The link below goes to Nick Polk’s “An Open Letter to the Editors at Amon Hen: Regarding the Decision to Feature Tom Martin’s ‘The Palantír of the 21st Century: Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).’” Martin’s article appears in the current issue of Amon Hen (one of the Tolkien Society’s publications).1

I share Nick’s concern about the editors’ decision to publish an article making a rather shallow (in my evaluation of the piece) argument about the “ethical” use of AI (the ethical use of the technology, according to Martin, is best achieved by: “Don’t Be a Denethor—Be an Aragorn”).2 That is, the purpose of the article seems more directed at pushing the use of AI by appropriating Tolkien’s work, rather than engaging seriously with the larger implications of Tolkien’s legendarium.

The comparison with of AI with Tolkien’s Seeing Stones is not particularly original: I’ve heard presentations/read articles on the palantír as television, as the internet, and cell phones, for years, all with the same type of portentous commentary. Martin adds his own original sexist dose of advice on how to use AI, i.e. being the descendent of a long line of kings and a Hero (male).

There’s also the problem of his solution being limited to individual (unspecified) choices by, presumably, consumers (is Martin making any of these arguments to those who create/control the AI systems?) as opposed to collective/systemic changes (which are in fact being discussed widely by other AI ethical experts, some of which I’m now reading in the wake of the Substack Pangram Problem. These include such things as regulation although at least at the moment in the U.S. the oligarchs’ bribery of the current regime has made any attempt at regulation unlikely, if not impossible, including the attempt to block states from regulating the companies).

I would encourage anyone interested to read Nick’s post for a more developed criticism of Martin’s approach. I am posting this piece to support Nick’s call for the editors to pull this article for all the reasons Nick gives, including the conflicts of interest (note: there is discussion in the comments on the post with the counterpoint of “free speech” appearing).3

Nick’s request to the editors:

I am asking for a digital removal of Tom Martin’s post, a public apology for featuring this article, and a commitment from all of us to be better in the future at vetting contributors and content that does not go against the mission of the Tolkien Society. I also plan to share the article with other Tolkien Society members and beyond to decry Tom Martin, the article, and decision to feature it in Amon Hen

Tolkien Pop!

An Open Letter to the Editors at Amon Hen

Hello Tolkien Poppers and Fellow Tolkienists…

Read more

6 days ago · 13 likes · 13 comments · Nick Polk

How Amon Hen, and the Tolkien Society’s governing board, handle this will be one more item to keep in mind as I consider whether or not to renew my membership in the Society (there have been some problems in recent years that concern me—although the earlier problems are not AI related; my concerns are related more to some actions that may reflect the Society’s retreat from engagement with the difficult work of equity, diversity, and inclusion).

The vociferous response to Substack imposing an AI detector (Pangram) on us all without any warning has been educational—not only did I find several Substacks by experts in AI to subscribe to, but one of them worked out a way to allow a user to get the damned detector turned off on their account/Substack (rather than having to manually turn it off each time we post).

So here is Jhong’s post that gives the method (and some useful additional information):

Natural Intelligence

All the President's Men: The Email That Got Pangram Turned Off

As you might’ve witnessed, the Notes did not stop. Over a dozen went out over the course of several days, highlighting the myriad ways the Pangram integration was legally unsound, masked the true intent of a business deal, and would lead to chasing a machine-made target of “100% human…

Read more

a month ago · 269 likes · 146 comments · JHong

I had a lot of other things going on, so only got around to writing my own request on Aug. 20. To give the support people credit, I got an immediate acknowledgement of the email the day I sent it, and today I received this email:

Hi Robin,

NAME REDACTED here from Substack Standards & Enforcement. Thanks for taking the time to reach out about this.

We have reviewed your request and configured your account so that Substack’s Scan for AI text feature is disabled for your content.

Existing AI detection labels associated with your content have been removed, and readers will no longer be able to initiate new scans of your existing or future posts, Notes, or comments through this feature.

Readers attempting to use Scan for AI text on your content will instead be informed that AI detection is unavailable. This reflects that the feature has been disabled for your content and does not indicate that the content has been evaluated or characterized by Pangram.

This configuration does not otherwise restrict your publication or your ability to publish on Substack.

We are providing this accommodation in response to your request. This response should not be understood as a determination that Substack is legally required to provide this accommodation under any particular law or regulation.

Your request has been recorded, and this configuration will remain in effect unless you subsequently ask us to reverse it.

(emphasis added)

So they’re turning it off, but not because they’re legally required to do so!

cues ominous music YET

As Jhong notes in the linked post above, a number of people are reporting success in getting Pangram turned off without citing any laws!

An aside: I have been cheered up by a growing numbers of news stories on how popular resistance to data centers is growing in the U.S. across the geographical and political spectrum. It’s apparently making the Republicans running for office very very very very nervous, especially those who are in AI’s corporate pockets!

Warning for autist/obsessive behaviors, potential nit-picking, and potentially some grumpy muttering!

I am deep in the stages of reviewing revised chapters for the racisms and Tolkien anthology: these are chapters that were revised using guidance from the two peer reviewers. (If all goes well, I should have the ms. in for printing this fall, which means it should be coming out in 2027—note the “If” clause please!).

I am also doing some basic editing for stylistic and citation consistency across chapters as I check whether or not authors addressed peer reviewer feedback. One part of citation consistency is making sure all chapters follow the Modern Language Association’s MLA Handbook 9th ed. guidelines.1

And I’ve run into an interesting problem—question—issue? That is, there seems to be an assumption in Tolkien studies that Tolkien’s initials are run together (no space between them) with periods: “J.R.R. Tolkien.” If anybody knows how that habit arose, please let me know!2

The issue is that MLA 9 has very specific instructions about how to handle initials (it depends on whether or not you include the period(s)!):

MLA 9th ed. “Mechanics of Prose,” [2.85] (50) (emphasis added)

[2.85] Given Names and Personal Initials

Capitalize given names of persons and the initials that stand for them. A period and a space follow each initial unless the name is entirely reduced to initials.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Octavia E. Butler

JKF

George R. R. Martin

V. s. Naipaul

J. R. R. Tolkien

They even include Tolkien in their models/examples! I imagine at some point a grumpy MLA employee getting frustrated at what they see in the wilds of journals and collections—it might be fun to track editions back to see when this example was introduced!

