(ETA: I want to clarify that remixes without permission of the original author are what is being banned.)

Now, I want to be perfectly clear that I am not criticizing the group owner’s decision about what is and is not allowed on a particular group or archive. I remain strong in my belief that this right belongs to group owners; anyone who doesn’t like it can vote with their feet and move on to another group or archive or start their own. There are groups to which I do not belong because I have strong objections to their fundamental principles and rules. I am not objecting to this particular rule. If I was, I would simply leave the group and skip writing a post about it.

What I find curious is the outrage that people feel toward “remixed” fanworks and what this says about our ideas about the ownership of artistic works. This is not the first time that I’ve encountered this idea, although it’s the first time that I’ve seen it incorporated into a group’s rules. Not too long ago, while doing maintenance on one of the sites I manage, I found a user profile that took similar umbrage to people using her original characters without her permission. (Whether this is because someone actually had used her characters or was a preemptive warning I don’t know.) And, in discussing the legal and ethical basis of derivative and transformative works, I have seen authors make similar avowals, that though they write stories based on another author’s work, they would not want stories written based on their own work.

Of course, no one who makes these claims is disingenuous enough to avoid the question of hypocrisy. Generally, this is resolved by pointing out that 1) Tolkien indicated in his letters that he wanted his work carried on by other artists and 2) the Tolkien Estate has made no move to shut down derivative and transformative work based on his books. To the first, yes, this is true:

I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.
~Letter 131 to Milton Waldman

More on that in a moment. To the second point, I hesitate to interpret the Tolkien Estate’s relative silence on fanworks as tacit approval. Since derivative and transformative works currently occupy a vast legal gray area and since lawyerly types provide good rationale why a challenge to the legality of fanworks quite possibly would expand protections of those works, then it seems just as likely to me that rights holders that currently wield some power to control works created at the fringes of that gray area don’t want more distinct legal definitions to make legal what they’d rather repress.

Personally, I’ve always been entirely laissez-faire with respect to my Tolkien-based works and published original works. I am stricter with respect to my unpublished original works simply because allowing aspects of those works to be made public would “use up” my first rights, which would eliminate most markets–and almost all of the good markets–where that work could be published. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever written anything based on my original work. However, plenty of other Tolkien writers have used aspects of my stories–from details, like names and timelines, to wholly lifting the universe as a setting for their own stories–in creating their own work. Do I care? Nope. I’ve never discovered my work being used without my knowledge. Would I care if I did? Nope. When people email me and ask if they can use details or the whole universe, I always grant permission and tell them that they don’t need to ask me again in the future. Credit is nice because that is the expectation whenever using someone else’s creation, but I don’t expect people to ask for permission to name Maglor’s wife Vingarië or to have Caranthir skilled in osanwë-kenta. Nor do I care if they decided that I did everything all wrong and decide to provide their own take on the questions my stories address. In fact, Another Man’s Cage was borne out of a desire to show the Fëanorians’ side of the story, which at the time wasn’t being widely addressed on the sites where I read. I have always felt that this community’s ability to use art and fiction as a means of expressing opinion and engendering debate is one of its virtues. I would much rather every hateful reviewer on fanfiction.net devote her energy to crafting the stories she’d like to read, to contributing her own perspectives to the ongoing discussion of canon. In fact, I’ve suggested to more than one of them that they do just that.

Given all of that, I find the opposition to using existing fanworks to develop one’s own stories a curious but ultimately illustrative perspective about our perception of the “ownership” of creative work. I’m sure that some of the people who declare their fanworks off-limits have also criticized authors like Robin Hobb and, more recently, Diana Gabaldon who voiced very vocal objections to people writing stories using their characters and universes. Both authors have been mocked by members of fandom for having unhealthy attachments to characters and scorned for their desire to control the way readers think about their stories. How do you reconcile criticism of published authors holding those views with acceptance of fan authors who experience similar horror, disgust, and disapproval at the notion of having their stories “used” by someone else?

I think it shows how close many of us share Hobb and Gabaldon’s views, whether we like it or not. It’s easy to tell a creator to get over the use of her work in ways she doesn’t expect or approve of. It’s a bit harder when it’s your precious character or your well-reasoned perspective that is being “trashed” by someone else. I say this with full admission that my own laissez-faire attitude doesn’t come easily. I can’t say that I would be happy to discover a canatic’s version of AMC up on the web. Or my original stories reduced to porn. I would feel that my work and its purpose were being misunderstood. But, ultimately, I would accept the author’s right to “misunderstand” my work however much she wanted because I believe deeply in the importance of this right.

It is the right that underlies all derivative and transformative work. It is the acknowledgment that creative people will usually respond creatively when faced with strong emotions, be that love or loathing, and that to place some works off-limits to creative transformation is repressive of creativity. It is recognition of the fact that, as humans, our first response to art has always been to redo it or retell it, to personalize it to our own beliefs or experiences, to make it our own.

Judging by the letter above to Milton Waldman, Tolkien knew that. He knew that great myths and stories didn’t arise from a single source but became part of the cultures to which they belonged, which required giving access to those stories to all members of that culture. If we choose to believe that our stories, poems, and art based on his books are carrying on his legacy rather than robbing him of it, then I think we need to think as well about how we respond when others take the same freedom with our own work.

ETA (16 June 2010): Nora Charles has this post on Dreamwidth about remixes, including links to a remix challenge posed by the original creators that went horribly wrong when a story was posted that was unexpectedly critical of the original universe. It’s an interesting look at some of the issues that arise from writing in a shared universe, as we all more or less do.

It is becoming a perennial thing here on the Heretic Loremaster to declare that fan fiction is fiction. As in the fact that fan fiction is the same as regular fiction (if there is such a thing), only it goes under a different and derogatory name. And as in the fact that treating “fan fiction” and “fiction” as separate is itself a fiction.

I must confess a growing weariness of pointing out to people smart enough to know better (like Ms. Gabaldon) that fan fiction is fiction. Until relatively recently, what would today be termed “fan fiction” was the norm, not the exception. In the Middle Ages, for example, it was more common than not to lift ideas, characters, and whole stories from existing, often contemporaneous, works. This doesn’t even begin to touch on how many stories are derived from myths. In fact, if you think back to the root of creating fiction, there is a knot of people gathered around a fire as one tells a story … or I should say, retells a story. The art was as much–if not more–in selecting, recasting, and expanding upon existing details as it was in adding original changes. I believe that it is a human drive to respond creatively to what moves us the most.

So what happened? When did “storytelling” become “fan fiction”? Ms. Gabaldon’s posts get to the heart of this: when we began to commodify creativity, when we began to draw boundaries (in the interest of making money) around my ideas, my characters, my stories. Interestingly, Ms. Gabaldon–like notorious “fanfic” detractor Robin Hobb Lee Goldberg*–used to make her living writing other people’s characters. Watching her justify that in the face of her ignorant stereotypes of fan writers as oversexed, lazy, bad writers too stupid to create their own fiction is unsightly. You see, like Robin Hobb, she wrote her own version of fan fiction for those who “owned” those characters already. There was money to be made for someone, so that made it okay.

* I originally–and mistakenly–identified Robin Hobb as the author who had tried some rhetorical gymnastics in justifying a career spent writing other people’s characters (Monk and Diagnosis Murder) alongside an utter despise of “fanfic.” A blog post discussing this can be found here. Lee Goldberg and Cathy Young have a very interesting (and more than a little wankish!) back-an-forth across multiple posts. Anyway. I misidentified Robin Hobb and apologize to her and to my readers here for being lazy and relying on my memory rather than digging up links to back myself up. Robin Hobb’s original rant against fanfic, via the Wayback Machine (having gone the way of Ms. Gabaldon’s anti-fanfic posts) can be found here. Thanks to Mervi for asking the questions that turned up my mistake!

Now, I will pause to say that I do not oppose in any way a creator’s right to make money on her or his creation. In fact, contrary to many citizens of the Internet and many members of my own generation, I believe strongly that if you like an artist’s work enough to want her or him to create more of it, then you owe that person a fair payment for that work.

But this is a different issue. No one is arguing Ms. Gabaldon’s right to make money on her books, and no one is trying to cash in on her creations; people are responding as people have responded to creative work since the first group of people crouched around a fire to swap hunting tales. That intelligent, creative people fail to understand the need to respond creatively to the stories of others is astounding. That intelligent, creative people make the sorts of slanders against those who respond in such a way–as Ms. Gabaldon makes against “fanficcers”–is disgusting.

In her essay What Fanfic Is (and Isn’t) to Me, Dreamflower points out the difference in how most people respond to creative work and how artists (which includes writers) respond:

You can pick up a book or turn on the TV, and you can sit there and consume what you have been given, and then close the book or turn off the TV and forget about it. Or you can interact with the book or the show, by imagining new scenarios or new ways of looking at what you’ve been presented with.

Most people consume the creativity of others. They buy books and pay for music downloads and sit through television programs that are 25% advertisements and maybe talk at the water cooler the next day about what they’ve read/heard/seen but, otherwise, never move much beyond consumption. Ms. Gabaldon herself points out that creative people find inspiration anywhere. For pity’s sake, I find stories in the swirls of fake marble on my bathroom wall. I can’t help but to lift an eyebrow at the notion that, in Ms. Gabaldon’s perfect world, we would legally and morally be able to respond only as consumers to the creative work of others.

