part of my ongoing project The Silmarillion: Who Speaks? The data is available under a CC license for others who wish to play with it: View the data | Copy the data

Previous posts:

Dialogue by Chapter Dialogue by Character Group Dialogue by Gender Who Talks More Than God?

The entire project is archived on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild.

[dawnfelagund]

The last couple of days have been heavier topics, with data on who speaks by gender and character group, so today seemed a good day for a post that is only semi-serious!

Because it doesn't actually mean much to talk more than Ilúvatar in The Silmarillion. Ilúvatar has a lot of lines and is prone to speech-making so has a high word count as well, but it's not like the four characters who speak more than him are trying to one-up God or anything. But we're Silmarillion fans and anything related to our characters feels political, so it's fun to consider which of them talk more than God.

In fact, the four characters who do are interesting in part because their dialogue is so different. Melian's dialogue is mostly in conversation, with Thingol or Galadriel. Fëanor has a variety of different dialogue but also makes some lengthy speeches; his speech to the Noldor prior to their exile is the third longest in the book (excluding two instances of "group speeches"). Túrin is the exact opposite: He speaks a lot, but his instances of dialogue are unusually short. The median length of an instance of dialogue across the book is thirty-one words, but the median for Túrin's dialogue is twenty-one words.

Thingol, of course, comes out on top as the character who speaks the most instances of dialogue AND the most words, topping Ilúvatar in both of these categories.

Returning to Melian and continuing yesterday's discussion of gender and speech, the woman who speaks the most after Melian is Yavanna, with ten instances of dialogue (most of them in the Christopher Tolkien-authored "Of Aulë and Yavanna). This means that Melian and Yavanna speak more than half of the dialogue uttered by women in The Silmarillion.

Of course, I'm always interested in pseudohistorical readings of The Silmarillion, particularly thinking about who is telling the story at what points and how the story Tolkien gives us is shaped by narrative point of view.

In this case, Thingol as the top talker makes sense given that the Beleriandic materials were collected by Pengolodh, who counted as a major source the refugees from Doriath who migrated, as did he, to Sirion's mouth. Dírhaval, who is credited with Túrin's story, would have likewise heard much of Thingol (and Melian) from his sources. It makes sense that Thingol, Túrin, and Melian are written with more immediacy than other characters are, who likely felt less accessible to the narrators.

What about Fëanor? The Aman materials were authored by Rúmil and passed to Pengolodh. I've always felt like Rúmil's sections portray Fëanor with more humanity than Pengolodh's sections do, though I've not yet drilled down into the data on this. The dialogue data seems to support that, at least, Rúmil perceived Fëanor as a character important enough that his words were worth preserving. That may seem like a "doh" statement, but consider how many important moments throughout The Silmarillion occur without us hearing dialogue from anyone at all. Multiple of Fëanor's speeches, on the other hand, were preserved.

---

This is part of my ongoing project The Silmarillion: Who Speaks? The data is available under a CC license for others who wish to play with it: View the data | Copy the data

Previous posts:

Dialogue by Chapter Dialogue by Character Group Dialogue by Gender

The entire project is archive on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild.

[dawnfelagund]

Thank you, @by-shire-reckoning, for your thoughts on my work. I want to be clear that I in no way aim to criticize Tolkien in this! He was dead for a few years before I was even born. He comes with the historical and religious baggage around sex and gender that you mention. I can't fault him for that anymore than I can fault myself for not meeting acceptable standards for representation and whatnot that will exist one hundred years hence. It's a good thing that we've raised our expectations for representation since Tolkien was actively working on "Silmarillion" material.

The reason I do this work is because of us, his readers and fans, and his influence on broader Western culture. We have Tolkien's books as they are, and they shape us and how we see ourselves in the world. That women have only 17% of the dialogue is huge in a fandom that is majority women and gender minorities, as Tolkien fanworks fandom is. What does this mean for us and how we read, understand, and enjoy this text? And how do we then respond to it with fanworks? (And also for the record, I don't think women or any other group of fans need to respond in a singular way to these facts. Many women are unbothered by the legendarium as written and that's totally fine! Others of us use it as a reason for shaping our own fanworks.)