So for some years now, I’ve been working on following that guide in my own writing (though it’s hard because I so often see “J.R.R.”)

BUT . . . . . . .

Many people don’t, and now we run into the MLA’s guide on how to style titles of sources in the Works Cited:

MLA 9th ed. “The List of Works Cited.” [5.25] (130) (emphasis added)

5.25] “Title of Source: How to Style It”

Titles are given in the entry in full exactly as they are found in the source, except that capitalization, the punctuation between the main title and a subtitle, and the styling of titles that normally appear in italic typeface are standardized.

Titles in sources that include Tolkien’s name often run the initials together! But with the periods!

In theory, I have no problem with saying, OK, cool—as Editorial Goddess of this Collection, anytime “J. R. R. Tolkien” is in the text, it will follow MLA, BUT if “J.R.R. Tolkien” is in a direct quote or in a title, then we will let the compressed version stand!

BUT. . . . . . .

Here’s where the autist/obsessive/perhaps nit-picky brain kicks in: what if people think that the discrepancy is an ERROR!11!!!!!!! (No doubt you may well scoff, who even notices such things. Well, erm, I tend to read Works Cited pages [also end- and footnotes {and OK indexes}] fairly obsessively and have, at times, found errors (and at least once was inspired to write a whole essay because of a ridiculously overblown stereotypical claim hidden in an endnote [I think it takes a bit more effort to read endnotes than footnotes because of the stupid placement and the need to flip back and forth—don’t even get me started on how impossible it is in badly formatted or coded e-books grrrrrrrrr].

Now obviously, as Editorial Goddess, I can tweak MLA guidelines (as long as I’m consistent about it), but in this case, it’s not easy. If I turn all the “J. R. R.”s into “J.R.R.”s, then I have to do all the OTHER initials to be consistent.

I suppose I could argue “JRR” would be possible—but again, my sense from what I’ve seen is that the people follow MLA’s “name entirely reduced” rule, so that means: JRRT.And while it might make sense to use that compressed version after the first usage (which requires the full name), it doesn’t make sense to do JRR Tolkien. (Most people just use his last name — though that gets complicated when one is also citing Christopher Tolkien’s writing from the posthumous publications — luckily here again initials come into play: JRRT, CJRT [Christopher John Reuel Tolkien]).

And I think the need to preserve the original source title is more important in some ways . . . . so at the moment, I’m thinking that I will add a short note to the “Abbreviations” page3 about the disparity in initials styling in text vs. in quotes and titles.

Feel free to weigh in with suggestions/options/etc. (and especially if you have dealt with this issue before!).

Decided if I’m going to keep posting about AI issues (which I am), I need an image! (Search term: surveillance).

Personal example #1:

So I got the following email this morning (sender name, AI name, and especially link redacted):

Dear Robin

A Tolkien scholar just asked about tolkien scholarship:

“Which journals accept Tolkien papers from independent scholars?”

They’re not alone: Tolkien scholars keep asking questions you could answer while sharing your newsletter, and you haven’t seen any of them yet.

See what they’re asking: REDACTED

It’s a first!

And completely bogus although me being me, I sent Sender my answer (basically that as far as I know all academic journals accept papers from anybody; the evaluation system, double-anonymous (what is more widely known as “double-blind”) is based on the quality of the work not the identify of the author, and that anybody who truly existed/wanted to ask me a question could do so via Substack message or in comments.

And then I told Sender (who did have a name and title and who actually may be a human, or, well, exist somewhere in that company) that I would never use any material generated by an AI in my work, sent the reply, and blocked the email address.

Personal Example #2:

A friend of mine with a job that requires them to work with AIs for academic purposes sent me the results of a search (query) using an AI that is linked to an academic publisher and supposed to be able to do a “sophisticated search” of scholarly sources (again, not naming names!).

Here is an excerpt from the results to the query: “What scholars have criticized the representations of women in Tolkien’s works?”

- **Repressed Misogyny**: The glaring absence of women in “The Lord of the Rings” has led some feminist scholars to interpret this as repressed misogyny. The few female characters present are often childless, reinforcing a sense of desolation and infertility in Middle-earth [4] .

- **Misogynistic Reputation**: Since 1971, many feminist scholars have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate, labeling him a misogynist. This criticism has persisted over decades, reflecting ongoing concerns about the representation of women in his works [5] .

Despite these criticisms, some scholars have defended Tolkien, arguing that the few female characters he created could be considered role models and that the absence of women serves to highlight certain thematic elements in his stories [4] . However, the predominant scholarly view remains critical of his portrayal of women, emphasizing the need for a more nuanced understanding of his works [5] .

4. “A Bleak, Barren Land”: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings Henderson, D.L.

Mythlore, 2023

5. “Perilous and Fair” in “A Bleak, Barren Land”: A Feminist Responds to Dylan Lee Henderson’s Essay Reid, R.A. Mythlore, 2024

The results listed five publications which, to be fair, are all academic ones (appearing in academic journals); four of the five are peer-reviewed articles I’m familiar with; the fifth is my publication which is a “Note/Response” so is in the category of “editor-reviewed.”

First, citing only five articles in 2025 (which is when the query was done) is a fairly pathetic showing. A recent chronological bibliography I did for my feminist killjoy bibliographic essay that covered publications through June 2026 had 141 publications, but even my completely-out-of-date-the-year-after-it-was-published bibliographic essay from 2015 listed forty essays. Relying on an AI instead of doing an actual database search would probably not end well.

Second, the “summaries” are mostly shit.

The “summary” of my response to Henderson’s article is the exact opposite of what my extremely LONG response argues; as I recall, the essay itself is over 10K, and there’s an online supplement which couldn’t fit into the hard-copy journal, so yeah, probably more like 12K.

Click on the link below to access the full essay:

- **Misogynistic Reputation**: Since 1971, many feminist scholars have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate, labeling him a misogynist. This criticism has persisted over decades, reflecting ongoing concerns about the representation of women in his works [5] .

