Snowflake Challenges #4 and #7: Add Something to Your Fandom's Canon. Interact.

[dawn_felagund]

snowflake_challenge #4 is especially intriguing:

In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Oh, I've gone around and around about this. I'm not just a Tolkien fan but a Silmarillion fan, which is a text constructed entirely from partial, unfinished, illegible, and undated drafts in varying contradictory forms. Tolkien left a lot of threads just ... trailing off into nothing. Wouldn't it be nice to have some of those threads resolved? Or to get his final word on a few things that are subject to particularly strenuous debate??

At first, I was like, "Pengolodh!!!" Y'all probably know that I have a thing for Pengolodh. He consumes a lot of my nonfiction and fiction writing. I thought, it'd be nice to have more information about him ... or more definitive information at least. If I had to choose, this would still probably be my answer to the question. (Which foreshadows that, perhaps, I am not going to choose??)

Then, along the same lines, I thought, "Christopher leaving Pengolodh in The Silmarillion!!!" But I immediately nixed that because Monday-morning quarterbacking Christopher's editorial choices is a particular fannish peeve of mine.

Next thought was The Shibboleth of Fëanor, which—despite being called The Shibboleth of F ë a n o r—goes into details about the names of everyone BUT the dang Fëanorians. How nice would it be if Tolkien had finished that and explained where the mother-names came from in more detail or why the Fëanorians alone have those matching nicknames of their father-names (Nelyo, etc)—what's up with those? When were the used and by whom? What did he have in mind when he decided to give them all those types of names?

But (as I hinted above), I ultimately decided that I don't want extra stuff on any of those things. Part of the fun of the Tolkien fandom and the Silm in particular is the mystery: the fragmentary nature of the canon and the need to piece things together and make inferences to get the full story, and then of course, we end up with different inferences and different interpretations and that is ... fanfiction. Or fanworks, more broadly. And this type of creative work has brought me so much joy over decades now, not least of all because of the intellectual exercise it entails: analysis coupled with creative expression of the ensuing ideas, with a significant dose of socialization with people who enjoy similar types of thinking and creative work, i.e., not people whom I feel like I have to hide or perform around.

Then there's also the fact that I've become attached to the characters of first Tolkien's and then my and others' imaginings: like finding out something disappointing about someone you thought you knew well. Or finding an old friend has changed ... not even for the worse. Just not the person you thought you knew. When The Nature of Middle-earth came out, I was nervous about what it might include that would upend the characters and world as I had come to know them/it. I remember early in fandom, when the Harry Potter novels were still being released, looking at their fandom and being so grateful that I was part of a fandom with a settled canon, and I do continue to like that.

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Okay, so on to Challenge #7: "In your own space, interact with a community or a fic."

This is an easy one. As one of the SWG mods, this is part of my everyday, in addition to the regular socially oriented interactions that I have. Let's see how I interacted today:

• I've been talking off-and-on all day with my SWG comods on our mod channel on the Discord.


• I responded to a member request on the Discord by updating something on the website.


• Unfortunately, I had to have an exchange with another member, privately, about taking greater care with their words on the Discord.


• I sent out Volume 18, Issue 2 of the SWG newsletter to 81 subscribers.


• I reblogged this post on Taxonomies of Fandoms and applied the OP's ideas to Tolkien fandom.


• I reblogged this post showing a bound book someone made that included a story I collaborated on and tagged the other authors in the story so they could see it too.

So that's not bad for someone who frequently describes her existence in recent years as "like a hermit" talking for the very first time.

Comments

[hhimring]

No, I wasn't suggesting what you said was not true! As far as I know, there never was an archive for drabbles.