Responding creatively is in us. And, culturally, I believe that we remain a species whose very nature assures that creation will, in part, be a collective act. Until fairly recently, that was just creating; we didn’t need any special or derogatory names for retelling another person’s story. When creators and the companies that profited from them realized that they could inscribe tight boundaries and claim “ownership” of stories that, in fact, are the product of the thousands of collectively derived myths, stories, and archetypes that define our culture did we end up with the sneering term “fan fiction,” the heart of which is fanatic, implying instability, obsession, hysteria (the latter particularly interesting given that “fanfic” writers are predominantly female). In reality it is, and will always be, just fiction.

All thoughts and opinions are welcome. The only rule I have for this place is that I ask that people remain civil to each other. It is one thing to disagree with a point or idea and quite another to attack a the person expressing it. The first is okay; the second is not.

Finally, although this is a continuation of the LotR Genfic discussion, and although I am the webmaster of the Many Paths to Tread archive, my website is affiliated with neither, and this discussion is occurring independently of the list on which it originated. So, if you find yourself annoyed or angered by the conversation here, please don’t take it out on either of those groups.

My door, however, is always open to questions or concerns at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

For those of you on the LotR Genfic list, you can find the original discussion thread here.

As part of my between-semesters study, I am reading secondary sources about JRRT’s world. It is easy, at times, in fandom (actually, in life), to place myself within an echo chamber of likeminded folks who share many of the same opinions and ideas that I do. Most of my closest fandom friends self-identify as “canon heretics” (as, by the title of this weble, I clearly do as well); if any of them advocate for strict canonical interpretation, they do it outside of my hearing. Yet slapping each other high fives gets old after a while, so I committed part of my break between semesters to reading those secondary sources that have earned acclaim and respect and, presumably, have ideas that are more “mainstream” than mine.

Top of the list, of course, was The Road to Middle-earth by Tom Shippey. Shippey is considered by many as the Tolkien scholar, and part of his appeal comes from the fact that he, too, is a philologist and even held some of the same academic posts as JRRT. If anyone can illuminate what it means to create a universe and write multiple books from a “philological perspective,” then presumably it would be Shippey.

One of Shippey’s theories regarding the construction of Middle-earth concerns “asterisk reality,” which is termed after the philological convention of using an asterisk to identify words that didn’t come from a source but were constructed based on the philologist’s knowledge of and extrapolation from other words and conventions in the language. Shippey maintains that it is this “asterisk reality”–the unknown that lies between two known points–that so enthralled JRRT. He saw stories in words: how they evolved and changed over time in response to happenings in the larger world. The “asterisk reality” attempts to glean those events from language and that–not the ever-popular “playground theory”–explains how JRRT began with a language and evolved a history for Middle-earth.

Perhaps the best-known example of this comes from the Shibboleth of Fëanor, published as an essay in the tenth volume of the History of Middle-earth series, Morgoth’s Ring. JRRT wished to explain how the Noldor came to replace the thorn (Þ) with the s sound. Before this, he had never conceived of the notion of friction between the sons of Finwë, but in explaining how the s began to be used, he delved the history of the House of Finwë and the tensions surrounding the replacement of one of the sounds used in Míriel Þerindë’s name, tension that became outright animosity between the two eldest princes and, eventually, the conflict between Fëanor and Fingolfin that underlies the entire history of the Noldor and without which it is impossible to imagine The Silmarillion. Between the thorn and the s lay this “asterisk reality” and the construction of a story from philological inquiry.

Now asterisk reality might sound familiar. You have known facts at Point A and Point Z and, between them, an infinite body of unknowns. Known Points A and Z might infer what lies between but it’s certainly nothing near to fact. So we start on a path from A and stop when our feet land upon Z. Shippey’s asterisk reality describes creating a story using philology, but it also describes what we know as “fan fiction” and, more specific than that, “gapfillers.”

So we are, essentially, practitioners of asterisk reality. The discussion of “canon” as it relates to Tolkien-inspired fiction also concerns this asterisk reality, perhaps even more so than the “facts” that bracket it. We all know that Maedhros was hung by his wrist from Thangorodrim; canon debates tend to center on how long he hung there and how he was kept alive and whether it’s possible that Fingon rescued him because they were lovers and not just cousins and friends. But all of these things are asterisk realities, so–however sound our conjecture and the evidence upon which it is based–a single definitive solution is impossible.

In The Road to Middle-earth, Shippey discusses JRRT’s work with early manuscripts in an attempt to demonstrate the existence of an “unconquered” (i.e., not French-influenced) version of the English language in the 12^th century. JRRT’s conclusions about the land in which such works were created and the scribes that penned them involved, at times, “a streak of wishful thinking,” in Shippey’s words. “The ghosts would be gentleman, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them,” Shippey writes before going on to say, “This sentiment may have been misguided: if we really had the ‘lays’ on which Beowulf was based, we might not think much of them, and if we had to deal with the scribes of Ancrene Wisse, we might find them difficult people” (pg. 41).

The notion of “canon,” as defined by the community in which we write, often seems to impose a sterility upon the texts with which we work. Canon is made up of facts, and if it cannot be appended with a clear citation, then it is not “canon.” To allow conjecture to flourish too much by combining “facts” from the text is acceptable to some, but it is not canon, and the prevailing attitude in the Tolkien-writing community is that such liberties demand explanation from the author (usually in the form of volumes of author’s notes), lest her or his conjectures be mistaken as uninformed and treated as such. But add a dose of the author’s “wishful thinking” and, suddenly, we’ve veered over the line for many people. One of the more memorable comments that I’ve ever received accused me of writing Another Man’s Cage for my own pleasure. Well, yes, as an author, shouldn’t I find pleasure in what I am writing? It is a story, a piece of fiction, not an instruction manual for a newfangled doohickey; if you remove my emotions, as the author, from the story, then what is left? “Canon,” I suppose, which amounts to a bare retelling of The Silmarillion or, in the case of AMC, not much at all. Yet I sometimes feel that this is what some Tolkien-writers feel is adherence to canon, with the expectation of apologies from authors who let too much of themselves show in how they work off of bare texts. They haven’t remained “clinical” enough. They’ve erred. They are often accused of allowing their own nefarious whims trump the “intent” that informed what JRRT placed upon the page. To some, this even amounts to insult against the author whose works we all admire, in one way or another.

Yet, as Shippey demonstrated in the quoted passage above, the very author whose intent we are supposed to descry was himself working in a field that not only relied heavily on hypothesis based on small and seemingly unrelated textual “facts” but allowed his own “wishful thinking” to touch upon the conclusions of his work. So, when I am fulfilling his great dream of having other hands and minds complete his stories, then I am supposed to believe that he would have wished me never to allow myself and my own “wishful thinking” to enter into that task? What, then, I would ask, is the purpose of what we do? Surely, the end result does not take us much beyond what JRRT himself accomplished in his lifetime, and I have a hard time believing that his “intent” ever included a wish for his work to stagnate so.

In describing what inspired Tolkien, both as an author and as a philologist, Shippey writes, “One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map …” (38). When I first read that line, I couldn’t help but to think that most of the fans I know who write stories based on JRRT’s books would use very similar words to describe why they do what they do. It is not so much the stories on the page as the unwritten spaces between them; the sense of a deep history behind each character and event, hinted at by JRRT and palpable to us, his readers and fans, that compel us to live part of our lives in Middle-earth. In constructing our stories to bridge the gap between fact, between canon, we rely on informed conjecture, yes, but also a healthy dose of our own wishful thinking, much as JRRT himself has done.

(I should add that this list is relevant to the Silmarillion fandom, perhaps the broader Tolkien fandom in places, but they are hardly representative of Fandom as a Whole, if there is any such thing, and they are not meant to be.)

5. AU. Short for alternate universe, this term isn’t bad if it’s used for what it is meant to represent: stories that are set in an actual alternate universe. This term’s shortcoming comes from the way that its definition has been distorted unto meaninglessness by confusing unpopular interpretation with distortion of the canon. I’ve discussed this elsewhere, so I won’t say much more here except to note that it is unfortunate that a term intended to delineate a distinct, legitimate genre has instead become an aspersion and used to attempt to shame authors into a mainstream, fanonical, and crowd-approved interpretation of JRRT’s texts.

4. OOC. Short for “out of character,” I’ve seen this used as a warning, as a form of AU (i.e., “Warning: I’ve made Maedhros really mean and OOC!”), but most often as a criticism of stories where the reader feels the author strays too far outside the bounds of believability.

But, in Silmfic, “OOC” is almost meaningless.

We recently had this discussion on the SWG list. As I pointed out in my post, even the most written-about characters are barely mentioned in the text; for example, Maedhros–who commands an impressive 22% of stories on the SWG archive–is mentioned only eighty-eight times in The Silmarillion. This isn’t a whole lot to go on.

Silmarillion characters, by and large, are not characters at all. They are archetypes; they are familiar faces throughout literature, here, being used to illustrate broad points about an imagined history. While a perceptive reader can and will detect complexity in these characters, this is more often derived from implication than anything explicit that JRRT has done in terms of characterization. For example, Fëanor is widely regarded as a complex character. What The Silmarillion actually says about Fëanor, though, is anything but shades of gray: He is depicted negatively, representing the worst qualities of pride and arrogance; he is the quintessential fallen character who serves a broader purpose as a vehicle for expressing ideas about possessiveness, pride, and obedience to authority.

These are Fëanor’s canonical traits: He’s a proud jerk. Readers, though, see complexity in his relationships with his family, people, and the Valar. They read between the lines to determine that he was not always such a negative character; that his negative traits evolved from what was done to him rather than from core character flaws.