For those not wanting to read a feminist academic rant, here’s my abstract which kinda shows the source for the AI summary:

Dylan Lee Henderson’s 2023 essay in Mythlore (vol. 42, no. 1) titled “A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings,” claims that “many feminist scholars [since 1971] have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate and denounced Tolkien himself as a misogynist” (88). In my response, I argue that Henderson’s essay reduces a fifty-plus year history of scholarship (much of it by feminists) exploring the complex, contradictory issues of Tolkien’s female characters to a single negative stereotype. I described that stereotype in my 2015 essay in Perilous and Fair (Croft and Donovan) in my conclusion which argued it was more than time to “move beyond the perceived need to defend Tolkien (whether the author, the body of work, or the human being) from the outdated stereotype of ‘feminist critics’ who exist only to rend and destroy” (39). In addition, while Henderson cites a number of essays to support his point, I would encourage those interested in the topic to read the original sources for themselves to get a better sense not only of the scholarship on Tolkien’s female characters.

I could probably go to Henderson’s essay and pick out the sentence or two that forms the basis for the AI Summary (his was source #4), but I don’t need to get irked by reading his essay again—I spent enough time on it while writing the response.

If this is a fair sample of that AI’s work, I could call it completely “unsophisticated” (it’s hard to find language that doesn’t anthropomorphize the machines). In fact, if I were grading the summaries and other text in a class assignment, the grade would probably hover between a D and an F (depending on the class level—certainly it would be an F in a graduate course). (And then students could read my feedback and revise for full credit!).

One aspect of academic writing that my students struggled with over the decades was the need to summarize views that the author disagrees with (and how to summarize them as fairly and in as neutral a tone as possible) especially if one plans to present a counter-argument.

And linked to that problem was the ongoing problem of students assuming that whatever was in the first paragraph of an essay was the argument (which may apply to the five-paragraph essay format, but when you’re looking at a full-on academic essay which may run twenty pages, not so much).

Unfortunately, as Henderson’s essay shows, humans can also fail as badly as AI (although in more words).1

I am glad that I escaped from Texas (and teaching) in 2020.

But given the extent to which AI is slithering all over the place, I’ve been reading about the issues (and not just in education—it’s EVERYWHERE). Here are half a dozen posts (on Substack) from authors I subscribe to that I’ve saved and now recommend:

How Republicans Are Using AI to Put Women Back in Their Place

Blade Runner 2049: The Detector That Decides Who Counts on Substack

Sloppelgängers

Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI

Misplaced panic over AI progress

The growing AI backlash

So during the last six months, I’ve been pulling together the bits and pieces of what I’ve started calling the Éowyn project. It is tentacular because it has grown, and it keeps throwing out new branches and leaves (love mixing those metaphor). It started in 2024 with an unplanned series of posts about Éowyn on my newly-acquired Substack.1

The posts were the start of what has become my next big (essay) project (and were originally part of my first book project that I am determined to complete no matter what),2 Webs by Women. I originally planned to have a reader-response and fan-fic oriented chapter about Éowyn in Webs, but, well, some presentations happened, and it just kept expanding, so now I’m pulling the Éowyn material out of the and am going to do an article. Or maybe two.

During the last six months, I’ve been working on transcribing information from the three relevant volumes of the History of Middle-earth: The Treason of Isengard; the War of the Ring; and Sauron Defeated, all on the various versions of Éowyn’s story Tolkien drafted. I had originally thought that I just needed to do Treason and War and did not realize that the drafts relating to the last chapters of RotK were in a third volume (Sauron) which is why only two of the volumes are in my photo above. (I’m also working with excerpts from TT and RotK, specifically Éowyn’s dialogue. I’ll be doing an applied linguistics analysis of agency in the grammar of her dialogue — that’s why I went into HoMe to see how much of those earlier versions had dialogue — but there’s so much in the earlier drafts that I may end up doing that stylistics analysis in one essay and then another analyzing Tolkien’s versions of her because, wow. My transcriptions from the three HoMe volumes total a little over 10K words that consist of JRRT’s drafts (ranging from rough outlines, to multiple drafts that range in depth from overviews to detailed descriptions of actions and dialogue) plus Christoper’s commentary which cover dating, changes, format of drafts (pencil overwritten in ink arch), relative readability of his father’s handwriting, and more; it’s absolutely fascinating (in a messy kind of masochistic way).3

There’s a fair amount of scholarship about Éowyn, but only two publications (that I’ve found so far—if you know of others, please drop the info in a comment!) that draw on the different narrative arcs that Tolkien considered. And what I find rather interesting is that both cite only the draft material from Treason and War: they don’t get into the drafts in Sauron (and that may be why I didn’t realize until LATE in the transribing process that I wouldn’t get all the stuff from those two volumes!).4

David Craig (in 2001) wrote what I consider the first queer analysis of LotR (Frodo and Sam) and one of the best discussions of Éowyn’s importance—all in the context of the changing gender relations in interwar Britain, and using the HoMe. Craig describes the different endings in Tolkien’s early drafts: Éowyn was going to marry Aragorn; or, alternately, ride openly to war openly only to die beside Théoden; only later did her decision to disguise herself as Dernhelm to ride with Merry to war and then to marry Faramir and become a Healer occur. Craig argues that one result of Tolkien’s lengthy and complex (contradictory!) revisions was that Éowyn is “the most developed female character” (14) in the novel.5

More recently (2023), Sara Brown opens her queer analysis of Éowyn’s gender fluidity and female masculinity (drawing on Butler’s, Halberstam’s, and Kristeva’s work) with a description of the various iterations Tolkien considered followed by this superb summing up of the impact of the one of the earlier drafts:6

This is a fascinating early draft, for so many reasons, including the fact that some of the language is familiar from the final published version. Here, Éowyn is not Dernhelm but simply Éowyn. In addition, she is powerfully victorious, framed by the light of the day, a terrifying foe to the Harad that face her. This is a different Éowyn to the one we are more familiar with, not least because she has not had to fight for her place as a Rider, nor has she had to overcome the same difficulties as our Éowyn. For one thing, the Éowyn of The Lord of the Rings performs her masculinity not just as a warrior, but as a male warrior – Dernhelm – and this performance of gender is something I want to explore further. (1-2).

I admire Craig’s and Brown’s scholarship immensely and consider that I am building on their work while drawing on some different methodologies.

