Fandom

J.R.R. Tolkien would find himself at the vanguard of a new genre tradition, and his early fans would prove both influential and transformative to fan culture as a whole. Fandom and fan culture do, as Tolkien put it, make up an amorphous body. Contemporary fans and their fan-works number in the millions today, but much of what they create has its seeds specifically in Tolkien fandom. Though the television show Star Trek has historically been credited with bringing fan culture to the masses, the same cultural emphasis on fan fiction and fan gatherings can be found emerging in The Lord of the Rings fandom at the exact same time. Though today Tolkien fandom is seen as a mega-franchise fandom due to the wide-ranging popularity of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, its roots stem backward directly to the publication of the books and their first fans in the 1950s.