And of course Tolkien's work is the foundation of the fantasy genre, which means that, intended or not, his work has become a prototype that has echoed through popular culture for decades with race, gender, disability, and sexuality only recently being addressed with more than tokenism (and even that remains controversial). Again, not Tolkien's fault, but if the house leans, you look first to the foundation.

For example, you mention Lúthien, who I think is an excellent example of the tensions we sometimes feel within this work, where what we "know" of the legendarium and what the text actually says/does are at odds. Lúthien is always—and rightfully so—held up as THE example of a strong woman character. Yet she is mentioned 137 times in The Silmarillion while Beren is mentioned 146. He speaks eleven times. She speaks four. Again, this is not to say that Tolkien, writing in the 1950s, should have done better. But I, as a woman reader, have been unable to discuss gender and Tolkien without someone pointing at her and saying "but Lúthien" ... yet she still doesn't get the airtime or the opportunities to speak that her inferior male companion does. (Actually, I find it highly relatable as a woman who has done most of the work and shared the credit throughout my life in the majority of mixed-gender collaborative endeavors.) And a character like Lúthien becomes a prototype for the strong woman in fantasy: beautiful, magical, and silent.

I expect the outcome of these data will surprise no one. Women speak less, and women speak less. This isn't a typo: It means that they have fewer instances of dialogue in The Silmarillion by a substantial margin, and when they do speak, they speak nine fewer words than men, on average.

Instances of women speaking is much nearer to speakers of unknown gender than to men speaking. (And before we get excited and think that the "unknown gender" speakers are rejecting the gender binary, this category represents mostly dialogue attributed to a group, plus two unnamed individuals who are given dialogue and one sword.)

This matters because dialogue signifies several important things in The Silmarillion. First, in a pseudohistorical text like The Silmarillion, direct quotes mean that someone said something important enough to preserve in the historical record. Men, based on the data, are saying far more important things than women, at least in the various narrators' estimation. Next, dialogue is often a proxy to action: Characters debate, give directives, and make speeches. Dialogue also humanizes, and even though Tolkien rejects many modern literary techniques in The Silmarillion, he does use dialogue as a characterization technique. As I will show in future analyses, some characters are distinguishable based on how they speak.

Of course, the reduced dialogue of women in The Silmarllion is a direct effect of there being significantly fewer women than men: Women constitute only 19% of the named characters in The Silmarillion. Even given this, however, women speak less than we would expect.

When we look at character groups, there are notable differences, namely that women of the Ainur speak more than Mortal Human and Elven women do. (Only four Elven women and five Mortal Human women speak in The Silmarillion! Excuse me while I scream!) This was the thesis of the long-ago Inequality Prototype that spurred this data collection endeavor: The Valar, being prototypical, show an equal penchant for entering into the world based on gender: It is a 50/50 split. So we can't say that women have less desire to influence the world than men in the legendarium. When we see less action and fewer instances of dialogue among women, then, we have to ask why.

Complicating the data for the Ainur (overall, not just this set) is the fact that a big chunk of their dialogue occurs in the "Of Aulë and Yavanna" chapter that Christopher Tolkien wrote. I don't want to treat these data differently until I have the opportunity to collect more data on where dialogue outside this chapter comes from; for all I know, Christopher wrote most of it! (Actually, I know he didn't, but this chapter does illustrate how his additions can skew data for a particular group, in this case the Ainur.)

Another future area of inquiry will be the type or purpose of the dialogue and whether/how this varies based on gender. Characters speak for many reasons. Do women speak for different purposes than men?

If these data illustrate anything to me, it is the importance of fanworks in amplifying the voices of women characters who we know existed and know said and did things that mattered. We are being given a historical record much like our own Modern-earth historical record: biased toward the contributions of some over others. Only we can fix that.