Most of Tolkien’s Silmarillion characters are this way. They have a handful of defining traits and not much else. It is possible to see much more implied in the story, but this is largely conjecture and interpretation and can hardly be called “canon.” So what of OOC?

OOC, I think, is a completely irrelevant label in Silmfic 99% of the time that it is slung against a story or author. “Keeping to canon” in terms of characterization is limited to understanding the roles that a character plays in the broader framework of the story and not much else. In other words, understanding Fëanor the symbol/archetype requires that he maintain certain traits in order to function in the same way in fan-authored stories as he does in the texts. Making him a meek and pie-eyed boot-licker of the Valar is likely to irrevocably change his character’s function in the story*. Making him chronically anxious or empathetic or a great teacher or a loving father … not OOC. Those things can all coexist alongside his necessary role as the proud jerk to create a portrait of Fëanor the man (not Fëanor the symbol/archetype). As authors, moving characters beyond their roles as symbols or archetypes is usually a good idea.

In Silmfic, OOC is rarely a legitimate critique. More often than not, it is wielded against those stories that do not conform to the reader’s personal interpretation of a character. For example, Another Man’s Cage was once deemed “OOC” by a reader because Fëanor hugged his kids. This particular reader–who clearly wasn’t inclined to see characters rounded beyond those few key traits JRRT gives us–couldn’t see how one as “evil” as Fëanor could ever do something so sweet and cutesy as hugging his kids.

There is absolutely nothing in the texts to support this idea. There isn’t, of course, anything in the texts that definitively states that Fëanor did hug his kids either. Which left that reader and me at an impasse, neither of us wrong but neither of us right either, hurling textual facts at each other that proved nothing definitive.

Slathering “OOC” onto any interpretation which one does not agree is not the solution.

* I would not be me if I did not mention that one can actually justify some of these “OOC” 180-from-the-texts depictions by remembering that The Silmarillion was written as fictional myth or history, with all the thorny issues of finding “truth” in myth or history present here as well. This takes more convincing in a story, I think, but is not outside the realm of possibility.

3. Mary Sue. “Mary Sue” is another one of those terms that has lost its meaning. When I first joined the Tolkien fandom, Mary Sue was usually defined as “ya know her when ya see her.” As I did more and more reading, Mary Sue came to be a character with flawed characterization: Instead of being possessed of all the round, complex traits that we know we should invest our characters with, she was flat and unequivocally Good. Because she represented the author, of course, and the author was simply acting out a fantasy.

Later, Mary Sue was redefined for me as an actor that warped the plot or the other characters. The problem with her wasn’t her flat characterization but the way that she had of hijacking canonical plotlines or skewing canon characters into “OOCness” (see the gripe above this one), i.e. making Frodo’s choice to take the Ring to Mordor not an act of self-sacrifice but because he was enamored of her, and she was going along with the Fellowship because she and Legolas could not be parted from each other. She could be the most believable female character in the world, but her exertion on the storyline and her fellow characters (as understood in the canon) was too strong.

Naturally, “Mary Sue” is not the only fannish term to have different definitions depending on who you ask. (Just ask a few people what “PWP” stands for …) That’s not my problem with the term.

The concept of “Mary Sue” is often itself misogynist. Like “AU” and “OOC,” it often becomes a criticism broadened to include any story with an original female character. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it suggests that there is something wrong with giving the spotlight–or even part of it–to a woman. One of my major critiques against JRRT’s writings is that they are an old boys’ club. Yes, he did better than many–even most–male fantasists, but his stories are still about males shaping their world to suit their vision. It’s called the Fellowship of the Ring for a reason. There is also a reason why even gender-conscious fans do not blink at the term “Men” being used to refer to mortal human beings of both genders: Because mortal women in JRRT’s writings so rarely give us reason to apply it to them that we don’t usually get the chance to notice the sheer wrongness of a sentence like, “Haleth was a Man who led her people to victory.”

One of the major positive functions of Tolkien-based fiction (aside from its value as entertainment or personal fulfillment or as a fun community-building hobby) is that authors can give voices to the unnamed, unvoiced women in the stories and begin to correct the gender imbalance in JRRT’s works. Pinning a derogatory label on the front of every female character who does not appear on the short list with which we have to work in “canon” is one way of further stifling creativity in this regard.

Secondly, the oft-mouthed definition of Mary Sue as a (female) character who is “too perfect” is problematic. What does that mean? That a woman can’t be beautiful, smart, and charming? (I do not believe that. I know some.) Characters that are “too perfect” appear throughout JRRT’s writings. They are both male and female. Critiquing a character as not relatable because of his/her unreal perfection is fair game. Claiming that, as a whole, female characters that are “too perfect” can’t function in a story is sexist. Despite the existence of terms like “Gary Stu” and “Marty Stu,” I’ve never actually seen these terms applied to a story. The message I come away with is that “perfect” women (read: strong, beautiful, assertive, charismatic) are problematic. The same traits in a guy are Finrod.

Thirdly, the accusation of “Mary Sue” is most often made against those characters appearing in stories authored by young women. They are problematic (it is said) because they are shameless self-inserts and represent a female fantasy and nothing else.

And what, pray tell, is wrong with that?

It seems to me that male-authored literature and media is full of self-inserts that represent male fantasies. How many skinny nerds become superheroes or martial arts masters or secret agents charged with saving the world? How many of them get ripped and get the girl? How many adolescent males authoring fan fiction do you think make their male self-inserts well-rounded characters? And how much critique do you think these young men get when they fail to do so?

We not only critique young women; we made up a whole term to point out their literary sins!

No, “Mary Sue” has to go. Not only is it being applied too broadly to exclude female characters in general, but it is being used to devalue the writings and fantasies of young women. It asks, why should they be writing about themselves as an equal, as a Tenth Walker, when they could just pick one of the boys that JRRT gave them to write about?

2. Slash. As I’m writing this, I’m sensing a trend in my loathing of most of these terms: once-accurate (and largely neutral) terms become pejorative and are broadly applied to anything that even vaguely resembles what the term was invented to actually define. Or: if it quacks like a duck, that means it must be a duck, even if it’s really a goose, my dogs’ honking stuffed duck toy, or my crazy uncle dressed like a duck on Halloween.

Slash, as I understand it, was a term originally coined for stories with a prominent same-sex non-canonical consummated pairing. Despite the awful-sounding name, it really was meant to be neutral: “Slash” referred to the literal slash between the characters’ names when indicating the pairing, i.e. Maedhros/Fingon, Aragorn/Legolas, Kirk/Spock. It was a distinct subgenre of fiction that represented the author’s purpose in writing the story–to present sexually a non-canonical homosexual (usually male) couple–and not to act as an indication of non-sexual content.

These days, though, I get the impression that “slash” has come to mean “anything gay.” If your characters just happen to be gay and just happen to have an off-screen and completely non-sexual same-sex pairing, then that is slash. If I want to look at the social issues that might have been present in Gondolin if Ecthelion and Glorfindel really were a couple, even if I never venture beyond the council rooms and parlors of the city to look at their personal/romantic lives, even if they never kiss, then a certain subset of readers will expect me to label that story as slash. It’s not remotely incestuous; it doesn’t “violate canon” in any way, but it depicts gay characters, so people need and deserve a warning.

Among my friends who write mostly same-sex pairings, there is lately a revolt against the term. They don’t like it, and I don’t blame them. Broadly defined as it is, it becomes a way of enforcing homophobia. Readers who don’t like slash often use sexual explicitness as the reason for that. They’ll often affirm, in the same breath, to dislike graphic het stories too. The difference is that a lot of these readers won’t blink at a story that mentions Maglor’s extra-canonical marriage but will pitch a fit if Glorfindel and Ecthelion have an extra-canonical off-screen romance. That’s homophobia, folks. Allowing homophobic people to avoid that truth by aiding them in sweeping anything “gay” under the same label as “gay sex” is wrong.

1. Canon. Tolkien’s stories are full of mythical entities. A coherent canon is one of them.

If one defines “canon” as basically the same as “inarguable facts” (implying that the writer cannot deviate from them without making a mistake or writing an AU), then there are precious few of those in JRRT’s writings.

That is not the problem. That is, in my heretic’s estimation, what makes JRRT’s writings such a fruitful playground for my own creative endeavors and why, I suspect, unlike many other fandoms, one doesn’t see too much migration of Tolkien fans.

The problem is that discussions of canon often begin with the belief that it is possible–with enough study of the texts–to find out answers, “what really happened” in the stories. That it is possible to grade most scenarios, tidily, as right or wrong in terms of canon. That “canon-compliant” and “AU” do not occur on a continuum.

I’ve already made the argument elsewhere that precious little truly counts as canon. Few of the “facts” presented in the stories can’t be challenged in some way. I’ve argued yet elsewhere that where people are hung up on questions of canon, they need to be asking questions about stories and writing. I stick by those beliefs and, in my perfect fannish world, would no longer see discussions of canon framed as finding right or wrong answers but as looking at myriad possibilities with the goal of creating a thoughtful or entertaining story.

So … what terms would you strike from the fannish lexicon?

And, yes, this is true. If you aim for one thousand comments on your novel, you’re probably not going to get them writing Silmarillion. (Another Man’s Cage currently has 185 comments on ff.net.) You’re much better off in Twilight or Harry Potter, even The Lord of the Rings. (My friend JunoMagic’s LotR-based novel Lothíriel has 995 reviews on the same site.)

My contention is not with whether or not this is reality. It’s pretty in-your-face obvious, if you ask me. My contention lies with the very notion of recognizing rewards for our writing in such terms.

