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mina_de_malfois at 11:26am on 01/06/2006 under memoirs
mina_de_malfois at 11:26am on 01/06/2006 under memoirsDisclaimer: Mina de Malfois is an original fictional creation. These stories and characters are the sole property of the author, but she lends them out for fanfic and fanart. A list of Mina de Malfois/Sanguinity things by other people can be found here. This is a work of fiction. No resemblance is intended to any person or persons living, dead, or online. No BNFs were harmed in the making of this fic.
‘I’ll be away from my desk for ten days,’ Arc had warned me. ‘I’ll forward your most recent batch of mail before I go. I’ll be attending a Tolkien conference--I'm particularly looking forward to the sessions on ‘Sindarin Syntax for the Purist’ and ‘Practical Reconstructions of Quenya.’’1
Well, that figured. Arc is so serious minded, she naturally gravitates towards the most boring ends of fandom. I don’t mind admitting that I’ve never, not once in my life, given any thought to learning either Quenya or Sindarin. To be strictly accurate, I don’t speak a second language, although I’ve often been told that my use of French words and phrases in my fanfiction is striking, so I’ve no doubt that I’d display a natural fluency if I ever took the time to learn.2
But the point of learning either Sindarin or Quenya escapes me. I mean, if I learned, say, French or German, I could converse with the French or the Germans, but the chances of my ever meeting up with a non-English-speaking Elf seem minimal. If it happens, I’ll deal, but until then, not so much.
‘You know, you really might enjoy the fandom,’ Arc added, and not for the first time. So far I’d resisted her urgings. Still, one can’t deny that Tolkien fandom has a certain je ne sais quoi, an undeniable cache of its own. Sure, some of its members are a bit fusty, but that might become fashionable; Eau de Olde Bookes would probably be being bottled and sold any day now. And haul them out, blinking, into the sunlight, and what did you find? A lot of professorial types, some incredibly beautiful costumes, and an impeccably respectable British background. They were, to be blunt about it, the top drawer of fandom. I wondered, also not for the first time, whether theirs was an area I should perhaps interest myself in.
I’d finally gotten around to watching the blasted movies, for one thing, and while this didn’t quite manage to fill me with a burning desire to read some fifteen-hundred-odd pages of extremely dense prose, it did open my eyes to some damned pretty men.3 And for another, more practical, reason, I’d heard a lot of buzz recently that the creators of Sanguinity were positive hobbit freaks. Apparently that proclivity showed through pretty clearly in Sanguinity. Warr1or had even written two long, footnoted essays arguing that the spiritual purity and sexual monogamy of the Elves of Middle Earth were the obvious inspiration for PrincessB.4 I confess I wasn’t well versed enough in all things Tolkien to see it, myself.
Perhaps it was time to follow Arc down the misty trails of LotR fandom, although not, I hasten to add, as far down as the languages-and-Silmarillion level of obsession. My time is not, I submit, limitless. Still, somehow the news that Arc would be absent from her keyboard for an extended period had left me feeling peculiarly bereft and hollow. Immersing myself in a new fandom should be just the distraction I needed.
To this end, I made a brief entry in my livejournal on the subject--the subject of my budding interest in Tolkienism, I mean, not the subject of my bereft hollowness, which was nobody’s business but my own. When you’re a BNF of my status--not, dear reader, that I expect you ever will be, as few attain these lofty heights--the fen bring links and resources to you. I didn’t forecast much legwork on my part at this preliminary stage.
The first to comment was PrinceC. ‘What an amazing coincidence,’ he said. ‘Did you get my letter?’ I hadn’t, and said so.
‘Then it proves what I’ve long suspected,’ he wrote. ‘We must be soul mates, you and I, destined to cross each other’s paths again and again.’
This would, ordinarily, have alarmed me; impassioned outpourings from the technically under-aged are not something I wish to be seen to encourage. In this instance, however, it struck me with rather more delight than apprehension, and I’ll tell you why.
Arc’s strategy in creating the Girls’ Dormitory at Penn’d Passion had, by and large, been successful. I could scarcely credit it, myself, but it appeared Arc had, once again, had the foresight to see what needed doing and to make it so. Almost all, I mean to say, of that ultra-femme scourge that had so recently threatened to flood Dread Lane had left off posing as Sanguinity fans and were redirecting their energies back into girls’ series fanfiction, where they belonged.