I am interested in going more in-depth into the multiple versions of Éowyn and foregrounding them as equally important (to me as a reader) as the published version. Part of my reason is doing for is noticing, due to my bibliographic work, that because, while she is a character embedded in the most overtly medieval culture of Middle-earth, she is also the character who has been at the center of many of the discussions/debates about feminist readers, and a good deal of the scholarship on her reflects the modern context (and even some postmodern approaches).

Unlike other powerful female characters (Goldberry, Arwen, and Galadriel) whose power is more spiritual in nature, Éowyn exercises her power in the material world in ways that I think read as more “feminist” (by various definitions) to some.7

Yet there is also a wide range of contradictory claims about Éowyn.8 My preliminary checklist of periods and approaches (not the specific arguments) in the scholarship about Éowyn includes:

• Classical: Librán-Moreno

• Christian/Biblical: Coutras; Enright; Filipczak; Fredrick and McBride; Roberts (2014; 2022)

• Medieval: Chance9; Donovan; Holmes; Honegger; Linton, Wallace

• Modern/Modernist: Benvenuto; De Souza; Hatcher; Jensen; Johnson; Schlesinger; Smith; Trenk

• Gender and/or Queer: Brown; Craig; Foster; Holmes, Reid, Sheppard

• Film: Dodd, Thum

• Stylistics: Drout; Reid

The existence of contradictory claims is not surprising given the contradictions in Tolkien’s text (see Flieger, “The Arch and the Keystone.”), but I think that the range or scope of analysis based in different historical contexts by scholars of such a range of period training in addition to contradictory readings relating to the gender and power of female characters is largest in the scholarship about Éowyn.

So I plan to take a different approach to the multiple versions (all 10K words of drafts by JRRT and commentary by CJRT): rather than summarize it in the service of an overall analysis of the “final” version, I am going to try to convey the absolute messiness of Tolkien’s process and how that messiness which includes changes of names, changes in dialogue, and, most importantly, changes in Éowyn’s story are linked to changes in other characters’ stories (especially but not only Merry’s). Rather than a smooth revision/narrative progression, I envision the process as a kaleidoscopic one (shifts in one character or plot point change other characters or plot points).

In addition, I do not assume that Tolkien’s published work is somehow “perfect” in the sense of revealing (accurately) some specific intention that was firmly in place from the start of the writing process. I’m firmly in the “author is dead, Jim” critical theory camp, with the clarification that “author” is a social construction or category applied to a human being.

Tolkien was juggling a lot of characters and plot strands in the chapters of the book which deal with Éowyn and Rohan (a LOT of CJRT’s notes are about the messiness of drafts, the lack of clear dating of material, and at what point in the whole messy period ‘final’ decisions were made). In a lot of the sections I was transcribing, Pippin is still calling Aragorn “Trotter”! And at times, CJRT notes that changes were made on the final proof copies (and that’s not even getting into the decades that Tolkien then spent trying to “finalize” the Silmarillion material—and that is one topic I know I will never engage with!).

I guess the shortest way for me to describe the way I see my goal at this point is that I am trying to convey a sense of the friction and multiple/contradictory possibilities of Éowyn as well as what I think is a tension Tolkien experiences about the whole issue of “women warriors” (i.e. whether there were historical women warriors, or only mythological ones AKA “Amazons”), and what role, if any women have during war, roles that were changing during Tolkien’s lifetime (see the publications by Anika Jensen, Lynn Schlesinger, and Melissa Smith).

And more. But of course at the heart of it all is the fact that I have been in love with Éowyn since I was ten years old, and at this point in my life, sixty years after I first discovered her, in the midst of what is happening globally, I seem to find myself with a whole lot more to say that I realized the first time I wrote about her (in my 2013 essay).

And, as my new profile pic (of a refrigerator magnet I found!) says, I have no more fox to give!

I am never going to use an AI to determine whether or not something was written by or with the assistance of AI (here on Substack or anywhere else).

I do use the crummy spellcheck in Word to help me catch typos which, alas, seem to be increasing the older I get (arthritic fingers one of the causes).1

I spent a lot of time a couple of decades ago reading the scholarship by composition faculty about the problems (false positives and false negatives and general crappiness) with the “plagiarism detection” programs that were being sold (and are still being sold, probably with more AI) and even more time (unsuccessfully) arguing against university blanket requirements for students to run their work through them.

What I’m reading these days about AI makes2 me fairly sure that that things have only gotten worse, especially given the environmental and human costs of the damned data centers.

So when I realized that Substack thought it was a good idea to roll out this AI called Pangram for everybody to use, my immediate response was simply no fucking way.3

Apparently, Substack requires us to actually use the damn program (give it your words for its data horde) in order to block it—on a post by post basis. I will not be doing that.

There is no way to just opt out completely which is right on brand for AIs (hell, I keep turning them off in Zoom and on my phone; but somehow the system keeps shoving AI links back at me; Adobe doesn’t even give me the option, and I have to shut down three different “suggestion” menu boxes every fucking time to read an article).

TL:DR: the act of opting out gives Pangram money and data.

Substack just enabled this program recently. The Substack help/information already has an elaborately detailed page of instructions (which I am NOT linking to) on how to use the damned AI to scan any text on Substack and, as far as I can tell, NOTHING on how to shut the damn thing off.

Karen Smiley, at Ethical AI, which I subscribed to last night, has an excellent post on “Why I won’t be using Pangram AI scoring,” complete with specifics on all the harms caused by the program biases and some useful links, including lots of other excellent substackers who are looking at AI critically, plus others to use to comment to support the request that Substack allow us a single opt-out.

Everyday Ethical AI

Why I won’t be using Pangram AI scoring

On July 21, Substack Team announced the integration of Pangram “AI detection” scoring into the Substack platform on our longer Notes, comments, and articles. I’ve been seeing lots of commentary on Pangram integration since then. This article is to summarize the issues and to state clearly where I stand…

Read more

a month ago · 50 likes · 14 comments · Karen Smiley

Call for Papers: The Middle Ages in the Modern World

The 6th international MAMO conference will explore the ways in which the Middle Ages have been imagined, invoked, forged, refashioned, used and abused in modernity. The conference will take place at Lincoln College, Oxford (UK) June 22-24, 2027.