---

This is part of my ongoing project The Silmarillion: Who Speaks? The data is available under a CC license for others who wish to play with it: View the data | Copy the data

[dawnfelagund]

I expect the outcome of these data will surprise no one. Women speak less, and women speak less. This isn't a typo: It means that they have fewer instances of dialogue in The Silmarillion by a substantial margin, and when they do speak, they speak nine fewer words than men, on average.

Instances of women speaking is much nearer to speakers of unknown gender than to men speaking. (And before we get excited and think that the "unknown gender" speakers are rejecting the gender binary, this category represents mostly dialogue attributed to a group, plus two unnamed individuals who are given dialogue and one sword.)

This matters because dialogue signifies several important things in The Silmarillion. First, in a pseudohistorical text like The Silmarillion, direct quotes mean that someone said something important enough to preserve in the historical record. Men, based on the data, are saying far more important things than women, at least in the various narrators' estimation. Next, dialogue is often a proxy to action: Characters debate, give directives, and make speeches. Dialogue also humanizes, and even though Tolkien rejects many modern literary techniques in The Silmarillion, he does use dialogue as a characterization technique. As I will show in future analyses, some characters are distinguishable based on how they speak.

Of course, the reduced dialogue of women in The Silmarllion is a direct effect of there being significantly fewer women than men: Women constitute only 19% of the named characters in The Silmarillion. Even given this, however, women speak less than we would expect.

When we look at character groups, there are notable differences, namely that women of the Ainur speak more than Mortal Human and Elven women do. (Only four Elven women and five Mortal Human women speak in The Silmarillion! Excuse me while I scream!) This was the thesis of the long-ago Inequality Prototype that spurred this data collection endeavor: The Valar, being prototypical, show an equal penchant for entering into the world based on gender: It is a 50/50 split. So we can't say that women have less desire to influence the world than men in the legendarium. When we see less action and fewer instances of dialogue among women, then, we have to ask why.

Complicating the data for the Ainur (overall, not just this set) is the fact that a big chunk of their dialogue occurs in the "Of Aulë and Yavanna" chapter that Christopher Tolkien wrote. I don't want to treat these data differently until I have the opportunity to collect more data on where dialogue outside this chapter comes from; for all I know, Christopher wrote most of it! (Actually, I know he didn't, but this chapter does illustrate how his additions can skew data for a particular group, in this case the Ainur.)

Another future area of inquiry will be the type or purpose of the dialogue and whether/how this varies based on gender. Characters speak for many reasons. Do women speak for different purposes than men?

If these data illustrate anything to me, it is the importance of fanworks in amplifying the voices of women characters who we know existed and know said and did things that mattered. We are being given a historical record much like our own Modern-earth historical record: biased toward the contributions of some over others. Only we can fix that.

---

This is part of my ongoing project The Silmarillion: Who Speaks? The data is available under a CC license for others who wish to play with it: View the data | Copy the data

[dawnfelagund]

This is part of my ongoing project The Silmarillion: Who Speaks? The data is available under a CC license for others who wish to play with it: View the data | Copy the data

---

The whole reason I decided years ago that I wanted to count instances and words of dialogue is because who gets to speak matters. Who gets to tell their own story in their own words?

(And, for the record, in this data set, "dialogue" is measured in instances of dialogue, not in word count.)

Of course, in The Silmarillion, it is more complicated than that because The Silmarillion is a pseudohistorical text, so we have to constantly question whether what the narrator is telling us happened (or is said) was in fact what happened (or what was said). The prevalence of group dialogue in The Silmarillion—when specific, quoted speech is attributed to a group of characters rather than an individual—attests to the inexact science that is dialogue in the text. There are twenty-six instances of group dialogue across the book.

So it would perhaps be more accurate to say that dialogue matters because it indicates who the narrator wants to allow to tell their story in their own words with the authority that comes from being important enough to quote.