The astute reader will note I say ‘almost all,’ however. One or two stragglers still hung around. Some of these, as for instance Xenalvr, seemed sound, sane fans; Xenalvr herself, I am convinced, is a generally good egg, although I wouldn’t go saying so in front of Arc if I were you, as they seem to act as irritants on one another. Some others of these newbies, though, were not only pronounced drips, but were PrinceC fangirls of the most shameless, coy, flirtatious type imaginable. It’s not that I begrudge him fangirls at all. I have a huge fanbase myself, and I know how gratifying that can be. Far be it from me to deny the youngster his rightful share of the Sanguinity glory. But something about these females just grated on my nerves, and the most grating of them all was a piece of work calling herself BalletChic.
Now, reading PrinceC’s message, I smiled to myself, imagining her reaction. Oh, I hadn’t ever stooped to outright hostility towards the girl; it would ill befit my status both as an author and as one of Dread Lane’s editorial staff. I’d corrected the spelling errors in her one-shot Sammich fluff without giving even the faintest sign that I found her photographic self-portraits an affront to human dignity. I’d put my feelings to one side and recommended her fanfiction for inclusion at the archive, thereby confirming her tenuous toehold in Sanguinity fandom, and if that wasn’t a purely selfless, noble gesture on my part then I’d like to know what is.
Deep down, however, concealed beneath my calm professional exterior, I nursed a growing distaste for BalletChic. If PrinceC’s messages to me caused her to choke on her pixi stix, well, so be it.
‘I might have guessed you’d be one of those clever Tolkienites,’ I replied to PrinceC now.
‘I don’t know about clever,’ the lad replied with modesty. ‘Compared to the other papers at the conference, mine’s probably jejune, but then, most of the other presentations at the sessions are by PhD candidates. I’m honored to even be included.’
I pouted for a moment as another little frisson of forlornness shook me. Was everybody else in fandom off to this con except me? Was I the only one who wouldn’t be there to enjoy the lectures, the hobbitish filksongs, and the deliciously unwashed tangled-haired men?5
Then I returned to my senses. It would be disastrous to attend an event like that when I wasn’t properly caught up on the fandom, and anyway--I glanced across at the mirror, and frowned slightly at the fit of my clothes--I didn’t feel like putting in public appearances right now. One wants time to get in fighting trim for that sort of thing.
I had cause to be glad, in the next little while, that I was approaching this fandom for the first time without any witnesses. Tolkien fandom should come with warnings for the unwary. Something along the lines of ‘best approached in solitary confinement’ would just about do the trick. To take an example at random, the first time I ran across the phrase ‘Elvish Linguistic Fellowship,’6 I’d burst into unrestrained laughter, thinking it must be a joke. I now know that if I’d made a gaffe like that amongst the committed fen, or ‘the fen who really ought, for their own good, to be committed,’ they’d have turned on me in anger and accused me of being a mere Ringer.
It chilled the blood to think that Arc ran with this crowd.
And PrinceC did too, of course. The last batch of mail from Arc had included a handful of mail from fangirls, and the letter from PrinceC. Well, by letter I mean poem, if you really must know. It was all lush fields and ancient forests and nostalgia for an era of chivalry, kind of thing, and it was signed, ‘your ARDAnt admirer, PrinceC.’ If that weren’t disturbing enough on its own--and it was, believe me--his stationery, though of a high fibre count, watermarked, and inarguably tasteful, had a black border a half-inch wide. He was either in deep mourning or, more likely, deeply Goth. He’d tied the letter with a strip of black ribbon, which again earned full marks for style and a certain kind of taste, but rather drove home the point that my correspondent was a teenaged boy.
Embarrassing, really. And yet also, undeniably, intriguing. It’s funny how you can look at a gesture cynically, fully aware that it’s a deliberate gesture calculated to make the gesturer appear attractively and romantically iconoclastic, and yet still, at a deeper, more private level, you catch yourself thinking my, this person is attractively and romantically iconoclastic. Seeing through it doesn’t make it entirely ineffective. Have you ever noticed this?
I was still feeling left out. I hung around online, but there was nobody I really wanted to talk to. The occasional breathless updates from people who were happily in attendance at the con made it worse, somehow. When Warr1or sneered that Tolkien fandom was nothing but a refuge for a bunch of elitist, effete elf-slashers, I caught myself half agreeing, and had to remind myself that soon I would be one of that elite. I picked up my copy of the Fellowship of the Ring with a heavy sigh. Its uncreased spine and pristine pages seemed to silently reproach me for a life spent in frivolity among fandom’s lightweights. Now I felt trapped in a sort of fannish equivalent of summer school.