We invite proposals for papers, panels, workshops and other events, on aspects of the entire Middle Ages (c. 500-1500, with questions of periodisation welcome). Proposals might consider, but are not limited to the topics of:

• Modern media: literature, films, theatre, visual art, games, podcasts, etc;

• Translations, creative adaptations, retellings, creative criticism;

• Editions, printing, and the material text; the history of scholarship;

• Pedagogy and teaching with/as medievalism;

• Performance and re-enactment of the medieval;

• Local, national, and global medievalisms; the built environment; Oxford and medievalism;

• Inclusive medievalisms;

• Questions of ethics, morals, and responsibilities; medievalist activism.

The deadline for proposals is 30 September 2026.

Please send abstracts of c. 250 words, with a brief author bio, to themamoconference@gmail.com.

CONFIRMED PLENARIES INCLUDE

SPECIAL EVENT: A film screening and conversation with Robert Eggers, director of The Witch (2015), The Northman (2022), Nosferatu (2024), and Werwulf (2026)

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Professors Carolyne Larrington (Oxford) and Elaine Treharne (Stanford)

KEYNOTE ROUNDTABLE: Translation and adaptation with Matthew Francis, Bernard O’Donoghue, and Professor Eva von Contzen (Freiburg)

Tolkien at Kalamazoo is sponsoring five sessions and co-sponsoring four additional sessions for the 2027 International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICM) at Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI). The conference is a hybrid one and is scheduled for May 13-15, 2027.

The Call for Proposals is live: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2027/prelim.cgi/Home/0

The deadline is 15 September, but the organizers ask that you submit to the link above by 1 September so they are able to make sure that all of sessions get enough submissions to be scheduled.

If you plan to submit but absolutely cannot make the 1 September deadline, please let them know that you are planning to submit:

Yvette Kisor (ykisor@ramapo.edu) &

Christopher Vaccaro (Christopher.Vaccaro@uvm.edu)

Sessions for Kzoo 2027

Tolkien at Kzoo Sessions:

1. The Silmarillion Fifty Years On. (Paper session, Hybrid). #8791

2. Tolkien, Medieval History, and Middle-earth Historiography. (Paper session, in-person). #8797

3. Tolkien and Hegemony (A Roundtable). (Roundtable, Hybrid). #8823

4. “Hey Dol, Merry Dol”: Medieval Impulses of Tolkien’s Poetry and Song. (Paper session, in-person). #8852

5. The Unfinished Tolkien: Fragments both Medieval and Modern (Paper session, in-person). #8772

Co-sponsored Sessions:

6. Continued Lessons from the Professor: Borrowings from Tolkien, 2020+. (Paper session, Virtual) [with Tales After Tolkien]. #8457

7. Medieval Roots and Modern Branches: Medieval Poets and J. R. R. Tolkien. (Paper session, Virtual) [with International Pearl-Poet Society]. #8277

8. Queer and Feminist Medievalisms in Tolkien’s Legendarium. (Paper session, Virtual) [with Society for Queer Medieval Studies]. #8669

9. The Women of Tolkien’s Arda: Uplifting Feminist Voices. (Paper session, in-person). [with Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship] #8911

Basic information on this call for submissions is reproduced below, but there is a great deal more information about the Society and its journal on the linked Facebook post.

Fantasy has long explored lifeworlds and paradigms outside of societal norms. Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid protagonist, declares, ‘I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.’ World myths, legends, folk tales, and fairy tales are early promoters of gender-fluidity, populated by the likes of Inanna/Ishtar; Hermaphroditus, the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite; androgynous Dionysus; Ardhanarishvara; Ometeotl; Guanyin; cross-dressing thunder and trickster gods; heartsick seafaring maidens disguised as sailors; and the mercurial ontologies of the Fae. In this issue we will explore how gender is portrayed and explored in Fantasy. Fantasy plays an important role in enlarging what is possible, and creating refugia for the marginalised and other modalities. In an increasingly intolerant, xenophobic, and close-minded world, where Far Right governments roll back hard-won freedoms and civil rights legislation, and undermine, mock or openly attack important principles of equality, diversity, and inclusivity, this function of Fantasy is never more vital, for as Orlando states, ‘He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.’

The BFS Journal is seeking original, unpublished, human-authored articles of between 2000-8000 words (including bibliography). Possible approaches include:

∙Non-binary identities and challenging binaries.

∙Found families and marginalised identities in YA Fantasy

∙The portrayal of matriarchies and patriarchies in Fantasy worlds.

∙The rise of Romantasy and the female gaze.

∙The performance of gender.

∙Power and gender roles.

∙Queer Fantasy and destabilisations of heteronormativity in Fantasy.

∙The divine masculine and feminine in Fantasy.

∙Masks, disguises, masquerades and carnivals.

∙Friendships and relationships in Fantasy.

∙Flirting, courting, and marriage in Fantasy.

Send the Abstract (200 words), including title, keywords, and a 100-word bio to the Editor (Dr Kevan Manwaring) by 31st August. The BFS Journal Winter issue will be published December 2026. Completed articles, if commissioned, will be due in by 30th September when they will undergo peer-review. Send to: bfsjournal@britishfantasysociety.org

The deadline for submitting a proposal for a 20-minute presentation is 31 Oct. 2026; the online conference is scheduled for 8-9 Jan. 2027.

Selected papers presented at the conference will be published in the CFLS’s biannual digital edited volume (with a DOI), which examines the theoretical aspects of fantasy studies.

Download the PDF for more information!

Cfls Conference Call 2027

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My last post was a teaser excerpt and a copy of the handout for my presentation at Southwest PACA’s Virtual Summer Salon. I had an amazing time: all three of the papers at my session were on some aspect of reception/fandom (!!!!). The other Tolkien session was also excellent—three very different approaches to good/evil, ethics, and moralities in Tolkien.

I can highly recommend the Virtual Summer Salon for those of us who are unable to attend F2F conferences (although SWPACA also runs an in-person conference in Albuquerque which I’ve attended in the past and can also recommend!). Janet Brennan Croft does an excellent job of organizing the Tolkien area/sessions for both iterations of SWPACA.

This post (I know that we’re apparently supposed to call these “stacks” but I’ve been calling the stuff I post online “posts” for decades and it’s engraved in my brain!) is in my Webs By Women category because it’s related although the final “product” of this process will be at least one essay. Like the other posts, I consider this to be a process piece rather than a finished product, meaning that some of what I’m talking about is the nuts’n’bolts of ideas and how I want to deal with them, so warning for messiness.

