Tolkien Fan Fiction Survey

Fan Survey
Title:	Tolkien Fan Fiction Survey
Surveyor:	Dawn Walls-Thumma (Dawn Felagund)
Date(s):	December 24, 2014-November 30, 2015
Medium:	Google Forms
Fandom(s):	J.R.R. Tolkien
External Links:	Data on Tolkien Fanfiction Culture and Practices (1st Edition)
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The Tolkien Fan Fiction Survey was a project undertaken by Dawn Walls-Thumma (Dawn Felagund) in 2014-2015 with the expressed purpose of documenting a fic fandom that, according to Walls-Thumma, had received little scholarly attention relative to its size and longevity:

I hoped that this study, commenced in late 2014 and progressing through all of 2015, would provide a snapshot of the Tolkienfic community and begin to provide evidence and maybe excite interest in our fandom and its history, culture, and practices because, as noted above, we often deviate and even defy the received wisdom from fanfiction studies.

The introduction to the first edition of the published data describes the survey as a "snapshot of a community’s self-reported beliefs and behaviors." It was a selected-response survey administered on Google Forms that included questions around demographics, motives for writing fanfiction, archive use, comment/review practices, perceptions of fanfiction, and other attitudes and behaviors of authors and readers in the Tolkien fanfiction community.

Walls-Thumma was a graduate student at American Public University at the time of the survey's distribution, and the survey was reviewed and approved by the university's Institutional Review Board. Survey results have since been published online as Data on Tolkien Fanfiction Culture and Practices (1st Edition), with occasional discussions of the data on Dawn's blog, the Heretic Loremaster. The data has been used in several conference presentations and journal articles.

1,052 valid responses were collected.

Methodology

Questions for the survey were developed, in part, from a pilot study on the author's Dreamwidth, Livejournal, and Tumblr blogs that posed the question: "Why do you write Tolkien fanfic?" This post describes the project's initial purpose as producing a presentation for the Mythmoot III conference.

With the exception of questions asking for a numerical response in years, a demographic question about gender, and a question asking about other fandoms the participant wrote/read for, all questions were selected-response. The survey began with a screening question, "Do you read and/or write Tolkien-based fan fiction, or have you done so in the past?" and was subsequently divided into two parts, one each for authors and readers. Most survey items consisted of a statement with five possible responses: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, and No Opinion/Not Sure. Participants were recruited on the author's social media and Tolkienfic mailing lists; signal-boosting of these posts was encouraged to attain a broader reach.

The survey was anonymous and designed to avoid inadvertent identification of participants (i.e., by asking about national origin) since the author is part of the fandom she is studying.

Limitations

"Data on Tolkien Fanfiction Culture and Practices (1st Edition)" identifies the following limitations:

• Selected-response questions, while producing easily quantifiable responses, may have failed to capture the complexity and nuance of authors' and readers' participation in the community. Several survey participants commented to the author that they would have liked more free-response fields to qualify their responses.
• Response time (about 15 minutes) may have been two arduous to capture more casual fans.
• The self-report format means participants may not have been honest. (This is somewhat countered by the survey's anonymity.)
• Some communities were easier to reach than others, and on some communities (e.g., Fanfiction.net), it was essentially impossible to reach users who only used that site.
• Veteran and inactive fans were unreachable.
• Fans familiar with and with a positive view of the author's fanworks may have been more likely to reply, skewing the survey to attitudes, values, and behaviors in line with the author's.

Historical Context

The Tolkien Fan Fiction Survey was released almost simultaneously as the final Hobbit film directed by Peter Jackson. This creates an interesting opportunity to observe the Tolkienfic fandom during a popular film release, but it also means that the data may not be representative of the fandom's six-decade history.

(This section needs more context.)

Future Iterations of the Survey

In 2019, Walls-Thumma and fan studies scholar Maria Alberto began working on a second iteration of the Tolkien Fan Fiction Survey. Walls-Thumma has expressed the hope that the survey would be released every five years to produce longitudinal data on the fandom.

Works Referencing the Tolkien Fan Fiction Survey

• Dawn M. Walls-Thumma. Attainable Vistas: Historical Bias in Tolkien's Legendarium as a Motive for Transformative Fanworks. Journal of Tolkien Research. Volume 3, Issue 3, 2016.