Not, I should in all fairness add, that the trufen were universally inhospitable. Many of them gave me a chilly reception, and many more ignored me altogether, but given the calibre of fangirl idiocy so prevalent online I can’t blame them. I mean, considering the ivory-tower isolation and advanced age-iness of the fandom in question, they might not have heard of me. They might have thought I was just another idiot fangirl.
And some of them were flat-out kind in response to my first tentative forays onto their bulletin boards. ‘Remember Silverlock,’ one of them cautioned the others. ‘Do we want to turn away potential pilgrims to the Commonwealth?’7 I had no freaking clue what that meant--I mean to say, I’d read just enough FotR at that point to be pretty certain it wasn’t Tolkien he was referencing--but, oddly, the others all took his point immediately. There was a slight but marked increase in their tolerance levels afterwards.
I wish I could say the same for self. My tolerance levels were at ground level, and seeping steadily lower. It wasn’t Professor Tolkien himself. His books, once you buckled down and forced yourself to the task, rather grew on one. I wasn’t entirely gripped, and I wouldn’t be calling him ‘Dear Professor’ anytime soon, but I was starting to enjoy him. No, I say, it wasn’t his writing that was getting me down so much as the writing of his fans. They went in for ‘humour’ in a big way. See how I’ve put quotation marks around ‘humour,’ as if to imply a certain distance or doubt there? Yeah.
Mostly in online fandom, as a helpful general rule, if you encounter someone who goes in for juvenile, moronic puns, that someone, it can be safely assumed, is both a moron and a juvenile. In the Middle-Earthian corners of fandom, I’d discovered, it didn’t work that way. Find a person sniggering over the female form or coining ‘clever’ new names for the characters, like ‘All-a-gone,’ and you were just as likely to be talking to a sixty-year-old tenured professor with a stack of publications to his credit as to a fourteen-year-old boy.8
By the tenth day, I’d come close to cracking. I didn’t ‘grok’ their jokes and references; I wasn’t sure I wanted to ‘grok’ them; I wasn’t entirely sure what ‘grok’ meant.9 I was utterly unable to contribute to any of their conversations, and I hated it.
So I screwed up my courage and risked lowering the tone a little by broaching a subject I was at least capable of offering an opinion on: the movies. ‘Did you think the films were faithful to the intent of the books?’ I asked cautiously.
And then a beautiful, beautiful thing happened. ‘I love Orly!’ chirped up BalletChic,10 who must have followed me into Tolkien fandom when she’d heard PrinceC was a participant. For a moment there was no response to her comment, as if no one could quite believe she’d said it.
And then they descended, filled with righteous snark, and roundly and sarcastically abused her in several languages. Some of their remarks, I noted with interest, were in Quenya, or, possibly, Sindarin. They’re lovely languages, aren’t they?
‘You were right,’ I messaged Arc when she’d returned from the conference. ‘I’m really enjoying Tolkien fandom.’
Footnotes:
1. ‘Sindarin Syntax for the Purist’ and ‘Practical Reconstructions of Quenya’ are, believe it or not, actual things that Tolkien fen argue about. The purist/reconstructionist divide is deep.
2. although I’ve often been told that my use of French words and phrases in my fanfiction is striking Fangirl French strikes me, personally, as even more pretentious than fangirl Japanese, though that’s a matter of taste.
3. it did open my eyes to some damned pretty men An even deeper divide is the one between Tolkien book fans, particularly those who read the books before the movies came out ("trufen"), and Tolkien movie fans, or Ringers, who are often accused of only being in the fandom because of their shallow attraction to the actors.
4. Warr10r had even written two long, footnoted essays arguing that the spiritual purity and sexual monogamy of the Elves of Middle Earth I bet if you google "sexual purity"+"Tolkien" you’ll find actual essays.
5. and the deliciously unwashed tangled-haired men Oops, my own shallow attraction to one of the actors seems to be showing. ::grins:: Actually, in all fairness, some of the Tolkien fen are also rather yum.
6. The ‘Elvish Linguistic Fellowship,’ actually exists.
7. John Myers Myers’ Silverlock was released and read in the U.S. at around the same time LotR was. As a result, older American Tolkien fen are, remarkably often, also conversant with Silverlock.
8. Find a person sniggering over the female form or coining ‘clever’ new names for the characters, like ‘All-a-gone,’ I hate to say it, but adult male Tolkien fans of A Certain Age do go in for this rather often. ::sigh::
9. grok: to understand fully, completely; from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. If I had a nickel for every time an adult male had asked me if I "grokked" something "in fullness," I’d have...a dollar or two in change.