I mentioned that all the presenters at my session were focused on reception, broadly, and so there were some excellent informed questions after we spoke (an audience unfamiliar with a topic can ask excellent questions too—just taking a different approach). One question lit up my brain in all sorts of way—the issue of limitations/problems of relying so heavily on the Archive of Our Own in fan scholarship (given that there are many other archives, of varying sizes and fandoms).

We had a good discussion—and I’m now working on a bibliography of Fan & Reception scholarship on Tolkien which reveals my original intuitive response, that most Tolkien fanfiction scholarship does not rely on AO3. Although, having seen a number of presentations in the Fan Studies area at PCA, I think it’s true that AO3 is a “go to” for many fan studies scholars archive. I’m actually planning on doing some work with with the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild archive for the Webs book, but also for this paper because there are some differences in fic patterns in the SILM fics at AO3 (as the handout in the last post shows), and because the SWG is a fandom-specific site with a long history of community and major efforts to focus on female and female-coded characters in Tolkien.

But I started with AO3 for reasons that I think explain its popularity among fan scholars (but that I probably need to acknowledge in the project because an audience of Tolkien scholars is probably not aware of the reasons): because of its size (currently 11 million registered viewers); multitude of fandoms (I saw an OTW announcement dated 2018 from the Tag Wranglers that the site had reached 30,000 fandoms; I haven’t been able to find out what the current number is!); its inclusive policies (long story there, but basically the Organization for Transformative Works has its origin in the LiveJournal strikethrough and FanLib’s attempted commercialization — follow the link for more information); and its search tools (“Sort and Filter”). Plus, a fandom statistician, Destinationtoast, has also done a lot of work analyzing data on AO3, on all fandoms, but their work also provides a useful context for what I’m trying to do in “Cruising.”

I’ll be posting about some of the work I’m doing with both AO3 and (eventually) SWG (their system is different of course!) while I work on this paper.

I spent some time yesterday doing a sort of overview of all the Fandom tags relating to “Tolkien”: my first searches were in very specific categories, so these results come from pulling back, so to speak.

Behold: the thirty AO3 Fandom Tags and how many works are tagged with that specific fandom (as of July 4, 2026). “Works” in AO3 include not only fanfiction, but fanmeta, fanart, fanvids, and podcasts, Many works have multiple fandom tags: so you cannot assume a one-to-one equivalent with a “work” and a “tag.” (From my earlier searches, I’d say a LOT of fics have both HOB and LOTR tags which makes sense, but quite a few toss in SILM as well — and writers often tag for both (Tolkien) versions and for various adaptations). “Fandom” is one of the tags that AO3 requires, but there are no limits on how many Fandom tags a writer chooses.

My original searches were for The Hobbit-All Media Types; The Lord of the Rings-All Media Types, and The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien which, fair enough, are three of the top four (in terms of number of works tagged).

At this point, though (process remember), my only conclusion is that there are some MAJOR dedicated Tolkien fans/fic writers out there.

137009	J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth Legendarium & Related Fandoms
63511	The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
47832	The Hobbit - All Media Types
43797	The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
33960	The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
24936	The Hobbit Jackson Movies
15180	The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
13120	The Lord of the Rings Jackson Movies
5309	The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV 2022
5309	The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV 2022
129	        The Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim 2024
75	        The Hobbit 1977
34	        Smith of Wootton Major - J. R. R. Tolkien
31	        The Adventures of Tom Bombadil - J. R. R. Tolkien
27	        The Father Christmas Letters- J. R. R. Tolkien
21	        Roverandom- J. R. R. Tolkien 
18	        Tales from the Perilous Realm - J. R. R. Tolkien
15	        Mr. Bliss - J. R. R. Tolkien
12	        The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son- J. R. R. Tolkien
9	        The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun- J. R. R. Tolkien 
8	        The Fall of Arthur -- J. R. R. Tolkien
7	        Leaf by Niggle - J. R. R. Tolkien
4	        Farmer Giles of Ham- J. R. R. Tolkien
3	        The Last Ship - J. R. R. Tolkien
3	        Sellic Spell - J. R. R. Tolkien
3	        Mîms Klage | The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf - J. R. R. Tolkien
2	        The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún - J. R. R. Tolkien
1	        On Fairy Stories - J. R. R. Tolkien
1	        The Story of Kullervo - J. R. R. Tolkien
1	        The Hobbit 1967

And speaking of Tolkien fans, and dedication, Dawn Walls-Thumma just posted some of the latest results from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey that she and Maria K. Alberto are working on. This is the third survey [2010 and 2015 being the earlier ones] making it the only longitudinal study of Tolkien fandom I’m aware of: “Six Demographic Takeaways from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey.”

Related Posts

Cruising the Archive Presentation Teaser & Handout

“Cruising The Archive of Our Own” (paragraphs 1-3):

When I started this project in 2018, I focused on “F/F,” “female slash fiction” or “femslash,” stories about erotic/romantic/sexual relationships between female characters. My goal was to address two significant gaps in Tolkien scholarship. The first gap is the almost exclusive focus on male characters in queer approaches to Tolkien; the second is the almost exclusive focus on female characters with minimal, if any, acknowledgement of sexualities, in feminist Tolkien scholarship (Reid 2026). This project is part of the growing scholarship on fanfic about female characters and on the fanfic fandom, the part of fandom dominated by women and nonbinary fans (Alberto and Walls-Thumma; Booker; Coker and Viars; Felagund 2022; McCormack; Sturgis 2004 and 2006; Viars and Coker, and Walls-Thumma 2023).

As I return to this project eight years later, two things are clear: the gaps still exist, but a great deal has changed in the Tolkien transformative works fandom and in our fanfiction. Maria K. Alberto and Dawn Walls-Thumma analyze the results of a longitudinal survey in order to delineate three generations of Tolkien fans and how the attitudes about “sexual content and gender,” have changed over the decades, illustrating the heterogeneity and even compartmentalization of fandom spaces and experiences (155-56). One of the areas of generational change has been the shift from a more affirmational fandom, valuing “the canon as is, locating the authority to interpret a work with its producers,” to a fandom which maintains some affirmational values but also “invests fans with the authority to interpret and transform canon” (150). Specific fanfic elements that are related to transformational works include more stories about erotic/romantic/sexual relationships (with more details than the canon), creating characters who have a wider range of genders and sexualities, including but not limited to more stories about female characters, all of which were stigmatized in the pre-internet Tolkien fandom and in the early years of the internet Tolkien fandom.