Which groups of characters get to speak aren't surprising, but this does still tell us something important about the perspective we are given in The Silmarillion. Elves speak the most, but The Silmarillion is an Elven history, so we'd expect that. Within the category of "Elves," though, speech is entirely dominated by the Noldor and Sindar. One Teler (Olwë) gets a single instance of dialogue, and the Green-elves get to speak once as a group.

Why are these characters' perspectives absent? Does this simply reflect a limitation of the narrator, or is the narrator foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Noldor and Sindar as more valuable—worth quoting?

Mortal Humans and Ainur speak almost the same amount. I find this interesting because, as I noted in the graphic, the Ainur made a big deal about flouncing from Middle-earth after the Noldorin rebellion. Yet they sure have a lot to say about things. In contrast, after they arrive in Beleriand, Mortal Humans are always at the hub of the action. Someone is always getting shot through the eye or something. Yet their stories, in their own words, are told only a bit more than the intoning, cursing, and speechifying that the Ainur get up to.

When Mortal Humans do speak, they are always "Men of the West": Edain, Númenóreans, or Dúnedain. We do not hear once from other groups of Mortal Humans, such as Easterlings, even speaking as a group. This certainly calls into question the absence of those perspectives from the story. Think about it: the Silmarillion narrator finds God a more accessible, quotable source than an Easterling soldier.

All of this corroborates other data and observations about Mortal Humans that I've made over the years (for example, the death data). Our Silmarillion narrator often seems to include Mortals almost grudgingly because, yes, they did important stuff in the story but tends to see them as ephemeral or expendable and really only likes to talk about them when they are doing cool stuff with Elves.

These data do add an interesting (to me anyway) perspective as well on the question of the Silmarillion historical tradition. In a nutshell, in the late 1950s, Tolkien considered that the historical tradition must be Númenórean, not Elven. Even though there was no strong evidence that he made significant revisions with this change in mind, it was enough for Christopher Tolkien to scrap mentioning a narrator in The Silmarillion at all, and several scholars have followed suit in asserting The Silmarillion is a "Mannish" history.

I have been a fiction writer much longer than a Tolkien scholar, and one does not simply walk into changing point of view. I've made the case for years now that Tolkien realized the depth of revisions that would be required and either changed his mind or just never got started on them. Regardless, the text we have is Elvish. These data support that: the predominance of Elven and Ainurian perspectives attest to a narrator whose main sources are Elves and Ainur and who subtly but nonetheless devalues the perspectives of Mortal Humans, even though they are the grist in the mill of the war against Morgoth.

Finally, there are Dwarves. The only named Dwarf who speaks is Mîm, in the "Of Túrin Turambar" chapter, which is an outlier of a chapter in its use of dialogue (it also has a different narrator) and which will probably gets its own analysis someday. Otherwise, Dwarves speak in groups. As with Mortal Humans, these data align with other data and observations I've made over the years of the status of Dwarves to the Silmarillion narrator. In this case, they are valued but often inaccessible—the opposite of Mortal Humans.

Methodology Notes

As already stated, all data are instances of dialogue, not word or sentence count.

Classifying Elves into subgroups is remarkably challenging. Here's how I did it for this project:

"Noldor" includes characters who have Telerin or Sindarin ancestry in addition to Noldorin.

"Teleri" includes only characters with only Telerin ancestry who live in Aman.

"Sindar" includes only characters with only Sindarin ancestry who live in Middle-earth; mixed Noldorin/Sindarin is not included; Lúthien is included.

Finally, the "Other" group includes animals, dragons, Orcs, objects, and speakers whose identity is not stated even enough to determine what group they belong to.

[dawnfelagund]

Back in 2019, I wrote a blog post called The Inequality Prototype. As part of it, I counted a bunch of stuff related to the Valar and looked at how those metrics differed based on gender. At the time, I thought it would be interesting to extend this work over the entire Silmarillion, namely looking at who speaks in the text and who doesn't. For Tolkien Meta Week, I began this work and am collecting my analyses related to it here. It is very much still a work in progress and will likely take me years to complete, but I'm going to post interesting data as I discover it.