10. ‘I love Orly!’ The cry of the Orlando Bloom fangirl; is received by serious Tolkien fen as proof of idiocy.
‘I’ll be away from my desk for ten days,’ Arc had warned me. ‘I’ll forward your most recent batch of mail before I go. I’ll be attending a Tolkien conference--I'm particularly looking forward to the sessions on ‘Sindarin Syntax for the Purist’ and ‘Practical Reconstructions of Quenya.’’1
Well, that figured. Arc is so serious minded, she naturally gravitates towards the most boring ends of fandom. I don’t mind admitting that I’ve never, not once in my life, given any thought to learning either Quenya or Sindarin. To be strictly accurate, I don’t speak a second language, although I’ve often been told that my use of French words and phrases in my fanfiction is striking, so I’ve no doubt that I’d display a natural fluency if I ever took the time to learn.2
But the point of learning either Sindarin or Quenya escapes me. I mean, if I learned, say, French or German, I could converse with the French or the Germans, but the chances of my ever meeting up with a non-English-speaking Elf seem minimal. If it happens, I’ll deal, but until then, not so much.
‘You know, you really might enjoy the fandom,’ Arc added, and not for the first time. So far I’d resisted her urgings. Still, one can’t deny that Tolkien fandom has a certain je ne sais quoi, an undeniable cache of its own. Sure, some of its members are a bit fusty, but that might become fashionable; Eau de Olde Bookes would probably be being bottled and sold any day now. And haul them out, blinking, into the sunlight, and what did you find? A lot of professorial types, some incredibly beautiful costumes, and an impeccably respectable British background. They were, to be blunt about it, the top drawer of fandom. I wondered, also not for the first time, whether theirs was an area I should perhaps interest myself in.
I’d finally gotten around to watching the blasted movies, for one thing, and while this didn’t quite manage to fill me with a burning desire to read some fifteen-hundred-odd pages of extremely dense prose, it did open my eyes to some damned pretty men.3 And for another, more practical, reason, I’d heard a lot of buzz recently that the creators of Sanguinity were positive hobbit freaks. Apparently that proclivity showed through pretty clearly in Sanguinity. Warr1or had even written two long, footnoted essays arguing that the spiritual purity and sexual monogamy of the Elves of Middle Earth were the obvious inspiration for PrincessB.4 I confess I wasn’t well versed enough in all things Tolkien to see it, myself.
Perhaps it was time to follow Arc down the misty trails of LotR fandom, although not, I hasten to add, as far down as the languages-and-Silmarillion level of obsession. My time is not, I submit, limitless. Still, somehow the news that Arc would be absent from her keyboard for an extended period had left me feeling peculiarly bereft and hollow. Immersing myself in a new fandom should be just the distraction I needed.
To this end, I made a brief entry in my livejournal on the subject--the subject of my budding interest in Tolkienism, I mean, not the subject of my bereft hollowness, which was nobody’s business but my own. When you’re a BNF of my status--not, dear reader, that I expect you ever will be, as few attain these lofty heights--the fen bring links and resources to you. I didn’t forecast much legwork on my part at this preliminary stage.
The first to comment was PrinceC. ‘What an amazing coincidence,’ he said. ‘Did you get my letter?’ I hadn’t, and said so.
‘Then it proves what I’ve long suspected,’ he wrote. ‘We must be soul mates, you and I, destined to cross each other’s paths again and again.’
This would, ordinarily, have alarmed me; impassioned outpourings from the technically under-aged are not something I wish to be seen to encourage. In this instance, however, it struck me with rather more delight than apprehension, and I’ll tell you why.
Arc’s strategy in creating the Girls’ Dormitory at Penn’d Passion had, by and large, been successful. I could scarcely credit it, myself, but it appeared Arc had, once again, had the foresight to see what needed doing and to make it so. Almost all, I mean to say, of that ultra-femme scourge that had so recently threatened to flood Dread Lane had left off posing as Sanguinity fans and were redirecting their energies back into girls’ series fanfiction, where they belonged.
The astute reader will note I say ‘almost all,’ however. One or two stragglers still hung around. Some of these, as for instance Xenalvr, seemed sound, sane fans; Xenalvr herself, I am convinced, is a generally good egg, although I wouldn’t go saying so in front of Arc if I were you, as they seem to act as irritants on one another. Some others of these newbies, though, were not only pronounced drips, but were PrinceC fangirls of the most shameless, coy, flirtatious type imaginable. It’s not that I begrudge him fangirls at all. I have a huge fanbase myself, and I know how gratifying that can be. Far be it from me to deny the youngster his rightful share of the Sanguinity glory. But something about these females just grated on my nerves, and the most grating of them all was a piece of work calling herself BalletChic.