My focus in this project is specifically transformational works, and the preliminary results of my analysis of tags in the Archive of Our Own supports what Alberto and Walls-Thumma have argued based on fan self-reporting. Tagging practices incorporate more terminology relating to genders, sexualities, and a wide range of queer relationships. There are more works that focus on female characters (including, in recent years, genderswapping canon male characters to female characters). My analysis will focus on the tags and works about female-coded characters although I suspect similar changes in stories focusing on M/M relationships may also have occurred. “Female-coded,” as Jackie Sheppard notes in her recent essay on “Female A-spec resonances in Tolkien,” is useful to “acknowledge that gendered traits in any text function as culturally constructed narrative codes rather than fixed biological or identity categories, thus leaving space for interrogation of how such codes operate, shift, or destabilize within a text (p2, n4.)

The attached PDF contains the preliminary results of some of my searches in the Archive of Our Own for this project and my Working Bibliography (which is the basis for what I suspect will be an annotated bibliography on Tolkien fandom/fanfiction scholarship I’m going to have to do at some point).

I will probably be posting more ‘process’ posts about “Cruising” (in the Webs section here because [waves hands] it’s all connected although this particular work won’t be in the eventual book due to length requirements).

2026 Reid Fd Handout Cruising

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Tolkien Society Seminar 2026: Tolkien’s Invented Languages

Deadline for proposals: 31st July 2026 (Submit Proposal Here)

{NOTE: No indication about time deadline, i.e. what time in their timezone, so I’d suggest submitting no later than July 30.}

Few modern authors have placed language so centrally within their imaginative work as J.R.R. Tolkien. As a professional philologist, Tolkien did not merely invent stories populated by fictional peoples, he created languages, writing systems, linguistic histories, and philological traditions that formed the very foundations of his legendarium. As Tolkien famously observed, his stories were often conceived to provide a world for the languages rather than the reverse.

This seminar seeks to explore Tolkien’s linguistic invention in all its forms: the aesthetic, philological, literary, historical, and cultural dimensions of his languages and writing systems. We invite papers that examine Tolkien’s languages, their internal development and grammar, their relationship to real-world languages, or the role language plays in narrative, identity, mythology, and sub-creation. We welcome contributions from established scholars, independent researchers, postgraduate students, linguists, philologists, calligraphers, translators, and enthusiasts.

Papers may address, but are in no way limited to, the following topics:

• the development and evolution of Tolkien’s invented languages;

• Tolkien’s professional work in philology and its influence on his legendarium;

• the relationship between language invention and mythology;

• comparative studies between Tolkien’s languages and historical languages;

• writing systems and scripts;

• language change, dialect, and linguistic history within Middle-earth;

• language and identity among Elves, Dwarves, Men, and other peoples;

• Tolkien and modern constructed language (“conlang”) traditions;

• the influence of Tolkien on later language creators in fantasy and science fiction;

• language loss, preservation, and cultural memory in Middle-earth;

• adaptations of Tolkien’s languages and scripts in film, gaming, and digital media;

• Tolkien’s own approach and theories on language invention; and

• digital humanities approaches to Tolkienian philology.

Just making it clear that it’s Robin from here to the end of the post, not part of the Tolkien Society announcement!

One of the reasons I started this Substack is to share information on virtual and hybrid Tolkien conferences/conventions (fan & academic and those brave souls who are trying to include both in their events). I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Society’s events since 2021 Tolkien and Diversity Seminar.

Recent events have given me the impression that at least some of the Tolkien Society’s Powers That Be have been trying to back away from a strong commitment to diversity. However, I have mostly enjoyed attending their events, and I have a number of amazing progressive friends who are active in the Society, so I haven’t given up on them yet.

However, there are a few red flags in this call that concern me: unlike the recent ones, there is no named organizer or organizers. The post of the Education Secretary, whose job in the past included organizing the seminars, is currently vacant. So there is no indication who is responsible for this event.

In addition, this topic seems to be chosen to exclude, as much as possible, some of the more diverse and intersectional critical approaches to Tolkien’s legendarium that have been featured starting in 2021. It is a very “safe” and specialized topic in that it seems unlikely to be perceived as controversial; it is very much focused on Tolkien and his text and can, easily, result in papers that ignore any of the circumstances of production and reception which are the sort of approaches (that would fit the “cultural dimension” referenced in the Call and that are often drawn on by us doing what I call killjoy Tolkien scholarship (see Sara Ahmed for the definition of a [intersectional] feminist killjoy).

There are a few of the suggested topics that have some potential (for those of us doing killjoy work). These are:

• language and identity among Elves, Dwarves, Men, and other peoples;

• language loss, preservation, and cultural memory in Middle-earth;

• adaptations of Tolkien’s languages and scripts in film, gaming, and digital media;

• digital humanities approaches to Tolkienian philology.

But of course it all depends upon who is reviewing the proposals and what approaches they want to feature, and how they define “cultural.”

I am temped to submit a proposal on another “chunk” of my on-going project, “Race-ing to Gender Arda: A Stylistics Analysis,” which was rejected in a very weird and messy process from the 2025 seminar, Arda's Entangled Bodies and Environments, and see what happens.

The link in my title goes to the handout from when I presented at the Northeast Popular Culture Association conference last year.

The project is a digital humanities (corpus linguistics) approach to Tolkien’s writing style (which is not necessarily the same thing as his “philology,” so we shall see!).

I will be interested in seeing just what the eventual program looks like.