Because the fact of the matter is that people who post their fiction publicly are looking for something for doing so. Oh, I’ve heard the wide-eyed assertions of people who claim, “I only post for myself!” I call bullshit. You may write for yourself–I hope that you do!–but if you’re taking the time to join groups/archives and format stories for uploading and to actually upload them and write summaries and debate the rating and so on, you’re doing so with hopes of getting something from someone else. That might be simply getting read; it might be in-depth concrit; it might be the adulation of masses claiming that Shakespeare is currently licking the taste of your road dust from his lips. So there is some hope for reward, maybe not even anything particularly tangible, but something. Write for myself, post for others: that is my motto, and I fail to see how there is any shame in standing on a stage and hoping for an audience.

And, of course–idealist though I may be–I can also see things in realistic terms, and I know that nothing I say will change the fact that there will be people for whom the sole measure of success is reaching a certain number of comments or page clicks. I count these people alongside those who take 80-hour-a-week jobs for the six-figure salaries and the ability to accrue shinies like a million-dollar home that might as well be a million-dollar motel room for all that they’re in it, complete with a professional-grade kitchen that never gets used because their dinners are slurped out of Chinese takeout boxes, and a vacation home in Bethany Beach that never gets used because they’re working eighty hours a week, every week. But the collection of such shinies is their mark of success; intangibles like contentment or personal enrichment are of little to no matter.

But, of course, there’s no meaning in such an existence, just as there is no meaning in fiction that is penned solely to entice the greatest number of eyeballs to look at it. Traffic accidents earn that much.

This concept is nothing new. In professional fiction, the term for it has been sanitized and euphemized as “writing for the market.” Those with blunter tongues call it “selling out.” Last year, horribly enough, I had to write an essay on Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara for a course called Modern Epic Fantasy, and while looking for information on the book, I found an interview with the author during which he was asked how he handles critical reactions to his work. “I write first for myself and for what I perceive to be the market” was part of his answer. Having read no further than Sword of Shannara (because, as I often admonish fandom trolls, if organisms lacking a central nervous system nonetheless possess the capability to learn a basic avoidance response, then what does it say of human beings who cannot do the same?), I can say that it is painfully obvious that Brooks writes foremost for a market. “Writing for the market” necessarily means that there must be a perceptible market in the first place, which means that there must be a body of books that is being overwhelmingly purchased (and, thus, published) over another body of books, which means walking in the ditches created by the passage of all those authors’ feet before yours, which means stale ideas and writing that lacks anything close to daring.

However, I am not so naïve not to understand that professional writers are just that: They are professionals, and so they need to make money on their work. So they must remain at least cognizant of the market for that work. I know firsthand the allure of that “market,” of leaving an idea about which I was passionate for another because I thought that the latter had a better chance of “selling.” It made me a miserable writer and drove me to give up writing for two years. I suppose it’s the same as the caveman’s urge to hoard more deer legs in one’s cave than one can possibly eat because that stack of rotting meat in the corner represents success and, ultimately, survival. Never mind that it reeks.

But this is professional writing. After my failed stint as a writer of literary fiction, it was “fan fiction” that brought me back to writing, and it brought me back in part because it was something that could not be sold. It kept me honest much in the way that a job at Denny’s and not Applebee’s keeps a recovering alcoholic honest by not even providing a whiff of temptation into the old habits. There was very little “market” for Silmfic beyond a slightly bigger audience for some characters and pairings over others; it was the closest I’d ever seen in a fiction-writing community to the ideal of 1) writing only what one’s heart and mind cries must be written and 2) having one’s work judged foremost in terms of how well it worked for its audience. This is not to say that the Silmarillion community was (and is) without any favoritism paid to some works, genres, and authors over others. But that an unknown author could march into the room with her big, hulking novel that never once touches on an event mentioned in the texts and still find readers and get comments on her work is, I think, a testament to the difference between fanfic and o-fic. Let me try the same thing with an original novel and see how far I get.

So I find this notion of recognizing and writing for a fanfic market to be dismaying. What the FanHistory posts encourage (especially the first) is abandoning one’s own passions as a writer in favor of writing to fit a perceived market. Fuck quality. My heart and mind pull me to contemplate the early lives of the Fëanorians, the quality of my writing (I hope) reflects my passion and interest in this topic, but as my “mere” 185 reviews on ff.net reveal, this isn’t enough. Never mind that I’ve never read Twilight and strongly suspect that I would object to some of the books’ basic premises, but this is where it’s at. I can surely scratch together a story about Bella and Edward (see, I know the main characters’ names at least!) that will probably get more comments in a week than AMC has gotten in three years.

I don’t object to the reality of this claim but whether this is a measure that we should be putting upon fanworks in the first place. It’s bad enough that, in order to make a living off of their art, writers must mash and corset their creative passions to suit the “market.” What is to be gained by placing the same impositions upon fan-writing? It takes fan-writing from something that is driven by creativity and the community that forms around sharing that creativity and turns it into a capitalist enterprise, only instead of success being measured in dollars or euros or pounds or kroner or pesos or yen, now we’re measuring in page clicks or comment counts and shifting our creativity and our communities to accrue those meaningless little tick marks. We can’t even feed our families off hits on ff.net. In such a system, tiny fandoms–like Silmarillion, where the stories being written are overwhelmingly of high quality and the communities are extremely dedicated, passionate, and close-knit–must necessarily lose out in favor of–what exactly? Stacking our archives with the same pulp that I saw when, two Christmases ago, I wanted to buy my husband a book by Ursula K. LeGuin (any book by Ursula K. LeGuin) and, in the local B&N fantasy/sci-fi section with its bright-colored covers featuring shovel-jawed, sword-wielding heroes and dew-eyed, diadem-wearing princesses, I found one copy of The Left Hand of Darkness? Terry Brooks, on the other hand, probably had a shelf unto himself.

The difference between piling rotting deer carcasses in the corner of your cave if you’re writing professional fiction versus fan fiction is that, in fanfic, those carcasses are never a matter of survival. They just stink.

The answer to that question is simple: JRRT doesn’t. At least, not in any of the books published during his lifetime or posthumously to this point.

The issue is a larger one. That this question comes up at least every year is indicative of its importance. This is a major event and a popular one to write about. Surely JRRT told us something about it! It is the fanfic writer’s instinct, when confronted with the desire to write about a particular event, to go to the texts for answers. But when there are no answers to be had …

What next?

My short answer was, and is: Use your imagination. Take what you know from the texts and how you personally interpret the texts and make something up. Yet I think that our perception of our relationship with the texts and of the texts to our stories sometimes makes this easier said than done. There is the uncomfortable feeling that one should not simply make up details about an event of such importance. Surely the answers lie in the texts somewhere, to the writer savvy enough to know where to look and know how to put the clues together!

I remember when I wrote Another Man’s Cage, my first reaction to posting that story was to label it as alternate universe (AU). The first reaction of many of my readers was to suggest that I do the same. To use a somewhat odd metaphor, imagine that I hold a rock, and that is my story. The big barnside is the text on which I am writing. If I peg the rock at the side of the barn, and it lands off in the tall weeds somewhere well away from and out of sight of the barn, then that is how scantily AMC was related to anything concrete in the texts. The texts shaped the direction of the story, but the story was quite independent of the texts after that initial toss.

I’ve already discussed at length elsewhere that this is not the same thing as AU. Yet that still does remove all of the squirmy discomfort that, in lobbing stones at barns, where those stones land might still be somehow wrong.

I do think, in writing Tolkien-based stories, that a lot of times we get hung up on questions of canon when the question should be writing: How to create an engaging and internally consistent story from one’s own head. Take the Maedhros-on-Thangorodrim example: JRRT gives us little help. Few events get such varied treatment in stories. I’ve seen,

• Morgoth sending a minion or going himself to force-feed Maedhros;
• Morgoth sustaining Maedhros unnaturally using “magic” (think Húrin);
• Maedhros only hanging for days or weeks, not years, because his story was exaggerated by loremasters and bards looking to tell a good story, so the how of survival isn’t even an issue;
• Maedhros surviving because, as an Elf recently arrived from the Blessed Realm, he had the endurance to do so; and
• Maedhros surviving on bugs and rainwater and determination until he’s rescued.

None of these are right; none are wrong. Each writer can provide his or her own facts from the texts to justify one interpretation over the other, and we’re no closer to an answer than we were at the start.

I love analyzing and discussing canon. I love taking the details used to arrive at each of the above interpretations and evaluating the relative worth of each, combining and recombining and questioning them, but at the end of the day, discussing “canon” about such questions with hopes of arriving at definitive answers to be applied to stories is pointless. It’s like arguing about whether Mexican, Thai, or Indian is the superior type of food. Each person can make her or his argument, but in the end, it really is a matter of taste.

On my list of things that I wish the Tolkien fandom would just get: stop turning such questions into questions of canon. Turn them into questions of writing. Accept that we will still be arguing about this twenty years from now, and–barring the publication or discovery of some textual evidence for the validity of one interpretation over another–we will still be no closer to an answer. What matters, at the end of the debate, isn’t what JRRT said or didn’t say, but how we present our stories, make them compelling, and make them work within our own visions of this world in which we play.

However, I think that anyone whose seen a couple of these go-arounds knows that such discussions tend to deteriorate into a squabbling over which set of facts is better put together than another. The question of how a writer uses her or his freedom to weave a compelling story around a major event where we have little help from the original author is never addressed; at least, I’ve never seen it. But that, I think, would be a productive conversation to have.