This project, like all of my data projects, is available to use under a CC license for others who want to play with the data: View the data | Copy the data | Methodology, progress, etc.

---

Dialogue does not occur evenly across The Silmarillion. While a little over 5% of the words in The Silmarillion as a whole are used in dialogue, this is very unevenly distributed across the chapters, with some chapters about half dialogue and six chapters containing no dialogue at all.

There is a lot more work to be done to tease out trends and patterns that might have some meaning, but just glancing at the graph above, some of those patterns do begin to emerge. First, dialogue increases as The Silmarillion progresses. In the second half of the book (calculated by chapter, not page or word count), only two chapters have no dialogue and only four chapters (inclusive of those two without dialogue) fall below the median of 5.3% dialogue. Put another way:

In the first half of chapters, 71% of chapters are below the median.

In the second half of chapters, 29% of chapters are below the median.

Why is this? My tentative theory is that we see the book moving from the realm of the mythic—from events that are passed down through the oral tradition and ancient written traditions—and into the historical, where the narrator has a greater array of sources, including eyewitness testimony, and begins to write with greater immediacy rather than the arm's-length style of myth and ancient history.

What I am curious about: As I dig deeper into these data, will I see this theory bear out in which episodes or characters/groups are granted actual dialogue? In other words, will characters and peoples lost to the mists of time speak less, as I would expect? Or will the type of dialogue (e.g., a formal speech that may have been preserved vs. an extempore conversation that would not) vary based on narrative distance? I have documented in the past that the narrator of The Silmarillion uses the "it is said/told/sung" construction more with characters who are less accessible, so there is evidence that Tolkien manipulated writing style based on what his narrators' access to various sources. Does he use dialogue similarly to communicate that "mythic distance"?

There are also chapters that are more expository in purpose (Valaquenta, "Of Beleriand and Its Realms") that do not contain dialogue. Without digging deeper into the chapters themselves, most of those without dialogue that aren't similarly expository are chapters where the material would be less accessible to Pengolodh as a narrator. Whether this bears added scrutiny remains to be seen!

Finally, in discussing these data on the SWG's Discord, polutropos noticed something interesting, which is that the chapter with the most dialogue—"Of Aulë and Yavanna," where almost 57% of the words of the chapter are given over to dialogue—was not in fact written by Tolkien. As document by Douglas Charles Kane in his book Arda Reconstructed, "This chapter is completely manufactured by Christopher, though using his father's own writings" (page 54). Where Kane usually includes a chart pointing to the source for each bit of The Silmarillion, his chapter on "Of Aulë and Yavanna" contains no such chart because, while he is able to document where ideas came from, Christopher actually wrote the chapter.

Interestingly, "Of the Noldor in Beleriand" is the chapter with the second most dialogue and, according to Kane, "The changes made in this chapter are among the smallest anywhere in the published text" (page 154). So Tolkien does sometimes write dialogue-heavy chapters—though without data to back me up (yet! it's coming!), most of that dialogue appears to come in the form of lengthier speeches, not necessarily the debate/conversation format of Of Aulë and Yavanna."

The biggest impact of the dialogue-heavy "Of Aulë and Yavanna," I suspect, will emerge as I dig more into the data on gender and who speak in The Silmarillion. Yavanna is one of the women who speaks the most in The Silmarillion, but almost all of her dialogue occurs in this chapter. If this chapter is constructed by Christopher, how does that impact the amount of speech women are permitted by Tolkien? Polutropos' observation spurred me to plan to document the source of the various dialogue sections: Are they original to Tolkien's writings or added? Kane, interestingly, is critical of Christopher Tolkien in Arda Reconstructed for what he perceives as Christopher removing women characters from the text. In this instance, we see a significant example of the opposite: a woman's role is not only expanded, but she is given an opportunity to speak.

[dawnfelagund]

Signal boosting!

