A Tribute to the Library of Moria by Dawn Felagund, Himring, and Talullah

Posted on 30 July 2022 ; updated on 21 August 2022

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A Tribute to the Library of Moria

It was the experience of many of us, seeing a link to or a mention to a site with an intriguing name: the Library of Moria, simultaneously implying darkness and creativity, secrecy and achievement. The site itself, with the warnings on its splash page and its distinctive dark background, contributed to its air of mystique. Many of us clicked through, many of us read, many of us stayed.

"A Debt of Gratitude"

Founded by CommodoreMarie in 2002, shortly after the release of the Fellowship of the Ring film, the Library of Moria would become one of the major archives¹ in a fandom that would shortly become home to dozens of fanfiction archives. While the Library began as an archive for slashfic about the films, it swiftly broadened its focus to include all Tolkien-based slash fanfiction, including real-person slash (RPS).²

The Internet in 2002, of course, looked very different than it did today. So did the Tolkien fandom. At its outset and like many fanfiction archives at the time, the Library was hand-coded. Authors sent their work to the admins to post for them as text files. Also like many fanfiction archives at the time, it was a subsidiary of a larger community: a place for that community's fanworks but not the center of the action, so to speak, which was concentrated on the kinds of communities typical of early-millennium fan spaces: forums, mailing lists, eventually LiveJournal. Specifically, the Library of Moria had a vibrant forum where much of the community's discussions occurred and friendships formed.

As of this writing, the Library is twenty years old, and twenty years brings inevitable changes in personnel. A fan who set up a website in 2002 as a college student is now middle-aged. The Library of Moria underwent one major personnel change, when CommodoreMarie handed over management of the site to a group of volunteers in 2005.³ Some of those volunteers remain admins until this day: a tremendous seventeen years of service. The Fanlore article on the Library of Moria describes the changes of those seventeen years as "minor fluctuations."

In the twenty years since the Library was founded, the Tolkien fanworks fandom has undergone several platform shifts, as well as weathered changes in the technology that undergirds the Internet. To wit, when the Library came onto the Tolkien fanfic scene, Geocities and Yahoo! Groups were both hubs of fandom activity. Both are now gone.

The Library of Moria similarly evolved. In March 2008, Talullah announced that the archive had been automated. While it did not yet allow self-uploads, the move to automated eFiction open-source software over a hand-coded site allowed readers to leave comments and bookmark favorite stories.⁴ Over the years that followed, the Library's admins would make similar changes and shifts to keep the site relevant amid rapidly shifting fandom platforms, setting up groups on Tumblr and Discord when fans went there and moving all stories to the automated archive. Other aspects of the site remained constant, such as challenges and the International Day of Slash, held on July 1.

Perhaps the steadiest constant was the commitment of those who worked on the site. There are the challenges and the events and the technical upgrades that form the baseline commitment when running a fanfiction archive. There are the inevitable technical snags, which can bring hours of unanticipated labor and sleepless nights as admins work to save the creative work of their members. "Nothing was easy back then," moderator Kelleigh sums up. But what stands out, as one looks back at the Library of Moria's LiveJournal—a publicly available record of the site's history—is how often the admins went above and beyond to spotlight and celebrate the work of their members. When I observed to site admin Talullah the tremendous effort the various admins made on their members' behalf, she replied:

I found fandom through the Library of Moria, so there was a debt of gratitude, so to speak, but also, I was, and still am, so glad when we got messages from readers and writers showing us how important the archive was to them. I had more free time then and it was a pleasure to give it to the LoM.

"Flame Us! Yay!"

As noted above, it is not just the technology that changed in the Library's twenty-year history but the Tolkien fandom itself. It's impossible to discuss Tolkien-based slash fiction in the context of the early 2000s without acknowledging the attitudes of the broader fandom toward slash, slash writers, and sometimes LGBTQ+ people. Talullah describes the site's purpose as creating a "safe haven" for slash and slash writers.

This is because slash writers were treated with disrespect in many mainstream parts of the fandom. Their work was casually excluded from sites both large and small. In some instances, they were outright harassed. There were targeted campaigns against their work, sometimes threats of violence. The word safety arose often as moderators and members of the Library discussed its founding.

The Library of Moria provided that site of safety while also poking fun right back at their detractors. From the site's origin to today, the contact link is prefaced with, "Flame Us! Yay!" Using joy and levity to not only deflect the hateful impulses of some parts of the wider fandom but celebrate their authors and the stories they produced would become a hallmark of the Library of Moria.

"Room for Everyone"

When I ran the 2015 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, one area I investigated was the cultural differences between the various archives. One statement I compared across archives: "Writing fan fiction helps me to correct problems with race, gender, and sexuality that I see in Tolkien's books."

I expected Library of Moria authors to be among the most enthusiastic to agree with this statement. But the opposite was true.

