My last post was a teaser excerpt and a copy of the handout for my presentation at Southwest PACA’s Virtual Summer Salon. I had an amazing time: all three of the papers at my session were on some aspect of reception/fandom (!!!!). The other Tolkien session was also excellent—three very different approaches to good/evil, ethics, and moralities in Tolkien.
I can highly recommend the Virtual Summer Salon for those of us who are unable to attend F2F conferences (although SWPACA also runs an in-person conference in Albuquerque which I’ve attended in the past and can also recommend!). Janet Brennan Croft does an excellent job of organizing the Tolkien area/sessions for both iterations of SWPACA.
This post (I know that we’re apparently supposed to call these “stacks” but I’ve been calling the stuff I post online “posts” for decades and it’s engraved in my brain!) is in my Webs By Women category because it’s related although the final “product” of this process will be at least one essay. Like the other posts, I consider this to be a process piece rather than a finished product, meaning that some of what I’m talking about is the nuts’n’bolts of ideas and how I want to deal with them, so warning for messiness.
I mentioned that all the presenters at my session were focused on reception, broadly, and so there were some excellent informed questions after we spoke (an audience unfamiliar with a topic can ask excellent questions too—just taking a different approach). One question lit up my brain in all sorts of way—the issue of limitations/problems of relying so heavily on the Archive of Our Own in fan scholarship (given that there are many other archives, of varying sizes and fandoms).
We had a good discussion—and I’m now working on a bibliography of Fan & Reception scholarship on Tolkien which reveals my original intuitive response, that most Tolkien fanfiction scholarship does not rely on AO3. Although, having seen a number of presentations in the Fan Studies area at PCA, I think it’s true that AO3 is a “go to” for many fan studies scholars archive. I’m actually planning on doing some work with with the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild archive for the Webs book, but also for this paper because there are some differences in fic patterns in the SILM fics at AO3 (as the handout in the last post shows), and because the SWG is a fandom-specific site with a long history of community and major efforts to focus on female and female-coded characters in Tolkien.
But I started with AO3 for reasons that I think explain its popularity among fan scholars (but that I probably need to acknowledge in the project because an audience of Tolkien scholars is probably not aware of the reasons): because of its size (currently 11 million registered viewers); multitude of fandoms (I saw an OTW announcement dated 2018 from the Tag Wranglers that the site had reached 30,000 fandoms; I haven’t been able to find out what the current number is!); its inclusive policies (long story there, but basically the Organization for Transformative Works has its origin in the LiveJournal strikethrough and FanLib’s attempted commercialization — follow the link for more information); and its search tools (“Sort and Filter”). Plus, a fandom statistician, Destinationtoast, has also done a lot of work analyzing data on AO3, on all fandoms, but their work also provides a useful context for what I’m trying to do in “Cruising.”
I’ll be posting about some of the work I’m doing with both AO3 and (eventually) SWG (their system is different of course!) while I work on this paper.
I spent some time yesterday doing a sort of overview of all the Fandom tags relating to “Tolkien”: my first searches were in very specific categories, so these results come from pulling back, so to speak.
Behold: the thirty AO3 Fandom Tags and how many works are tagged with that specific fandom (as of July 4, 2026). “Works” in AO3 include not only fanfiction, but fanmeta, fanart, fanvids, and podcasts, Many works have multiple fandom tags: so you cannot assume a one-to-one equivalent with a “work” and a “tag.” (From my earlier searches, I’d say a LOT of fics have both HOB and LOTR tags which makes sense, but quite a few toss in SILM as well — and writers often tag for both (Tolkien) versions and for various adaptations). “Fandom” is one of the tags that AO3 requires, but there are no limits on how many Fandom tags a writer chooses.
My original searches were for The Hobbit-All Media Types; The Lord of the Rings-All Media Types, and The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien which, fair enough, are three of the top four (in terms of number of works tagged).
At this point, though (process remember), my only conclusion is that there are some MAJOR dedicated Tolkien fans/fic writers out there.
137009 J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth Legendarium & Related Fandoms 63511 The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types 47832 The Hobbit - All Media Types 43797 The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien 33960 The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien 24936 The Hobbit Jackson Movies 15180 The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien 13120 The Lord of the Rings Jackson Movies 5309 The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV 2022 5309 The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV 2022 129 The Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim 2024 75 The Hobbit 1977 34 Smith of Wootton Major - J. R. R. Tolkien 31 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil - J. R. R. Tolkien 27 The Father Christmas Letters- J. R. R. Tolkien 21 Roverandom- J. R. R. Tolkien 18 Tales from the Perilous Realm - J. R. R. Tolkien 15 Mr. Bliss - J. R. R. Tolkien 12 The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son- J. R. R. Tolkien 9 The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun- J. R. R. Tolkien 8 The Fall of Arthur -- J. R. R. Tolkien 7 Leaf by Niggle - J. R. R. Tolkien 4 Farmer Giles of Ham- J. R. R. Tolkien 3 The Last Ship - J. R. R. Tolkien 3 Sellic Spell - J. R. R. Tolkien 3 Mîms Klage | The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf - J. R. R. Tolkien 2 The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún - J. R. R. Tolkien 1 On Fairy Stories - J. R. R. Tolkien 1 The Story of Kullervo - J. R. R. Tolkien 1 The Hobbit 1967
And speaking of Tolkien fans, and dedication, Dawn Walls-Thumma just posted some of the latest results from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey that she and Maria K. Alberto are working on. This is the third survey [2010 and 2015 being the earlier ones] making it the only longitudinal study of Tolkien fandom I’m aware of: “Six Demographic Takeaways from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey.”
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