I am proud to be a fandom old. I can go all "I was there Gandalf" about the early online fandom fights over Balrog wings, LiveJournal's Strikethrough debacle, and the planning phases of AO3. I remember when you might get dozens of emails in a day from a Yahoo! mailing list. I've used the <marquee> HTML tag unironically. The SWG is rapidly approaching "old as dust" territory as far as fanfiction archives go, and I'm right along with it.

In a lot of ways, this makes doing fandom history easier. I often know where to look and what to look for because I experienced and remember it. Yet there is a layer of fandom history that has remained tantalizingly out of reach for the decade or so that I've identified myself as a "fandom history": pre-internet fandom and specifically fanzines. I am a fandom old-but-not-that-old it seems.

Well, researchers from Marquette University—which holds a large special collection of Tolkien fanzines—handed researchers like me a huge gift last month: They published a dataset of the fanzines in their collection, detailing their contents in my favorite of all document formats: a spreadsheet. Until I can make it out to the university in person, this dataset gives a glimpse at what the zines contain and lets us draw some tentative theories about what Tolkien fandom—and fanworks—were like when fans shared their work with each other using pencils and typewriters and mimeograph machines.

This month's Cultus Dispatches column focuses on some basic analyses that I conducted on the dataset. If you held a fanzine from the '60s or 70s, what would you likely find in its pages? Was there fanfiction? What character groups were popular then compared to now? I tackled all of these questions in my first forays into the data.

Of course, we are a "Silmarillion" group, and the years the dataset mostly covers—1969 through 1979—includes 1977, the year The Silmarillion was published. The impact of The Silmarillion can be seen in the number of zines produced and, yes, an uptick in fanfiction. Likely few people reading this are surprised.

I've always wondered the extent to which in-person fandom groups and fanzines shaped the cultures of early online Tolkien fan communities. I've always suspected that they did, but lacking access to the documents of pre-internet communities, could never find evidence to make that more than a hunch. With this research, some tenuous continuities begin to emerge, attesting to the longevity and cultural richness of the Tolkien fandom and its fanworks tradition.

You can read my article "Fandom before the Time of the Trees: Revelations from Marquette's Fanzine Dataset" here.

And I want to end this week's newsletter with a massive thank you to the researchers, supervisors, and project backers who made the dataset possible: Robinson Ensz, Gabriel Marotto, Aidan Oakey, Ivy Stanich, and Ethan Thomas; Dr. Gerry Canavan and Dr. William Fliss; and Jason and Shannon Swiatek and Judy Mitchell.