Now, reading PrinceC’s message, I smiled to myself, imagining her reaction. Oh, I hadn’t ever stooped to outright hostility towards the girl; it would ill befit my status both as an author and as one of Dread Lane’s editorial staff. I’d corrected the spelling errors in her one-shot Sammich fluff without giving even the faintest sign that I found her photographic self-portraits an affront to human dignity. I’d put my feelings to one side and recommended her fanfiction for inclusion at the archive, thereby confirming her tenuous toehold in Sanguinity fandom, and if that wasn’t a purely selfless, noble gesture on my part then I’d like to know what is.
Deep down, however, concealed beneath my calm professional exterior, I nursed a growing distaste for BalletChic. If PrinceC’s messages to me caused her to choke on her pixi stix, well, so be it.
‘I might have guessed you’d be one of those clever Tolkienites,’ I replied to PrinceC now.
‘I don’t know about clever,’ the lad replied with modesty. ‘Compared to the other papers at the conference, mine’s probably jejune, but then, most of the other presentations at the sessions are by PhD candidates. I’m honored to even be included.’
I pouted for a moment as another little frisson of forlornness shook me. Was everybody else in fandom off to this con except me? Was I the only one who wouldn’t be there to enjoy the lectures, the hobbitish filksongs, and the deliciously unwashed tangled-haired men?5
Then I returned to my senses. It would be disastrous to attend an event like that when I wasn’t properly caught up on the fandom, and anyway--I glanced across at the mirror, and frowned slightly at the fit of my clothes--I didn’t feel like putting in public appearances right now. One wants time to get in fighting trim for that sort of thing.
I had cause to be glad, in the next little while, that I was approaching this fandom for the first time without any witnesses. Tolkien fandom should come with warnings for the unwary. Something along the lines of ‘best approached in solitary confinement’ would just about do the trick. To take an example at random, the first time I ran across the phrase ‘Elvish Linguistic Fellowship,’6 I’d burst into unrestrained laughter, thinking it must be a joke. I now know that if I’d made a gaffe like that amongst the committed fen, or ‘the fen who really ought, for their own good, to be committed,’ they’d have turned on me in anger and accused me of being a mere Ringer.
It chilled the blood to think that Arc ran with this crowd.
And PrinceC did too, of course. The last batch of mail from Arc had included a handful of mail from fangirls, and the letter from PrinceC. Well, by letter I mean poem, if you really must know. It was all lush fields and ancient forests and nostalgia for an era of chivalry, kind of thing, and it was signed, ‘your ARDAnt admirer, PrinceC.’ If that weren’t disturbing enough on its own--and it was, believe me--his stationery, though of a high fibre count, watermarked, and inarguably tasteful, had a black border a half-inch wide. He was either in deep mourning or, more likely, deeply Goth. He’d tied the letter with a strip of black ribbon, which again earned full marks for style and a certain kind of taste, but rather drove home the point that my correspondent was a teenaged boy.
Embarrassing, really. And yet also, undeniably, intriguing. It’s funny how you can look at a gesture cynically, fully aware that it’s a deliberate gesture calculated to make the gesturer appear attractively and romantically iconoclastic, and yet still, at a deeper, more private level, you catch yourself thinking my, this person is attractively and romantically iconoclastic. Seeing through it doesn’t make it entirely ineffective. Have you ever noticed this?
I was still feeling left out. I hung around online, but there was nobody I really wanted to talk to. The occasional breathless updates from people who were happily in attendance at the con made it worse, somehow. When Warr1or sneered that Tolkien fandom was nothing but a refuge for a bunch of elitist, effete elf-slashers, I caught myself half agreeing, and had to remind myself that soon I would be one of that elite. I picked up my copy of the Fellowship of the Ring with a heavy sigh. Its uncreased spine and pristine pages seemed to silently reproach me for a life spent in frivolity among fandom’s lightweights. Now I felt trapped in a sort of fannish equivalent of summer school.
Not, I should in all fairness add, that the trufen were universally inhospitable. Many of them gave me a chilly reception, and many more ignored me altogether, but given the calibre of fangirl idiocy so prevalent online I can’t blame them. I mean, considering the ivory-tower isolation and advanced age-iness of the fandom in question, they might not have heard of me. They might have thought I was just another idiot fangirl.
