Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

• The Fading of the Elves: Techno-volunteerism and the Disappearance of Tolkien Fan Fiction Archives. I wrote this symposium article (on encouragement by Maria :) for the special Platforms edition of Transformative Works and Cultures. The crux of the article is the disappearance of single-fandom archives and what precipitates that. I argue that it's technology + volunteers ... techno-volunteerism, to use the term coined by Abigail De Kosnik! In short, people who are willing to volunteer their time time learn the technology needed to maintain an archive or other fannish platform. While viable options for doing so have dwindled in the wake of eFiction's demise, there has been a dearth too of education, support, and mentorship opportunities (although this does seem to be changing, I hope). Finally, the invisibility—an intentional choice on the part of those of us who do this work—can be grinding. Everyone else is hanging out, chatting, writing and reading stories, and you're updating software. Yet independent, small archives are a vital part of the fannish ecosystem, so what needs to change to make them a viable part again?



• Discord as a Fandom Platform: Locating a New Playground by Welmoed Fenna Wagenaar. This one is not mine, obviously, but it appears in the same special edition of TWC, and one of the two Discord servers discussed is the SWG! The author uses the lens of play to study how "users interact with and negotiate rule-based structures and designs" on a Discord server. The SWG functions in the article mostly as an example of a moderated space, but I'm okay with that. I'm proud of the work my comoderators do on the server to keep it a safe and friendly space!



• Ten Important Moments in Tolkien Fanfiction History. For February's Cultus Dispatches column, I thought I'd give myself an "easy month," which I think I defined at the time as "no data to crunch or graphics of said data to make," for the Organization for Transformative Works' challenge to write a "10 things" essay about fandom Ha. HA. This was not an easy article to write! In fact, I think it was my most challenging Cultus article to date. Not only did I have to choose ten things (which is very political and potentially fraught, as more than one person who clearly thought this was a bad idea pointed out), but I had to do enough research to speak with some authority on all of them. I quite liked the resulting article, though. It was worth the effort!



• Grief, Grieving, and Permission to Mourn in the Quenta Silmarillion (text, audio, and slideshow). This is my presentation for this year's Tolkien at UVM Conference. The theme was Tolkien and Psychology, and this was my attempt to achieve a tenuous connection to the theme while yattering on, yet again, about narrative bias with a hearty scoop of quantitative data. In this presentation, I look at the data not only on death in the Quenta Silmarillion (who dies? and how? ... other than "lots" and "violently," that is) but on grief and mourning. What I've discovered is, yet again, Tolkien has constructed a pseudohistorical text that shows clear narrative bias, this time using death and mourning rituals cast certain characters in politicized ways. In other words, some characters go conspicuously ungrieved and unmourned. Others receive more than their fair share, and very often, this seems to be motivated by a desire to distract from what they were up to when they died. (Fair warning that I knock a few heroes of The Silmarillion off of their tear-washed and haunted pedestals, including my own namesake!)

Tolkien's construction of his legendarium as a pseudohistory, complete with fictional narrators or loremasters, offers one means by which some writers of Tolkien-based fan fiction extend their authority to critique and change the details of the texts. As this paper will show, Tolkien employed fictional loremasters and wrote his books from their distinctly biased perspectives. Pengolodh, as the primary loremaster of The Silmarillion, was given a background that leaves him particularly susceptible to bias, and analysis of how characters and realms are discussed in The Silmarillion show that this bias reflects subtly in ways that even readers unfamiliar with Pengolodh's personal history are able to detect. Correcting this bias by showing other perspectives on the story becomes a motive not only for writing fan fiction but for extending the fan writer's authority far enough to allow alteration of details of the text.