Fandom is a dialogue. What we do, as fans, around our beloved source texts is largely centered on conversing with other fans. Through discussions and, of course, fanworks, we share and respond to each others' ideas. If you create fanworks, you are doubtlessly familiar with the experience of making a creative choice to cosign a particular fanon, theory, or idea that you like, or making a choice that pushes back against those that you don't.

Tolkien looms so large in our popular imagination that it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that he, too, was a fan, and much of his work was fannish in nature. As one of the preeminent scholars of Anglo-Saxon philology, his interest in the landmark Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf" was more than professional; it was fannish too. He loved "Beowulf," and his scholarly work advocated for it to be taken seriously as art and for others to appreciate what he saw, and loved, about the poem.

And just like, as fans, we respond to each other through our fanworks, Tolkien too used writing to respond to other scholars of "Beowulf." In this month's "A Sense of History" column, Simon J. Cook continues his investigation of Tolkien's lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" by making the case that the famous tower analogy in the essay should very much be seen as a response to actual people whom Tolkien knew and interacted with, both professionally and socially. By using an early draft of the lecture, which features a simplified version of the analogy, Simon shows how the various figures in the tower analogy match up to the other "Beowulf" scholars who were writing in Tolkien's day. Without this context, Simon makes the case that understanding the tower analogy often goes astray. Instead, we must understand the tower analogy as responding to specific people and their specific claims about the poem ... indeed, much as fans often direct their fanworks very directly at specific fans, fanworks, and theories.

You can read Simon's essay "The Rock Garden" here: https://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/node/7014

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