Only slightly more than half (52%) of authors agree with the statement. Only one archive—Many Paths to Tread—agreed less often (48%) that they used their fanfiction for social justice purposes. In contrast, authors who used the SWG, An Archive of Our Own (AO3), and Tumblr agreed the most, with at least two out of three authors from these sites agreeing with the statement.

But the Library of Moria was one of—perhaps the?—most important organizations for laying the foundation upon which those later sites would build, establishing a fandom open and safe enough to explore the kinds of ideas that later archives would embrace.

As discussed above, the Library of Moria was built at a time when slash fiction was openly unwelcome in many Tolkien fandom spaces. The work the archive's moderators and authors did was less the overt activism of later fans and more the quiet work of building community and connection in such a way that encouraged acceptance of diverse sexualities—not just in fanfiction but in life. In the early to mid-2000s when the Library of Moria flourished, the Western world was also grappling with the question of civil rights for their LGBTQ+ citizens. At the time, simply knowing someone who identified as LGBTQ+ increased support for marriage equality significantly, and the Library operated similarly in moving slashfic into the Tolkien fandom mainstream.

Slash writers ceased to be the Other. They ceased to be creators acting solely for their own gratification, who neither knew nor appreciated Tolkien. The 2015 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey respondents who used the Library of Moria used an average of eight sites—significantly more than the three sites used by respondents overall. Nearly all Library of Moria authors used LiveJournal. They were not hiding, were not isolated. They became the friends and neighbors and colleagues whom it became hard to marginalize, hard to hate.

When I asked Talullah about the changes she saw during her tenure as a Library of Moria admin, she stated that slash writers came to

be known and respected as writers and human beings in the wider fandom. For instance, I watched and experienced it myself, being befriended by people who weren't interested in slash but got to know me through friends in common who were more flexible in their views—they didn't became slash fans but they found a position where there was no need for flaming or wars and there was acceptance that there was room for everyone.

Talullah's analysis emphasizes the importance of personal connections in the parallel quest for slash writers to receive similar respect and regard in the Tolkien fandom. A Library of Moria reader recalls that the site played, for her, the very role that Talullah predicted:

Even now I recall that awe-inspiring sense of discovery and freedom in many LoM stories, where M/M and F/F couples were completely ordinary and accepted. At the time I had never personally met anyone who openly identified as LGBTQ … so a fictional world without stigma was quite the eye-opener.

LGBTQ+ characters and fans were not the only group marginalized in the early online Tolkien fandom. Writing about women was also a perilous act that opened an author to open scorn in many places. Amid this climate, Himring recalls that the Library of Moria also made concerted efforts to promote femslash. "[In 2015], Talullah launched an initiative to support femslash more strongly on the archive," she writes. "She consulted Elleth and, with the help of lists made by Elleth, significantly expanded the archive tags to cover femslash ships." Himring also notes that there was an accompanying challenge to encourage authors to write femslash and recalls that, because of the initiative on the archive, she not just wrote femslash but made a point to always post it to the Library of Moria, where it was both welcomed and celebrated.

Library of Moria authors' presence in the wider community defanged the hyperbolic fears that slash and femslash would somehow corrupt Tolkien's works. Similar to how many came to accept civil rights for LGBTQ+ people because they grew to realize that their neighbor's marriage or colleague's adoption had little impact over their own lives, preferences, and choices, knowing authors who wrote slash and readers who enjoyed it removed the mysterious dark power slash detractors had attributed to the genre in the early years of online fandom. Slash stories humanized the characters they featured and presented LGBTQ+ relationships as normal and accepted within a healthy community. It became a genre like any other: enjoyed by some and not by others, with neither choice superior.

"Based in Love"

As I sought recollections from members of the fandom about the Library of Moria, words like joy and fun and love came up a lot.

This was not the norm for the Tolkien fanfiction fandom at the time of the Library of Moria's inception. Multiple pieces of scholarship from the period document contention within and between archives.⁵ Fans were divided on their perceptions and use of the Lord of the Rings films. Fans were divided based on whether they wrote about Hobbits, Elves, or Mortals. And, of course, there was conflict around genre, with slash, gen, and het writers often heading to their separate corners of the fandom. These divisions created tensions within communities, as well as determining where authors posted their work.

"Perhaps it’s the amount of time that’s passed," Kelleigh recalls, "but I don't remember a lot of drama. Back then, we were all just so grateful to have a community of like-minded people with similar interests that we didn’t let a lot divide us."

Authors on the site certainly gave the impression that they had fun with their work. Kelleigh also remembers that the same debates that were fracturing other fandom communities—the preference for Elves versus Hobbits versus Mortals was one such topic—were treated with a degree of levity on the Library of Moria, where many of the active forum participants have remained lifelong friends.

The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey also reflects this joy that Library of Moria members seemed to find not only in their fanworks but in the canon. On the survey item "I enjoy writing fan fiction to explore fun or silly scenarios," Library of Moria authors agreed 81% of the time—more than any other archive studied. Readers on the Library remember the "absurd" pairings that provided levity on the site and generated creativity in a way that was happening on few other Tolkien fanfiction sites.