And some of them were flat-out kind in response to my first tentative forays onto their bulletin boards. ‘Remember Silverlock,’ one of them cautioned the others. ‘Do we want to turn away potential pilgrims to the Commonwealth?’7 I had no freaking clue what that meant--I mean to say, I’d read just enough FotR at that point to be pretty certain it wasn’t Tolkien he was referencing--but, oddly, the others all took his point immediately. There was a slight but marked increase in their tolerance levels afterwards.
I wish I could say the same for self. My tolerance levels were at ground level, and seeping steadily lower. It wasn’t Professor Tolkien himself. His books, once you buckled down and forced yourself to the task, rather grew on one. I wasn’t entirely gripped, and I wouldn’t be calling him ‘Dear Professor’ anytime soon, but I was starting to enjoy him. No, I say, it wasn’t his writing that was getting me down so much as the writing of his fans. They went in for ‘humour’ in a big way. See how I’ve put quotation marks around ‘humour,’ as if to imply a certain distance or doubt there? Yeah.
Mostly in online fandom, as a helpful general rule, if you encounter someone who goes in for juvenile, moronic puns, that someone, it can be safely assumed, is both a moron and a juvenile. In the Middle-Earthian corners of fandom, I’d discovered, it didn’t work that way. Find a person sniggering over the female form or coining ‘clever’ new names for the characters, like ‘All-a-gone,’ and you were just as likely to be talking to a sixty-year-old tenured professor with a stack of publications to his credit as to a fourteen-year-old boy.8
By the tenth day, I’d come close to cracking. I didn’t ‘grok’ their jokes and references; I wasn’t sure I wanted to ‘grok’ them; I wasn’t entirely sure what ‘grok’ meant.9 I was utterly unable to contribute to any of their conversations, and I hated it.
So I screwed up my courage and risked lowering the tone a little by broaching a subject I was at least capable of offering an opinion on: the movies. ‘Did you think the films were faithful to the intent of the books?’ I asked cautiously.
And then a beautiful, beautiful thing happened. ‘I love Orly!’ chirped up BalletChic,10 who must have followed me into Tolkien fandom when she’d heard PrinceC was a participant. For a moment there was no response to her comment, as if no one could quite believe she’d said it.
And then they descended, filled with righteous snark, and roundly and sarcastically abused her in several languages. Some of their remarks, I noted with interest, were in Quenya, or, possibly, Sindarin. They’re lovely languages, aren’t they?
‘You were right,’ I messaged Arc when she’d returned from the conference. ‘I’m really enjoying Tolkien fandom.’
Footnotes:
1. ‘Sindarin Syntax for the Purist’ and ‘Practical Reconstructions of Quenya’ are, believe it or not, actual things that Tolkien fen argue about. The purist/reconstructionist divide is deep.
2. although I’ve often been told that my use of French words and phrases in my fanfiction is striking Fangirl French strikes me, personally, as even more pretentious than fangirl Japanese, though that’s a matter of taste.
3. it did open my eyes to some damned pretty men An even deeper divide is the one between Tolkien book fans, particularly those who read the books before the movies came out ("trufen"), and Tolkien movie fans, or Ringers, who are often accused of only being in the fandom because of their shallow attraction to the actors.
4. Warr10r had even written two long, footnoted essays arguing that the spiritual purity and sexual monogamy of the Elves of Middle Earth I bet if you google "sexual purity"+"Tolkien" you’ll find actual essays.
5. and the deliciously unwashed tangled-haired men Oops, my own shallow attraction to one of the actors seems to be showing. ::grins:: Actually, in all fairness, some of the Tolkien fen are also rather yum.
6. The ‘Elvish Linguistic Fellowship,’ actually exists.
7. John Myers Myers’ Silverlock was released and read in the U.S. at around the same time LotR was. As a result, older American Tolkien fen are, remarkably often, also conversant with Silverlock.
8. Find a person sniggering over the female form or coining ‘clever’ new names for the characters, like ‘All-a-gone,’ I hate to say it, but adult male Tolkien fans of A Certain Age do go in for this rather often. ::sigh::
9. grok: to understand fully, completely; from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. If I had a nickel for every time an adult male had asked me if I "grokked" something "in fullness," I’d have...a dollar or two in change.
10. ‘I love Orly!’ The cry of the Orlando Bloom fangirl; is received by serious Tolkien fen as proof of idiocy.