I presented at my first Tolkien conference in 2013 and have generally done two or three per year since then, and trust me when I say, fanworks people: You can more than hang. We tend to downplay the years of reading, research, thinking, debating, and discussing that we do because it's "just" for fandom or "just" for fanfiction, but friends? You are still very qualified to talk about Tolkien if this is something you want to do.

I keep a foot in both the fanworks fandom and the scholarly fandom (because, yes, it's fandom; very few people are doing Tolkien studies professionally), and the fanworks side is often discussing ideas long before they arise on the scholarly side. So yes: You have ideas that matter. People will be psyched to hear them!

Tolkien conferences attract a wide range of experience levels and are supportive of all in my experience. Academics and published authors present right alongside independent scholars and students and fans. Everyone is there to have fun and talk Tolkien!

So I want to encourage people to attend this (or watch the video/look at the handouts afterward!) even if you're not sure you're ready to present something yet (or even if you want to present something but kinda sorta think sometimes you might?) Lurkers are welcome. For those who are ready to craft a proposal, we will stay on afterward not just for questions but to cowrite proposals together. If you can't make it live and want to bounce ideas or have someone look over a proposal before you send it in, just let me know.

Mereth Aderthad 2025 is coming in July, and we are looking for presenter willing to share meta, research, and scholarship about Tolkien. We are specifically welcoming fans—including fans who have never presented anything like this before—to submit proposals for presentations because we believe strongly that fans have a lot to offer as we collectively read and work to better understand and interpret Tolkien's world.

But presenting at a conference feels like a big deal! And even in a field as friendly to fan and independent scholarship as Tolkien studies is, the trappings of academia remain and, unless you have academic training, can be a barrier to participation.

To help demystify conference proposals and presentations, over the next few months, we will be holding sessions aimed at helping fans make the sideways step to Tolkien scholarship by presenting their work at a Tolkien conference. Our first session will be about writing proposals. Join us in a virtual (Zoom) session to learn about how Tolkien conferences work and how to put together a proposal!

Date: Saturday,4 January 2024  Time: 1:00 PM Eastern Time (what is this in my timezone?)  Location: link coming soon! (RSVP to have the link emailed to you)

After the session, there will be time for questions, and we will stay online for a proposal writing session for anyone who is interested.

Attending the session does not require you to submit a proposal to Mereth Aderthad or attend the event. All are welcome to attend and participate to whatever extent they feel comfortable! (In other words, you can keep your camera off and there are no breakout rooms.)

Can't make it on January 4? We will record the session so that anyone can view it.

[dawnfelagund]

What is canon in Tolkien's universe? How to deal with the History of Middle-Earth and Tolkien's Letters

One last post before Tolkien Meta Week is up!

What is canon? Yes, we all know the correct (as in-'nobody can disagree with that') answer is 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings', because that is what Tolkien published himself.

Is it, though?

I would tend to answer no- not only because excluding the Silmarillion from canon would be utterly ridiculous (like, folks, Tolkien worked on it his entire life!), but also because Tolkien wrote things in both the Hobbit and LotR that don't make any sense within the wider lore. That 'dwarves helped Thranduil build his halls' passage is probably the most obvious example.

It is completely natural for an author to use their ideas in different ways than originally intended, especially if they think that they will never publish all their works. But we do have the Silmarillion now, and so can hardly take the 'Thranduil's halls were built by Dwarves' for canon, even though it is written in the LotR.

So we can likely agree on the fact that the Silmarillion is canon, even if it wasn't published by J.R.R. Tolkien himself. But Christopher knew his father's works like no other, perhaps, and I am very sure that he knew both Middle-Earth and his father well enough to capture the spirit.

But what with all the other works, then? The notes, the stories, all that we know now was 'The History of Middle-Earth' and the 'Unfinished Tales'. Everyone who ever tried to work with them as canon knows the problems that come with that attempt.

The thing is- these are completed essays and stories as well as background information Tolkien wrote down for himself and -probably worst- notes. Writing is a complex process, especially when there is such extensive worldbuidling behind the stories as there is with Tolkien's legendarium. There is the forming of one's own style and the lack of selfsame in the beginning, which results most often in a form of copying the source of inspiration, there are first drafts, plotlines that are thrown out, re-written or added, those thrown out sometimes entirely disregarded or else used in other stories, gap-fillers that only wait for a better idea,... you get the point.

