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

Posted on 30 July 2022 ; updated on 21 August 2022

Himring's Memories

I originally encountered the Library of Moria when I was trawling the internet for fanfiction about Maedhros—any stories of Maedhros. I have no certain memory of having visiting the front page of the archive at that time, but I quickly learned to recognized the distinctive black background, especially as soon as my reading broadened to include others of Tolkien’s characters again. That background probably helped to develop my concept of slash as something that could be a fannish genre, although I had only the vaguest idea yet of the fandom culture associated with the archive. One of the stories that I remember most clearly having read specifically on LOM was actually Erestor/Glorfindel (by Ezras Persian Kitty).

When I stopped lurking, some months later, it was at the SWG Archive that I got involved. For a while, I did not return to the Library of Moria, as the SWG gave me all I needed at the time and I did not wish to separate out my slash from my non-slash works then. However, eventually I learned more of fandom history and began to appreciate the background and traditions that underlay the Library of Moria much better.

I also got to know Talullah after I had joined LiveJournal, although it took me longer to realize that she was associated with the Library of Moria, as of course she was also engaged elsewhere in fandom in that period.

In 2015, the Library of Moria launched an attempt at reviving the Library of Moria more as an active archive, rather than just a very important repository of fanfiction and fandom history. I learned about this through Talullah and it was at this time that I finally signed up to LOM to participate as a fan fic writer, because I had fond memories of reading at the archive and felt it was an attempt worth supporting. (However, I was slightly hampered in this by the fact that I was writing more gen than slash, by then, so a lot of what I was writing was not particularly suited for LOM.)

I wrote a Fingon/Maedhros story for LOM’s International Day of Fanworks challenge in February 2015. That same year, Talullah launched an initiative to support femslash more strongly on the archive. She consulted Elleth and, with the help of lists made by Elleth, significantly expanded the archive tags to cover femslash ships. There was a July challenge linked to this and, during that challenge, I wrote a femslash poem for prompts supplied by Talullah about Yávien of the line of Elros, which eventually grew into a small series. From then on, LOM became the archive I made a point of posting any femslash I wrote to, as well as the occasional short Maedhros/Fingon piece. I wrote another femslash ficlet for the LOM’s International Day of Slash challenge in 2016, set in the last days of Númenor.

In 2016, Talullah also launched a Horrifying October challenge at the LOM community on LiveJournal, which included 31 days of recs and new fan fic for 31 horror topics linked to Middle-earth, as werewolves, depths of Moria, written in blood, etc. I did not manage to write anything new for this, although I contributed quite a number of recs.

Although I was by no means the only participant in these challenges, the uptake was comparatively limited compared to previous use of the archive. Also, I believe not everything written for the challenges on LiveJournal was actually posted to LOM, although not everything posted there in those years came out of the challenges, of course. For quite some time, the LOM mods also made a concerted effort to boost any new works posted to LOM via the LiveJournal community, but eventually this flagged. They had to deal both with low numbers of genuine users and severe spam attacks.

I did not post anything to LOM in 2017, but did post a couple of ficlets in 2018 and my last post was in 2020.

Throughout this time, I remained deeply impressed with the dedication and creative engagement of the LOM’s mods. I completely understand the reasons why they had to ask Open Doors for help, in the end, but I feel a strong twinge of bitter-sweet nostalgia at the loss of the original site and the whole “feel” that went with it!