When I asked Kelleigh how she wanted the Library to be remembered twenty years from now, her response summed up the Library's philosophy perfectly: "I hope everyone can remember that the origins of fandom and shipping⁶ were based in love."

"Everyone and Every Tale"

I have written elsewhere about how myriad concurrent changes in the early 2000s shaped the online fandom. It was a tumultuous time, with film and bookverse fans learning to coexist and the word netiquette abruptly part of popular discourse.⁷ In writing about most fanfiction archives around at the time, it is easy to center conflict.

Researching and writing about the Library of Moria was different.

What emerges from twenty years of the Library's history is love: love for Tolkien's world, love for creating fanworks, and love for each other. Nor can one ignore the archive's very purpose as a slashfic archive—a genre about love—and the essential role the Library served in bringing slash and femslash into the fandom mainstream. When other Tolkien fanfiction groups were often drawing ever-tighter boundaries around who and what was welcome in their spaces, to go back through twenty years of Library of Moria history, what emerges is celebration, and love: invitations to read, to create, to connect.

If 2002 marked a flurry of new Tolkien fanfiction archives, 2022 brings another soft sigh in a long decline of those archives. The Library of Moria, earlier this year, announced that it would close and move its fanworks to the Organization for Transformative Works' Open Doors project. As one of the final Tolkien-specific archives still standing, its closure is a loss to the Tolkien fanworks community and the result of a constant backdrop of cultural and technical changes in the fandom.

Despite technical setbacks and waning interest, for twenty years, Library admins kept the site open. The demise of eFiction, coupled with a drop in participation on the archive, this time, proved obstacles too large to clear.

A theme throughout Tolkien's works is the bittersweet lesson that even the most beautiful and most enduring of things must end. Yet amidst that loss, the memory of the goodness that was carries forth into the world: a star gone but its light lingering, undimmed.

And so, after looking back twenty years, we look ahead to the next twenty. Twenty years from now, I wondered, what will we remember of the Library of Moria? Talullah wrote back to me: "That there was beauty and kindness in the welcoming way it received everyone and every tale. That it was warm and fun. That so many of us loved it."

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to daughterofshadows for reading an early draft of this article and for the valuable feedback they provided.

A Reminder …

Cultus Dispatches isn't just about presenting tidy articles about fandom topics. We also hope, through this project, to collect the recollections of fans who experienced the history we are writing about. As the Library's closure illustrates, fan history is too often ephemeral. We hope this project leaves something behind for future generations of fans and researchers to know our history.

Keep reading for some of the personal recollections of fans who agreed to help with this tribute. If you were a part of the Library of Moria and want your recollections of the site included, send them to Dawn. Not sure where to begin? Message Dawn and she will pass along a list of questions to get you started.

Works Cited

1. What makes an archive a "major archive"? Arguing that the Library of Moria was part of the fanfiction experiences of many authors is inherently biased and definitely reflects the company I keep—but it's an argument I'll nonetheless make. Likewise, the archive's longevity is noteworthy: Twenty years is a long time. But for those seeking an even more quantitatively based definition, in the 2015 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, I settled on considering a site a major archive if it was used by 5% or more of authors who participated. Only fifteen sites met this criteria. The Library of Moria was used by just over 7% of authors.
2. Much of the history in this section comes from "Library of Moria," Fanlore, accessed July 29, 2022.
3. The Fanlore article identifies 2005 as the year CommodoreMarie handed over the archive to a team of volunteers. Azzy announced the change on the Library's LiveJournal in March 2006, announcing herself, Talullah, and Tinker Bell as new archive admins. Azzy, "The archive!" LiveJournal, March 16, 2006, accessed July 29, 2022.
4. Talullah Red, "Updates and some changes," LiveJournal, March 23, 2008, accessed July 29, 2022.
5. Robin Anne Reid, "Breaking of the Fellowship: Competing Discourses of Archives and Canons" in The Lord of the Rings Internet Fandom" in How We Became Middle-Earth: A Collection of Essays on The Lord of the Rings. ed. Adam Lam and Nataliya Oryshchuk (Zollikofen, Switzerland: Walking Tree, 2007), 347-370 and Kristi Lee Brobeck, "Under the Waterfall: A Fanfiction Community’s Analysis of their Self-Representation and Peer Review," Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media 5 (2004). Both of these articles document that the character groups (Elves, Men, and Hobbits) one wrote and read about were often a source of divisiveness in the fandom. Both articles also document tensions on and between Tolkien fanfiction archives.
6. It can be strange to remember in retrospect, but the term shipping was not widely used or even known in the early online Tolkien fandom, even though it was used in the broader online fanfiction world.
7. According to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, the use of the word netiquette (in books) rocketed from near-zero in the early 1990s to its highest use to date in 1998, just two years before The Fellowship of the Ring film provided the spark that launched Tolkien as an online megafandom.