Today, in the age of the vast majority of writers working with computers, these byproducts get mostly lost. No-one will know of an author's sketchy beginnings, of the many failed attempts to develop a character that seems natural and is really its own thing and not a trope or overly inspired by a RL person or other fictional character. Not many keep their disregarded ideas somewhere, those that did not work for that story and are not loved enough to keep for the next.

With Tolkien's works, we have those notes. Papers, sheets of paper, random notes scribbled in the margins- thanks to Christopher Tolkien, Carl Hostetter and co, we do have these notes. There is just one major problem with this: we have no way of knowing which of those were disregarded, and which of those Tolkien really intended to end up in the Silmarillion he never was able to finish. It is not even possible to say the younger the notes are, the more accurate, because sometimes, the first ideas stay the best ones.

So are those notes canon? Hardly, most of all because many of those openly contradict the published works. But can we then just disregard them? No, we cannot, or at least not easily.

What we end up doing with all the background information is up to each reader themselves, so what I write from now on is only my very own approach.

I like the HoME and UT for seeing where a character may have come from, or what ideas Tolkien might have had. And those parts that fit well with both the published stories and my headcanons, I take as canon 😅. And it is also fascinating to see how Tolkien developed his style.

(btw, little anecdote there, because it still gives me goosebumps- Elu Thingol was 'my' elf from the start, the character I identified with, and from early on, I imagined and read him very differently from how most within the fandom read him, and I wrote him like that in my fanfics as well. One of those traits that Elu had in my head was a dislike to force his decisions on others, and yes, I explicitly wrote this in one of my stories, even though I knew that many would read this as totally out of character. No, I had not read NoME then. And when I did, and read the 'I can but choose for myself' I sat on my bed shaking. Now, the rational part of my brain knows perfectly well that this was purely co-incidence, and that there are far more other passages in HoME and NoMe and so on that actually contradict my take on Elu Thingol, but still, that moment was totally magical for me. And that's why I really love those works, even though they are not what I would call canon)

That still leaves us with Tolkien's letters- and they are even more complicated to incorporate into canon or disregard as non-canonical than the HoME. On one hand, they are not a story, they were never meant to be published, we are often missing the other half if the conversation or the general context, but on the other hand, Tolkien often did referred to text passages, and explained his intents and ideas. And -most-importantly, the letters were written by him, the words not edited (the context is another story here).

Do I therefore take them into canon?

No. For one, they are as his notes- ideas that were in his head in that moment, without us having any clue of whether or not Tolkien later liked them or not. For another, by selecting which letters were published and which were not, the publishers intended of painting a certain picture of Tolkien. We are simply missing too much context to put those letters to any meaningful use on our quest to learn the truth about the lore we love.

@silmarillionwritersguild

[dawnfelagund]

My Open-Source Tolkien Studies Data Sets

One of the best parts of being an independent scholar is that I get to be generous with my research. I am not counting on it for a job, and frankly, between teaching at a small rural school and running the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, I will likely never be able to do all that I want to do with the data that I collect and so love the idea that someone might do something with it.

Because I do love making sets of data. Everything from the mind-numbing copy/paste data entry to learning new spreadsheet formulas is enjoyable to me. I'm an introvert in a very extraverted profession, and after a day of being all on for my students, turning everything into numbers is like a cup of tea under a warm blanket with a Golden Retriever at my feet.

So please use these data sets if they interest you. Play with them. Write about and share what you notice. Expand and build on them. Publish using them. If you use my data or work, credit Dawn Walls-Thumma and link to my website, dawnfelagund.com, if possible. I'd also love if you'd let me know if you share anything using them.