It’s inaccurate. It should be just “fiction.” The addition of the word fan is not a comment on the writing but a comment on the writer that is being used to project judgment on the writing and set it inherently lower than “non-fan fiction.” This is an unfair, spurious judgment, and we should be less complacent in accepting it.

To begin explaining why, I think we need to start at literature’s roots, before it was literature or even writing. I do believe that our use of language and, most importantly, use of language to tell stories–whether of a successful hunt earlier that day, an ancestor’s triumphs in battle, or a completely made-up account of a colony on Mars–is one of the most important traits that defines us as human apart from our brethren in the Animal Kingdom. Prehistoric evidence shows that, as far as you want to go back, if there were people, then they were telling stories.

All over the world, for example, we see a rich tradition of oral storytelling among preliterate peoples. Because these societies did not yet have writing, then all of their stories were a form of what we now call fan fiction: If I am a storyteller, and I hear something that I like, then I retell that later. Only, because it was not written down, then I am less concerned with fidelity to the original and invent where I might have forgotten exactly how it goes or reinvent when I think that I like a different idea better. Or I reframe an old story so that it is more relevant to the present day: think of all the Christian elements in Beowulf, a poem about a pre-Christian Pagan civilization.

Nor am I the first to make this argument; Natasha Walter gave fandom its favorite quote to validate its existence when she said that “when it comes to fan fiction, the internet is giving us back something like an oral society, in which people can retell the stories that are most important to them and, in so doing, change them.” The SWG uses that quote on its LiveJournal community, and I see it resurface occasionally in an email sig line of some fan defending her dirty habit against the scorn of the literati. Fans are, I have found, really proud to “return to their roots,” so to speak, in engaging in collective and revisionist storytelling as old as the species. But there is actually a return to nothing. Writing based on the words of those to come before us never stopped. We are upholding a tradition of storytelling as old as the species, defending it against commercial interests.

It is hard to find a medieval fictional writing that does not have a source. Religious and Biblical stories, myths and legends, historical accounts, and the work of other writers formed the basis of much of medieval literature. If you look at Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, it is a poem made up of two plots, each coming from a different Celtic legend. Even in combining them, scholars can’t agree as to whether this was done first by a French author, and the anonymous Gawain poet was just copying what he’d read elsewhere, or if he’d originated the concept of putting two familiar stories together into one. Or, to put it into “fan fiction” terms: did the the Gawain poet invent the crossover?

That medieval literature largely derived from existing sources makes sense since much of medieval literature began as oral storytelling: Building upon, expanding on, and reinventing favorite stories was how literature was done. Nor was there copyright to complicate things. A story was “owned” by anyone who heard or read it.

But derivative and transformative fiction–fan fiction–did not end in the Middle Ages. The American author Washington Irving is credited with writing the first short story: “Rip Van Winkle.” “Rip Van Winkle,” however, was not Washington Irving’s story. It was a rewriting of the German story “Peter Klaus the Goatherd” by J.C.C. Nachtigal, which Nachtigal had transcribed from a folk tale. Irving liked it, so he retooled it a bit and wrote it in English. Yes, a fan fiction writer invented one of the most prolific genres in literature today: the short story!

Of course, conditions for writers were not ideal in the 19^th century. There was no such thing as international copyright, so an author could publish a story in the United States and discover it reprinted and selling like proverbial hotcakes in England (or vice versa), without ever having given his permission–much less earning payment–for the sale. This is clearly not ideal if we want to encourage a system where writers can make a living on their work (which, of course, allows them to produce more of the work that we love). So maybe one could argue that making copyright stricter in order to protect writers is what made certain kinds of fiction into fan fiction, a genre inferior to its brethren where the connection between it and the sources that inspired it are less apparent.

But fan fiction is not only being written but being published even today.

Neil Gaiman is regarded as one of the most imaginative authors in speculative fiction today. In his last short story collection, Fragile Things, he included a story, “The Problem of Susan,” that dealt with questions raised by C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories. “The Problem of Susan” supposes a basic familiarity with Lewis’s writings (even though, like most good fan fiction, it can be read and enjoyed without it) and even uses Lewis’s characters. Gaiman could never understand why Susan, of all the Pevensie children, had to remain behind and never return to Narnia:

I read the Narnia books to myself hundreds of times as a boy, and then aloud as an adult, twice, to my children. There is so much in the books that I love, but each time I found the disposal of Susan to be intensely problematic and deeply irritating. I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction ….
Fragile Things, Introduction.

He writes about Susan’s life, long after Narnia, to address the questions the book raised for him.

This should sound familiar to fan fiction authors. The curtains close on a part of a literary history, only questions, even dissatisfaction, still linger in our minds. So what do we do? We write as though that curtain never dropped and consider the continuation of the story that the author never embarked upon. We use that author’s ideas to make sense of the story’s outcome, or not. My story Rekindling does this: Tolkien never described the ending and remaking of the world into Arda Unmarred. Using some of his early ideas, I consider one possibility. Keiliss’s beautiful and haunting Star’s End is another such story that looks at Arwen’s death and Maglor’s fate. MithLuin’s intriguing novella Lessons from the Mountain takes Maedhros’s story beyond where Tolkien left us at his death and tells of his rehabilitation in the halls of Mandos. Stories that consider Elladan and Elrohir’s choice between mortality and immortality fit as well, as do Legolas and Gimli’s Fourth Age adventures. Maglor in history and Frodo sailing to Tol Eressëa are common enough that they are practically their own genres.

So what is the difference between what these authors are doing and what Gaiman has done? Many of the authors of Tolkien stories like those described above treat the texts on which they are based just as thoughtfully–even more so–than Gaiman’s treatment of Lewis’s works “The Problem of Susan.”

Responding to a story by answering it with stories of our own is a human trait. We have been doing this since we have been. In every literary epoch, even as it dwindles as copyright tightens and “originality” becomes increasingly valued, we see writers engaging stories in this way. It is neither new nor primitive: It is simply human.

This is the first reason why I detest the term “fan fiction.” Until recently, fan fiction has simply been fiction. Creatively engaging another author’s story was no different than creatively engaging a philosophical idea, a scientific concept, or a historical event. That Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” was a rewrite of an existing German story didn’t make it subpar; it was simply a fact about its creation that didn’t impede enjoyment of the story any more than knowing that Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged about a free-market economy or that Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park about dinosaurs and DNA impeded enjoyment of those: These authors are all engaging aspects of their world and doing so creatively. Why is literature–ironically, of all subjects!–roped off from such inquiry?

I believe that the term “fan fiction” has nothing to do with the fiction and everything to do with the fan. In other words, it is not derogatory because of the kinds of stories it produces; I hope that I have adequately shown that these sorts of stories were and continue to be natural displays of human creativity. It is derogatory because of who the writer is perceived to be, and that is why we should be insulted by it.

What is a fan? It derives from the term fanatic: someone who is passionate to the point of irrationality about something. Think packs of men breaking off the necks of bottles to glass the opposing team’s fans after a sporting match. Think animal liberationists who throw fake blood on families visiting the zoo. Think religious zealots who leave tracts as tips as restaurants because they honestly believe that the words and hazy illustrations will benefit their underpaid server more than money to feed her family. These are not people who deal thoughtfully and rationally with anything where their subject of interest is concerned.

Fan derives from that. It has, of course, earned a milder meaning over time. I can say that I am a fan of the actor Ioan Gruffudd without worrying that I might be misconstrued as a stalker who is–as I type this essay on fan fiction–sitting outside of his house, waiting for him to emerge so that I can kidnap him a la Stephen King’s novel Misery. Or I can be a fan of country music, Japanese motorcycles, wine bars, or Marvel comics.

Our fannish interests as humans are unlimited, but they are invariably regarded as frivolous. Once I get into a certain realm of “serious” subjects, I am not longer a fan but maybe a student or a scholar. I don’t say, for example, that I am a fan of medieval literature. In that I enjoy it, in that I spend a lot of time and thought on it, it is much like the fannish interests I just listed. But to say, “I am a real fan of Piers Plowman!” sounds almost as ridiculous as saying, “I spend my weekends reading, fishing, and performing neurosurgery!” I think it is generally assumed that certain subjects eclipse fannishness and become matters of serious study.

So why am I a student of medieval literature but a fan of Tolkien’s stories? Actually, Tolkien’s works are a perfectly valid subject of study, and there are people who consider themselves not fans but students of his work. Why am I any different? Because, of course, one of my primary ways of dealing with the texts to this point has been through exploring them creatively: in pondering what Pengolodh’s authorship of The Silmarillion means for that text, I wrote a story about it; in trying to explain the story of Lúthien in mythological and historiographical terms, I wrote a story about that too. Who can take that seriously?

I remember that I once got a comment on a story on FanFiction.net from a reviewer who identified herself or himself as a “Tolkien scholar.” I remember nothing else about the comment except for that (and the fact that s/he misspelled the word gonorrhea). I remember, at the time, finding the comment hugely funny. What sort of “scholar” would come up with such wonky views about Tolkien and what sort of scholar would misspell gonorrhea? And, most importantly, what sort of scholar would waste her or his time debating with a fan-fiction writer? The idea of “scholar” and “FanFiction.net” could not be reconciled in my mind; it was contradictory, along the lines of “fighting for peace” or bombing clinics for “pro-life” causes.

