It's now been almost twenty-five years since Henry Jenkins wrenched to the forefront of media studies the then-radical notion that fandom participation serves a predominantly critical purpose. Fan fiction writers, for example, don't simply rehash over and over stories that have already been told, and they don't reread and rewatch their source texts in the interest of amassing trivial knowledge that translates into social status in the company of other fans. Rather, these stories seek to interpret, analyze, and criticize the original text; they view the characters and world of the original text through the lens of the fan writer's experience; and they often rewrite portions of the text to remedy what the fan writer views as weaknesses, failings, or injustices.

That the community that writes fan fiction based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien does so with a largely analytical and critical intent is anecdotally obvious to anyone who spends time in their midst, which as the founder and owner of the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, I have certainly done. In December 2014, I initiated a survey of Tolkien fan fiction readers and writers, and the preliminary results from that survey also offer empirical support to the idea that the Tolkien fan fiction community is well-read and critically adept. The majority of writers venture beyond Tolkien's most popular and accessible works and gain enough comfort with these more difficult texts to write fan fiction using them: 76% have used The Silmarillion in their fan fiction, 50% have used The History of Middle-earth, and 49% have used Unfinished Tales. Furthermore, these writers acknowledge fan fiction as a reason why they have delved so deeply into the world and works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Eighty-seven percent of respondents agreed that writing fan fiction encouraged them to do more research on Tolkien's world than they would have done otherwise, and 75% agreed that fan fiction has encouraged them to read texts by Tolkien that they might not have read otherwise. Two rather unique attributes of the Tolkien fan fiction community, I believe, drive its pursuit of textual and critical competency beyond the appeal of the texts themselves: the influence of Peter Jackson's two Tolkien-based film trilogies and the community's reliance on Tolkien-specific archives for sharing stories.

The Films and Fandom Entry

Although Tolkien is arguably the most popular author of the twentieth century, one can author Tolkien-based fan fiction without picking up a book. In a little over a decade, Peter Jackson has released six films set in Middle-earth, all of them. These films have left an indelible impression on the Tolkien fan fiction community, and the release of both trilogies correlated with spikes in participation in the Tolkien fan fiction community by new authors (see fig. 1). Authors who participated in my survey acknowledged this influence, with 73% agreeing that the films encouraged them to write fan fiction.

One can author Tolkien-based fan fiction without picking up a book but very few do. In fact, only 0.5% of survey respondents indicated that they use only film and no book sources when writing fan fiction. One can certainly author Tolkien fan fiction without venturing into the more difficult terrain of Tolkien's posthumous works but, again, as the data above suggest, very few do. If the data presented thus far suggest any almost universal conclusion about Tolkien fan fiction writers, it is that authors that remain for any significant length of in the community—even those that began writing because of the films, having never touched one of Tolkien's books—will become readers of his books and generally knowledgeable readers at that. What drives this shift from initiation based heavily around the films to participation based almost solely on the books, and many of the more difficult and obscure books at that?

Archives and the Development of Critical Skills

The Tolkien fandom has always been reactive in creating institutions in response to an influx of new fans and the perceived misguided tastes of those fans.  John Lennard notes how, after the Ace Books piracy made The Lord of the Rings more widely available in the United States, the Tolkien Society was founded to counteract "the appropriation of Tolkien’s works by the wilder fringes of the hippie movement" (Part 4). Internet Tolkien fandom exploded at the same time as Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy was released, and similar reactive tendencies can be observed in the fandom institutions that arose online amid an inundation of new film fans (Organization for Transformative Works, "Timeline").

The Tolkien fan fiction community has always been rather unique in its reliance on Tolkien-specific archives rather than multifandom archives or social media platforms for the sharing of stories. Tolkien-specific archives are built and maintained by fans—most of them fan fiction authors themselves—as sites for storing and often commenting on or discussing stories. While some archives accept all or most Tolkien-based writing, others specialize based on character, group, book, genre, or romantic pairing. On the fan history wiki Fanlore, the only fandom with more fandom-specific archives listed than the Tolkien fandom is the Harry Potter fandom (Organization for Transformative Works, "Category"). I believe that the "fandom geography" created by the existence of so many and such a variety of archives aids in encouraging Tolkien writers to develop a high level of critical competency with the books through a combination of community cohesion and support, and tension between competing interpretive approaches.

The online Tolkien fan fiction community, with its many and diverse spaces for sharing stories, takes on many of the characteristics associated with physical communities. There are places where writers feel welcome, safe, and familiar with the culture and customs, and there are places where they don't. Just as physical barriers can prevent mingling between physical communities, fan fiction writers on different websites can remain completely unaware of the perspectives—often the existence—of other members of the larger fan fiction community in a way that they could not if most fan fiction activity were concentrated on a single multifandom site, like FanFiction.net. In my survey, 65% of writers agreed that they had a site that they considered their "Tolkien fandom home." These "fandom homes" become places to share information and provide support in making sense of the complex welter of canon texts. Members with greater knowledge of these texts are allotted fuller participation and, sometimes, status. Especially on Tolkien-specific archives, site policies about adherence to canon or requiring peer review of stories pushed writers to read more and deeper into the texts.

However, the opposite effect of the Tolkien fandom geography—the tension between different groups and archives—exerts perhaps an even greater influence in encouraging the development of critical perspectives among fan fiction writers. Twenty-six percent of writers agreed that they avoided posting to certain sites because of the interpretations used by other writers on those sites. Most of these writers use Tolkien-specific archives: 37% of writers who use Tolkien-specific archives avoid groups or sites because of difference of interpretative approach compared to just 19% of writers who post only to multifandom archives and/or social media sites. The perceived tension between archives and other fan fiction communities presses writers to justify their particular interpretative approach (and often minimize the approaches taken on other sites), which requires not only a high comfort level with the texts themselves but an awareness of how details from the texts are selected, discarded, or reshaped in the course of writing a story. Of course, other participants within a writers' home site support the development of such competencies.

Conclusion

In the big picture, Peter Jackson's films and the preponderance of Tolkien-specific archives are two major factors that drive Tolkien fan fiction writers to become competent in their ability to use fiction to comment critically on the texts. The films are perhaps the single biggest reason why new authors begin writing Tolkien-based fan fiction. Reactions to the common misconceptions of new Lord of the Rings film fans and the types of fan fiction they preferred undoubtedly drove the policies of many of the first online Tolkien fan fiction communities. Those new fans who stayed around received support from these communities as they began reading and making sense of the texts. Simultaneously, the development of different interpretative approaches to the texts by different communities required writers to understand and often defend their interpretations, deepening their knowledge and critical capabilities even more. The end result is a fan fiction community that uses fiction to take an interpretative stance on the texts in a similar way that traditional Tolkien scholars use research essays.