Consolidated Timelines. I made this back in 2013. I was trying to arrange all of Tolkien's timelines side by side. I did some weird things with numbers that I'm not sure I fully understand now, but maybe you can make sense of this or maybe you just want everything Tolkien said about timelines in one handy document. (Make a copy of the Consolidated Timelines.)

Fanfiction Archive Timeline. Made for the 2023 Fan Studies Network North America conference, this timeline-on-a-spreadsheet shows archives in the Tolkien and Harry Potter fandoms, multifandom archives, and social networks and when they came online, were active, became inactive, and went offline, along with data about affiliated communities, software, and rescue efforts. I update this timeline annually with that year's data and will continue to add new archives when I have enough data to do so. (Make a copy of the Fanfiction Archive Timeline spreadsheet.)

References to Sources in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. In this document, I record each time a narrator's source is mentioned or alluded to. Ideally, this will one day include The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as well! For now, it is just The Silmarillion for the selfish reason that I'm predominantly a Silmarillion researcher. (Make a copy of the References to Sources.)

Silmarillion Characters. A list of all of the characters in The Silmarillion, demographic data about them, the number of times they are mentioned, various aliases, and which "books" of The Silmarillion they appear in. The latter part is a work-in-progress. (Make a copy of Silmarillion Characters.)

Silmarillion Death Scenes (spreadsheet | document). For last year's Tolkien at UVM and Oxonmoot conferences, I collected every death scene in the Quenta Silmarillion and recorded various details about character demographics, cause of death, and grief and mourning rituals. (Make a copy of the spreadsheet. Make a copy of the document.)

The Silmarillion: Who Speaks? This is my newest project, which I hope to complete by the end of the year, documenting which characters get to speak actual words, the number of words they speak, and demographics about the speaking characters. Eventually, I would like to include as well characters who are mentioned as having spoken without being given actual dialogue, but one step at a time. Again, this is a work-in-progress. I have just started working on it. Come back in 2025 and, hopefully, there will be interesting stuff to see.

[dawnfelagund]

Today I presented a paper titled Libraries at the Edge of Middle-earth: Fanworks, Archives, and Communities as Heritage at the Tolkien Society Seminar: Tolkien as Heritage.

This paper reviews the history of Tolkien fanfiction community archives, considering the ways that they both preserve and support the ongoing understanding of Tolkien as heritage through identity-building. Heritage studies involves negotiating how to balance preserving the past (with all the values and nostalgia that entails) and recognizing heritage as a living entity for the communities it belongs to. As I did my research, I found this paralleled in interesting ways with the fan studies understanding (from obsession_inc, 2009) of fannish expression on a continuum of affirmational (deferring to sanctioned authority) and transformational (locating authority within each reader or fan) tendencies. I used the Silmarillion Writers' Guild as a case study in how an archive promotes Tolkien as heritage.

Big ideas:

Fanfiction archives have shifted from a primarily preservational purpose to one of conversation around how fans' identities and experiences lead to many different readings/interpretations of Tolkien's world. This shift was facilitated by technological change that allowed archives to become automated and increasingly democratized.

Fanfiction archives support preservationist and affirmational aims in their explicit efforts to make Tolkien's original words accessible to a broader audience and in valuing the books as still having relevance, even to fans who do not form what we typically think of as Tolkien's audience.

Fanfiction archives document conversations between fans on topics such as the interpretation of Tolkien's "canon," sexuality in Middle-earth, social justice, religion and morality, and the use of fanfiction as a critical form.

Fanfiction archives push beyond the original texts to create space for fans to see themselves in Tolkien's world and interpret Tolkien's books through the lens of their own identities and experiences. In this way, fanfiction and its archives are one way in which Tolkien as heritage is being constantly refined, redefined, and expanded.

Entirely by coincidence, today is also the first day of Tolkien Meta Week and one of the prompts is "Tolkien fandom" so I'm counting this for that prompt! If you'd like to check out the full paper and presentation:

"Libraries at the Edge of Middle-earth: Fanworks, Archives, and Communities as Heritage": paper, slideshow, and audio

Just the audio

Just the slideshow