When I think of myself as a fan-fiction writer, I can’t possibly take myself seriously. I see a parody of myself: a squealing little girl leaping up and down and clapping her hands until she faints for a lack of oxygen. That high-pitched squeal is all that I have to contribute to the discussion of his works; I am a fan and lack rationality and the perspective that comes with it. But I know that the study I’ve made of Tolkien’s works has been serious. There has been very little leaping up and down and no fainting. My study and writing about Tolkien has been largely grounded in rationality, in a desire to better understand something that I enjoy. Coupled with the human drive to express myself as a storyteller, my ideas take shape as fan fiction.

So what makes me a fan-fiction writer and Neil Gaiman simply a writer? Well, of course, he had proven himself as a writer long before writing “The Problem of Susan”: He had work published, he won awards, he sold lots of books. He’s earned his credibility in expressing ideas creatively, even ideas about works of literature that would ordinarily be corralled as “fan fiction.” With the few publications to my name all in journals or anthologies no one has ever heard of, I don’t carry that credibility. When I interact creatively with a text, it becomes a frivolity, even a perversion. It becomes something to be ashamed of and treated as subpar to so-called “original fiction” or to the derivative/transformative/(fan) fiction of proven writers like Neil Gaiman.

Even look at how we talk about ourselves. Of course, there is fan fiction and fandom and fannish, all words derived from that word fanatic, with all the implications of hysteria and irrationality intact. Then we are “playing in So-and-So’s sandbox.” We are not engaging the texts as fellow readers, writers, and critics. We are children, making silly artifacts that are easily stomped into nothingness. We are “fangirls” and “fanboys” (except for Juno Magic’s reimagined “fancrones,” which I love): again, children. Again, tiny, insignificant voices piping well below the range of adult hearing, sequestered away at a kids’ table where we need not bother the grown-ups with our nattering. We talk about ourselves as frivolous and in need of growing up but, no, I don’t believe that this is always true. I don’t believe that we have nothing to offer, either in analyzing the stories we write about or as writers of fiction independent of those stories.

I see the so-called “real” world of writing fiction as one where there is a lot of scrambling going on to assert the value of one’s work by devaluing the work of others, often without ever having read it. Genre fiction gets trod upon by the literary genre, and sub-genres get stomped by their mainstream counterparts. (Has anyone else ever heard the sneer in the voice of journals that, for example, accept fantasy and horror but “nothing with vampires or werewolves”?) I see the label of “fan fiction” as another way of devaluing a genre of writing. Except that “fan fiction” is perhaps the oldest genre of writing around; I think it deserves better than this.

And I think that we deserve better than this. The Internet is transforming how we write. No longer do we have to be “good enough” (read: unoffensive enough, mainstream enough, know enough of the right people) to be read. More people have probably read my novel Another Man’s Cage than have read all of my published writings combined. It must be scary, for an industry accustomed to acting as arbiters of quality and taste, to consider us. In reading arguments against fan fiction, it is inevitably mentioned that fan fiction has the potential to take a paying audience from a writer. We are cast as thieves. Implied in that fear is that fan fiction about a story may be better than the original. That as a series creaks on indefinitely, fans dissatisfied with the plummetting quality might get their “fix” of characters and a world that they enjoy through fan fiction, not through purchasing the original author’s books. Whenever I see literary snobbery in action, I hear a note of fear underlying it: that someone who we thought took writing less seriously than we did somehow managed, despite that, to produce a better story. What’s left after that but to discredit the story’s very existence, to claim it as inherently inferior?

“Fan fiction” is not inferior. It is a continuing form of storytelling that is older than writing itself; it is the way that humans always have and always will engage the stories that interest and inspire them. It is a way that authors celebrate not only their love for those stories but analyze, discuss, and otherwise make sense of those stories. What we do is not inferior or even immoral; this–not the idea of derivative or transformative storytelling–is the novel attitude, and it serves the commercial interest of those who would compartmentalize stories as saleable entities. We should be less complacent in accepting this, beginning by not willfully labeling our work as inferior.

One of the thoughts that has crossed my mind and is currently sticking in my mind like a cockleburr and annoying me and refusing to be dislodged is how a similar conflict exists between writing and fandom. I say “fandom” because this blog is largely aimed toward fandom and because fandom is where I am most comfortable, but really, I think it applies to any sort of group that encourages (or is even based solely or primarily on) creativity and is maintained by a collective effort by members of the community. For example, I am also a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and I find many of the same conundrums that I experience in fandom arising there as well.

Writing or creating artwork is a selfish endeavor. It is done alone, usually in solitude or silence (as, indeed, I am alone right now in the house with the only sound the humming of my laptop; even the dogs are outside). At times, the drive to write and escape from social obligations drives me to the brink of madness, and I become a truly unpleasant person to be around. Luckily, Bobby understands this and packs me off into an empty room with my laptop and a couple of hours to write. I am not the first writer to lament the words on the page and how they might have translated better into folded laundry or dishes put away or time spent in the company of others who might feel hurt that I am not around. I sometimes feel like an exceedingly selfish person for my writing. (In fact, I should be finishing a school paper right now and even feel a little guilty that I am writing this instead.) For the few years that I participating in NaNoWriMo, November was such a time of peace and relief. It was something official and even impressive-sounding (”I am a participant in this year’s National Novel-Writing Month” *polishes fingernails on the front of waistcoat*), and it was a good excuse to avoid other activities and write instead. I remember when Bobby was playing in a particularly far-off hockey league, and I used to go to all of his games so that he was not driving home exhausted and alone, and I used to take my laptop and write while he was playing. And, sometimes, people I knew would sit down with me and make conversation, and how I longed to say what I was thinking: “Would you just fuck off and let me alone to write?” Only that was exceedingly selfish, so I never did, and who knows how many words didn’t get written because of it. I feel guilty, even now, lamenting those lost words when, clearly, socialization was the right and proper and human thing to do, and people were just trying to be nice to the lonely eccentric woman over by the soda machines. But when NaNoWriMo was going on, everyone was warned up to a month in advance, and I was left alone, and I didn’t feel guilty about it. I was, after all, serving a project larger than myself; it was not so selfish as writing simply because I wanted to.

Fandom, on the other hand–or groups like the SCA–are entities that value unselfishness in the form of service to the community. Forget the above paragraph for a moment and meet Dawn the Archive Owner and Webminister and Volunteer. One of my most passionately uttered values is the importance, as part of a community from which one derives as much enjoyment as I do fandom and the SCA, of contributing in some significant way to that community. Fannish communities are built almost entirely on the contributions of members of that community; if, tomorrow, the co-moderators, volunteers, writers, and reviewers of the SWG all decided that they wanted to leave the time and effort that they spend on their various contributions to someone else, then there would be no SWG. That is the surest way to shut us down.

But the SWG (and many other fannish groups) is by name and definition a group of writers and artists, people whose work is by its very nature selfish and solitary. Almost four years after I formed the SWG, I’d have to say that my only regret, in creating this group for fandom and doing all of the service that that entails, is again, the lost words: the stories that I wanted to write and didn’t because obligations to the community. I am beyond proud, delighted, and thrilled with the SWG and what it has accomplished, and I would never ever unwish it, but sometimes–in the midst of doing the fannish equivalent of changing dirty diapers or playing stuffed-animal tea party–I lament the lost ability to be selfish and wonder what I could have produced in the last four years if I’d never created the SWG.

I have always been proud of my involvement with fandom–and this, quite unexpectedly, has increased the more that I study literature–because I see its collective, shared creativity as more of a return to the creativity that has been natural to the human race since our distant ancestors first started singing verses around the campfire at night, adding and changing where they saw fit. I see the recent turn that creativity–writing in particular–has taken, with its obsessiveness over possession and markets and profit, as the abnormality, not the desire to create based on what has already been done by others. But, at the same time, writing is largely a solitary act. How does that fit into a collective community? For me, I find that I have the same balancing act as that described by mothers who are also writers, who have to make the choice between a crying child and a whispering muse (1), only my choice is between the whispering muse and a webpage that needs updating, emails that need answering, a newsletter that needs writing, announcements that need posting … all of these things that need to be done in service of the fannish ideals in which I believe so strongly and which, almost always, trump my creative ideals, in which I also believe but are easier to defer: They are selfish.

The first creative communities, artists/authors produced songs and stories for the entertainment of an audience that was usually not artistic itself; the artist/author might find able subsistence from this audience: “singing for one’s supper,” if you will. In the modern “real” writing world, markets exist that seek and publish fiction to provide to an audience and, hopefully, these markets compensate writers fairly for their work (excuse me while I have a good laugh at that last point ………….. thanks, I’m better now). In both cases, the artist/author is independent from the majority of consumers of his or her work, and the “community” in which she or he operates is also maintained by people who are not usually themselves artists/authors. Therefore, the creation and maintenance of the infrastructure by which such creativity is produced and shared does not interfere much with the actual production of that creativity.

Fandom is different: The same people who are producing creative works are usually also those who are building and maintaining the communities necessary for that work to be produced and shared. Most archive and group owners are themselves writers; most of our volunteers (and all of my co-moderators) with the SWG are also artists or writers, and so whenever they give their time to their group, then that is taking time from their writing. The audience for fannish works is also, largely, the same people producing those works, so whenever I hear of people who review x number of stories for the MEFAs or review everything posted on a particular archive or community, then I can’t help but to think that that contribution comes at the expense of their own creative endeavors. But, of course, they are making a very necessary contribution.

What is the solution here? There is no solution. What is beautiful about our communities–that they are collective and run by those who are themselves artists and writers (versus those looking to turn a profit on the efforts of others)–is also to our detriment: Those who believe most strongly in service to their communities will feel the pull of both obligations, and it won’t always be pleasant, and the “selfish” and creative will most often lose out, which is itself a loss in words unwritten and ideas unexpressed.

I do wonder, also, to what extent this is a manifestation of fandom being a “female space,” as some like to call it (amid much controversy, of course). Most cultures teach young girls to be selfless, to be helpers, to put their needs below the needs of the group. In women, selflessness is still valued, as evidenced by the continued fervor of the debate over whether or not mothers belong in the workplace. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to value more their individual accomplishments, and it is understood that a degree of selfishness is to be expected. (I remember reading once, when I was very young, that American culture teaches us to see psychopathology in the mother who chooses her needs over those of her children but not in the man who uproots his family, takes his wife from her family and friends and his children from their peers and familiar home, in order to pursue a career that will not benefit that family in the least; in fact, might be to its detriment as the responsibilities of said career take him away from home even more than he already is and, possibly, to a city or living conditions that are ideal to no one but him. That might have been the moment when I became a feminist, being as this point has stuck with me across, literally, almost the entirety of my life. I only wish that I could remember where I read or heard it to give proper credit.)

I wonder how these values that are still taught to girls and esteemed in women have shaped fandom, and I wonder how this will affect our creative accomplishments. Is there a connection? I don’t know. There are, of course, men in fandom, and several Tolkien-based writing groups are run by men, and I do not intend to dismiss or diminish their contributions. But the Tolkien-based writing community is 95% female (at least) and so, presumably, the culture of that community is female as well. I wonder, sometimes, what male-dominated fandoms (and they do exist) look like compared to female-dominated fandoms, like the Tolkien fandom. Do they feel the same conflict between personal creation and contributing to the collective? And this goes, I think, beyond something so large as creating a group or archive. Do they drop everything to write a ficlet for a collection dedicated to a friend whose going through a rough spell? Do they read every story participating in an award or fest and leave comments for all the authors? Do they set their own work aside because a friend needs a last-minute “emergency” beta-read? Most of the people that I know in the Tolkien fandom–male and female–have done at least one of these things at some point, but the Tolkien fandom–being dominated by women–would of course have evolved a value system created largely by women.

To what extent are these values female and not merely fannish and expected parts of any collective community?

These are questions whizzing through my head lately.

An Afterword …

I don’t often write about my experiences as the owner of the SWG for the simple fact that such “confessions” seem to result in an outpouring of gratitude and back-pats that I think people feel are obligatory and that make me feel bad and slightly dirty, as though I have solicited something undeserved for an endeavor that I find very enjoyable and gratifying without people feeling the need to regularly prostrate themselves before me. I make a conscious decision to continue as the owner of the SWG because I love my group and am proud of what it has accomplished. I am breaking my personal rule about writing about my experiences with the SWG here because, as the owner of a mid-sized fannish group, I work well as an example for this topic; nothing more and nothing less. This is not a hint of dissatisfaction or a fishing for praise, pity, or gratitude, and I am going to request that people not turn this post into a session of the above. The contributions of members and associates of the SWG that have allowed us to accomplish what we have, despite being a small and very niche community, have been and continue to be gratitude enough.

References

1. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood,” in The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature, edited by Mary K. DeShazer, 621-637. New York: Longman, 2001.

When I first started studying Tolkien’s works and writing stories based on them, I had this idea that, as I studied more, I’d move closer to being able to define canon definitively; that is, to produce a final and unequivocal judgment on how things really went down. Instead, I’ve found that the opposite has happened. Pandemonium remarked the same in the comments on Take Pity upon Him: “As I’ve examined JRRT’s work, canon becomes more and more nebulous to me.” Yet, at the same time, I feel better equipped now than I did four years ago to analyze what JRRT wrote in terms of “canon,” even if–at the end of my study–I don’t end up with any answers at all.

Sometimes, I think that we discuss canon and how to define it without really differentiating the ways that authors use JRRT’s writings to form judgments on their relative truth. This leads to arguments where something that is clear fact to one author, debatable to another, and false to a third, and all three fans are trying to prove each other wrong without considering whether they might all be right. I don’t think that canon can be so neatly summed up as “is” or “is not”; it occurs on a continuum, and different people will draw the line between “canon” and “not canon” in different places–even multiple places–along that continuum. I am going to attempt to summarize some common ways–complete with made-up terms!–that I think authors put together information from the texts to develop their definitions of canon.

Defining Canon

Canon. “Canon is synonymous with fact. It is not arguable. An author who violates this canon unintentionally has made a mistake; an author who violates this canon intentionally has written an AU.

Precious little from JRRT’s texts are canon by this definition. That which qualifies tends to be basic facts that would either be difficult/impossible to distort or lie about (such as the date of a major battle in which a literate culture particpated) or which are so frivolous that no one would logically have motivation to lie about them. Hair color, if definitively stated, is one such detail, perhaps ironically since this fandom is prone to fights over characters’ hair colors. But if Fëanor’s hair color is stated definitively to be black (The Silmarillion, “Of Fëanor,” §6), why would a loremaster or historian have reason to lie about this? Geographical details, dates, and physical descriptions all tend to fall into this category … in other words, mostly boring stuff.

Personal canon. Personal canon is an individual author’s appraisal of what parts of the texts are “fact” and employs any or all of the analyses discussed below and then some. For example, some authors have determined from reading the HoMe that JRRT’s final word on Gil-galad’s parentage puts Orodreth as his father. For these authors, Orodreth as Gil-galad’s father is personal canon; it is not an indisputable fact and so not simply canon, but it is a detail in the texts that these authors have analyzed and found to be true. For other authors, their personal canon is that Fingon was Gil-galad’s father.

It is important to point out that personal canon must come from the text (i.e., is not paracanonical or extracanonical) and is different from personal verse.

Personal verse. Personal verse is the sum total of all that an author believes to be true about the world in which she or he writes. It involves facts from the text (personal canon), as well as facts that the author develops based on and independent of the texts (paracanon, extracanon et al; see below).

For example, a personal verse might use the personal canon that Orodreth was Gil-galad’s father. It might also operate on the idea that Maedhros and Fingon were lovers and that confusion about Gil-galad’s paternity arose because historians associated with the House of Fingolfin were encouraged to conceal Fingon’s homosexuality and so distorted facts when they thought they could get away with it so that it appeared that Fingon had a wife and fathered a child.

Paracanon. In my original comment to Rhapsody about this, I called this extra-canonical. I’ve reassessed this term and think that paracanonical describes better what I mean, but to keep things as confusing as possible, I am using extracanonical elsewhere for something different. Paracanon is arrived at by putting together facts from one’s personal canon and drawing conclusions based on those facts. Likewise, paracanon cannot conflict with other facts in one’s personal canon.

The important aspect of paracanon is that the conclusions are fact-based. They are not merely whims or inventions. The author has analyzed a body of facts from the text and has, from this analysis, developed a personal canon. In putting those facts together, certain conclusions can sensibly be drawn. This is paracanon.

Naturally, for every dozen authors, you will end up with a dozen paracanons!

The Maedhros/Fingon pairing is a paracanon. Any fan of this pairing can tick off a dozen personal canon facts that makes this pairing, for them, a logical interpretation based on these facts. The pairing comes from putting those facts together and deciding that romantic involvement between the characters is the preferred conclusion to draw from those facts.

At the same time, other authors will put together personal canon facts to develop the paracanon that Maedhros and Fingon remained close (platonic) friends throughout their entire lives. Both paracanons are justified with JRRT’s texts and don’t involve any invention on the author’s part.

Some authors will necessarily “stretch” further than other authors in developing paracanons. However, the mechanism is the same.

Extracanon. Extracanon develops ideas outside of but in accordance with the texts. In other words, extracanonical facts in an author’s personal verse do not have any strong basis in the texts. Neither do they directly contradict the texts that an author uses in his or her personal canon.

Original characters are perhaps the best and most common example of extracanon. Their presence does not contradict the texts in most cases, but the texts don’t give us any information about them either.

Pandemonium’s The Apprentice is a good example of extracanon being used in this fashion. Sámaril is not a canon character. But neither does his existence as an apprentice in the Gwaith-i-Mirdain defy canon in any way.

Other extracanons place canon characters in settings other than what JRRT described. Erestor gets a lot of extracanonical treatment. He frequently ends up in Gondolin; in my By the Light of Roses, he ends up in Formenos. There is no canon support for either of these ideas. Neither does canon dispute them, however.

Making Fëanor a chronic nail-biter or Túrin’s favorite color black or Amarië the daughter of an important Vanyarin scribe are all extracanonical.

As with paracanon, different authors will have different comfort levels when it comes to how far they’re willing to go in inventing extracanonical details.

Pericanon. Pericanon analyzes and interprets the texts using concepts from psychology, mythology, sociology, science, and other “real world” disciplines. Because JRRT intended his stories to serve as a history or mythology for our world, and Arda corresponds with our solar system, then much of what we understand about our world can also be applied to Arda and, thus, becomes a sort of canon.

Authors using pericanon might use it to choose one text over another for their personal canons (such as using the more scientifically accurate ideas from Myths Transformed in describing how Arda operated outside a mythological framework) or add extracanonical details (such choosing to have Maedhros threaten to kill Elrond and Elros based on his psychological state at the time).

My assertion that homosexuality is canon is based on pericanon: If Elves and Men are human (in JRRT’s own words [Letter 153]), and homosexuality is normal behavior among humans, then lacking anything in the texts that makes an exception for Elves and Men, homosexuality would have occurred in their populations as well.

Pretty much everything Pandemonium writes uses pericanon to develop and explain not only the science of Arda but its cultures. My Another Man’s Cage uses pericanon in that I was often informed by psychology in how I developed the characters extracanonically.

I should note that pericanon uses our understanding of our world to enhance existing information from the texts, not to challenge or contradict them. To challenge the texts requires …

Historiocanon. Historiocanon is the process by which some authors challenge the texts and develop interpretations that do not take the texts at face value. Historiocanon justifies deviating from the texts where historiographical analysis causes concern about authorial bias or inaccuracy.

Pericanon can influence historiocanon when our understanding of how the world works calls us to question the accuracy of the texts. JRRT acknowledges this himself in Myths Transformed (HoMe XII) when he expresses doubt that readers would believe that scientifically sophisticated cultures (like the Eldar) would believe primitive and implausible cosmogonical myths.

Historiocanon is based on an understanding of Arda as our own solar system and, also, the JRRT’s texts as an ancient history/mythology of our own world and so subject to historical analysis. Historiocanon can hinge on the following (please note that this is an incomplete list):

• the narrator possesses bias (such as Pengolodh’s vilification of the Fëanorians in light of his service to Turgon, who was opposed to them)
• the narrator is relying on hearsay or could not possess accurate knowledge about the subject (such as Pengolodh writing about Fëanor’s death, which occurred before he was born, or about Lúthien’s plea to Mandos, during which none from Middle-earth were present)
• knowledge of how the world works makes the event as reported impossible (such as Maedhros hanging on Thangorodrim for fifty years)

Pandemonium’s Risk Assessment uses historiocanon to offer alternate explanations about lembas. My An Ordinary Woman uses historiocanon to argue that Lúthien’s exceptionality in, well, everything was more a case of hero worship and wishful thinking by her people than truth.

Pericanon and historiocanon are both, of course, personal canons as well: They require accepting Arda as our own solar system and a world subject to many of the same natural laws. Historiocanon also requires accepting as personal canon that the texts are historical or mythological accounts and can be analyzed using historiography. I think it makes sense, then, that these forms of canon will be the most controversial in terms of concept alone (not individual use) and won’t be used by everyone. However, they are valid ways to develop interpretations of canon.

Alternate universe. By definition, alternate universe (AU) requires the deliberate changing of a canon detail to affect the outcome of a story. Juno Magic’s Lothíriel is an AU because it adds a tenth walker to the Fellowship. My For What I Wait is AU because it is based on the premise that Fëanor outlived all of his children.

Both of these stories change canon facts. There were nine members of the Fellowship; it is hard to argue–though perhaps not impossible–that a tenth would have been completely overlooked by the many people who observed or were involved with the Fellowship. That Fëanor died shortly after the Battle-under-stars is another fact that would be extremely difficult to argue against. The AU aspects of both stories are not justifiable using any of the above-discussed canons. They are simply changes to the canon that the reader will have to accept and that are essential to the story.

It is important to note that AU cannot be justified by canon. Positing that Lúthien was less than perfect, as I do in “An Ordinary Woman,” is not AU because it makes sense from a historiocanonical perspective, which can be defended using Tolkien’s texts. Deciding that Erestor grew up in Gondolin is not AU because it does not counter a canon fact; it is extracanonical. Writing Maedhros and Fingon as lovers is not AU because it can be defended using evidence from the texts. However, I think that the term and label “AU” is misapplied as often as it is used correctly.

When Does “Canon” Become “AU”?

I am hardly the first to tackle this topic. Earlier this year, we had a discussion on the SWG Yahoo! group about how to define AU. This prompted a series of posts and discussions elsewhere (many of which I didn’t even know about until researching this post). I will link these discussions throughout my post, but it seems that they come to some of the same conclusions.

First of all, that the “AU” label is misused in the Tolkien fandom. I’ll discuss this further in a moment.

Second of all, that there is a strong desire, in discussions of canon, to move beyond the “is canon”/”is not canon” dichotomy and to recognize at least a third way to classify ideas used in fan fiction. Marta called this “extra-canonical” in her post On Canon and Fanfic, and this term (and the concept it defines) was echoed throughout the discussions following her post. So my own idea of a continuum between “canon” and “AU” is hardly original to me.

So why so many differentiations when Marta made good use of the single term “extra-canonical”? Mostly as a demonstration of how many different methods fans use to arrive at the extra-canonical (by Marta’s definition of the term) details that they use in their stories. I don’t expect the terms I’m using here to make it into popular usage. They’re awkward and hard to distinguish between for anyone who doesn’t make a regular habit (as I do) of thinking and writing about these things. In other words, for most people, they’re useless.

However, I think there is an important point to be made with them. As I defined each term, I often qualified that different authors would have different comfort levels with how far (or in what direction) they wanted to take various interpretations. Perhaps the most salient example is that of the paracanon about Maedhros and Fingon. Proposing that the texts suggest close friendship requires less stretching than suggesting that the characters were lovers, even though both interpretations utilize similar analyses. Yet I know that readers and authors will consider some details “canon” and others “AU,” even when the same methods were used to construct them. People are fond of lamenting that AU is hard to define. I don’t think that it is, if we recognize that accepting all of the above as legitimate analyses of Tolkien’s texts and understand that our willingness to accept (or not) an interpretation derived from them reflects more about how we see canon than the actual canonicity of the interpretation.

I also wonder if people’s comfort differs between the different ways of interpreting the texts that I’ve mentioned here. For example, maybe I’m not willing to stretch far in terms of paracanon. Maybe I like my interpretations of the texts to as innocent and obvious as possible. But maybe I’m willing to accept more in terms of extracanon: If you want to add all sorts of original characters and off-the-wall facts about the canon characters, then this doesn’t bother me. So Maedhros/Fingon feels wrong to me, but I’m okay with Fingon having, once upon a time, studied herb lore, lived with the Fëanorians in Tirion, and been engaged three times to three different women before the Darkening. Looking at the different ways that we shape our personal canon from the texts will, hopefully, aid me in approaching these questions in the future.

Which brings me to the other point about the misuse of the term “AU.” There is the popular complaint that some authors use the “AU” label to deflect any criticism about the wanton flouting of canon in their stories. Several people made this point in the posts I’ve linked here; Roh Wyn goes as far in Can(n)on Fodder to differentiate between canon deviations: non-canonical, where “some important detail has been altered, and this alteration affects all the downstream activities events or characters so that the entire story is different from canon”; and un-canonical, “stories that essentially break canon. … [T]hey don’t merely change a few canonical details. These fics change the basic premises of canon, so that the ultimate story bears little relation to the original.” My understanding of Roh Wyn’s uncanonical is that these are those stories that change details from the text because the author doesn’t know better (or doesn’t want to do the research to find out) or because the author simply likes the changed version better than the textual version but doesn’t want to think about how to make the work within the general canon framework Tolkien has established; for example (to borrow Roh Wyn’s example) because s/he wants Aragorn and Boromir to be twins but doesn’t want to have to do the work to make that plausible. So it just is–much in the way that Legolas has been married off to many teenaged unicorn-riding princesses–and the reader is expected to accept it without explanation or question.

Others bring up how “AU” is used as a defense against the so-called “canon police” or “canatics,” who are depicted as fans who hunt through stories looking for any detail that does not jive with their particular interpretation of the texts. In a comment on her rantastic Is AU a negative label?, Juno writes,

In my rant I didn’t discuss the validity of labels such as “canon” or “AU” as such. They definitely can have their uses. But they also pose problems. There are no fixed, exact rules about what is and what is not “AU” or “canon”. Actually, there IS no one canon, really; canon is not determined by physical laws or divine laws, canon is always the result of the interpretation of an individual and thus … fluid. Therefore, labels can be misleading. Especially in LOTR fandom, especially about new authors I’ve noticed the tendency to label what I would call “canon stories” as AU, simply because some kind self-appointed canon-police scared them and made them feel insecure about their stories.

In my original post on the SWG that started this whole discussion, I admit to doing just that. I am not alone in this either. But I’m also willing to admit that this comfortable deflection of attacks from canatics does a disservice to actual AU stories and the very valid approaches to the texts that I and others take in developing personal verses that give thoughtful treatment to Tolkien’s writings.

All of the terms I discuss above are valid ways of approaching and interpretting Tolkien’s texts, and none of them are AU. Yet I’m sure that many of us can think of examples of each where the author or her/his critics would suggest such a label: the Maedhros/Fingon pairing (or Celegorm/Aredhel, for that matter), a story told by an original character or heavily featuring original characters, a story that challenges the truth behind Laws and Customs among the Eldar. I think the temptation–when encountering a story that uses an interpretation unfavorable to us as readers–is to discount that story as “uncanonical” or to suggest that the author needs to label it as “AU” rather than giving thoughtful consideration to the means by which authors use facts from the texts to arrive at different interpretations or conclusions.

And this brings me full-circle back to Pandemonium’s comment about how the study of Tolkien’s texts makes recognizing a definitive “canon” more and more difficult. Personally, in all but a few instances, I’m ready to be done with the term “canon” for good. It’s misleading. It doesn’t exist in the form that we think it does, though it’s a nice idea–that with enough study and effort, we can devise a compendium of facts about Tolkien’s world that allow stories to be graded in terms of canonicity–like many of the fancies to which humankind has been prone over the millennia.

I doubt that one humble heretic like me will ever have such influence, though. In the meantime, though, if I can encourage even a few people to resist the temptation to jab pointy fingers and shriek, “AU!!” and, instead, stop and think and question how the author arrived at a particular conclusion, then I will consider my overwrought analysis a success.