Volume 24, Issue 1: Asexuality and Aromanticism in Tolkien’s Legendarium

Editors: Clare Moore and Rory Queripel

Introduction: Asexuality and Aromanticism in Tolkien’s Works by Clare Moore and Rory Queripel

Peer Reviewed Articles:

“Mythology is Language and Language is Mythology”: Allegory, Applicability, and/or Asexuality in Tolkien’s Legendarium by Rory M. Queripel

“Motions of Love and Friendship”: Elven (A)sexuality by Clare Moore

Chaste Bachelors and Abstaining Husbands: Celibacy and Asexuality in the Line of Finwë by Kristine Larsen

“A Natural Human Activity”: the Split Attraction Model as a tool for reading Tolkien’s Legendarium by Sarah Courtis

“As Bachelors Very Exceptional”: An Asexual Reading of Frodo Baggins by Danna Petersen-Deeprose

What is Unwritten May Yet Resonate: In Search of Female A-spec Resonances in Tolkien by Jackie Sheppard

Articles

Introduction: Asexuality and Aromanticism in Tolkien’s Works by Clare Moore and Rory Queripel

An Asexual Autist’s Feminist Musings on The Lord of the Rings by Robin A. Reid

A number of Tolkien fans/academics I know immediately noticed that Pope Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, quotes from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf’s advice given at at “The Last Debate” (RK, Book V, Chapter viiii; italics indicate the portion the Pope quotes):

“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

I’ve read a number of people commenting on Pope Leo’s choice to quote Tolkien.

I thought this post (dedicated to writing about Pope Leo in a way that I (atheist!) find compelling) makes an excellent argument that:

The encyclical is the Vatican’s answer to two years of Peter Thiel’s public theological campaign against the moral oversight of technology. By quoting Tolkien, Leo placed the magisterium of the Catholic Church on the side of the tradition Thiel has spent his life appropriating and inverting.

Link leads to the Substack (some of the post is behind a paywall, but there’s quite a lot that is open). Hale also links to other Catholic commentary on the Pope’s use of Tolkien in the context of Thiel’s appropriation of Tolkien’s work which is well worth reading.

Letters from Leo — the American Pope & US Politics

Pope Leo XIV Just Quoted The Lord of the Rings Against Peter Thiel’s Empire — and Thiel Is Now Fleeing America

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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3 months ago · 281 likes · 15 comments · Christopher Hale

Peter Thiel named his surveillance company Palantir.

He has said publicly that he has read the books at least ten times. The Tolkien quotation he chose for his high school yearbook actually came from the 1977 animated Hobbit film, not the book it adapted. His references to Middle-earth are so constant that even sympathetic conservative critics have spent the last few years arguing he does not understand the books he claims as scripture.

Ten times? Piker. I first read LotR when I was ten, and by the time I graduated from high school, had read it at least a hundred times (documented in a reading journal which I lost somewhere during all my college moves). And I kept reading it afterwards (I did take a break when I entered my angry young feminist phase, but I never got rid of the books, and I came back to Tolkien when I was falling in love with the Jackson films, so HAH, ten times.)

Reading about how Thiel attributed a quote from the cartoon Hobbit to Tolkien reminded me of a previous post I wrote about Misquoting Tolkien:

At some point before Covid (2019 maybe?), I attended a Tolkien Society event and heard a great presentation by Marcel Aubron-Bülles based on a project that he calls “Things J.R.R. Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with (TThnsdwohatdw)” where he debunks, through research, internet quotes that are not by Tolkien, or are corrupted versions of what Tolkien wrote (I might charitably call some of those paraphrases but they are attributed as direct quotes to Tolkien), or are quotes from Jackson’s films (though they also might be incorrectly quoted). It was fascinating and turns out that wrong/fake quotes on the internet are legion.

And speaking of misquoting/appropriating/misusing Tolkien (and mistaking your own sense of the work’s applicability to some aspect of yourself/your life with The One True Authorial Intention), I am also reminded that there there is an ongoing movement to get Tolkien canonized (I first stumbled across it in 2017). The link below goes to File 770, Mike Glyer’s excellent newsletter, which has other good links about the effort:

Tolkien: An Unexpected Sainthood

And thinking about the extent to which Thiel and Vance are pimping their middleearthmaxxing credentials, I remember an excellent Substack I recommended a while ago on what Tony Ginocchio calls the problem of “Tolkien Catholics”:

If you become a Tolkien Catholic, you run the risk of thinking that God has chosen you to do something great, that you are at the center of the story, that you need to form your fellowship and begin your journey to vanquish Sauron, however you define that. In the bleakest, darkest version of that scenario, you decide to enter American politics because of what you learned from Tolkien, you read a story about powerlessness and decide that you need to build up power for yourself, power like all the cool swords and big trees in the book.

Connected: Is Peter Thiel a “bad fan” of LOTR? and Tolkien Against the Grain.

I often say that my ongoing and immersive reading of his works led to me becoming a nature poet (which was really RADICAL back in the 1970s, let me tell you, snicker) and an animist. But I suspect that the majority of “Tolkien Catholics” are, well, men (#notall but most).

And every time the issue of how such a widely varied (ideologically, politically, religiously, etc.-speaking) audience of readers exists for Tolkien comes up, I have to note that Verlyn Flieger has an explanation for that:

What he really thinks, what he really believes, is still and undoubtedly will continue to be a matter of conjecture and (of course) of lively debate. That is partly, of course, because his work is so various, but also because when we look at Tolkien we are likely to see ourselves, and thus to find in his work what we want to see. This is as true of his most devoted fan as of his nastiest critic. It is as true of me as it is of Edmund Wilson or Germaine Greer. Or, I dare say, of Peter Jackson. But the result is that the more I read about Tolkien the less homogenous a figure I find. What I find instead is increasing fragmentation and polarization. Everybody has their own private Tolkien—more Tolkiens than you can shake a stick at. “The Arch and the Keystone.” pp. 8-9

And as a final link (which just dropped into my email), here’s an excellent post by Brian Merchant (Blood in the Machine) on the “AI ethicslop” of Anthropic:

Blood in the Machine

How Anthropic used its AI ethicslop to play the pope and eclipse OpenAI

It’s been a big week for Anthropic, the tryhard “good guy” of AI; the startup that has built its brand as the “ethical” AI lab by positioning itself as an alternative to the unscrupulous OpenAI, from which Anthropic’s co-founders famously defected. That positioning, by way of some canny marketing work and disciplined brand strategy, has paid off handsom…

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3 months ago · 22 likes · 2 comments · Brian Merchant

Seems a good time for this reminder: My posts are always free, and I loathe and despise AI with a longstanding passion!

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JACKSON, WALSH, & BOYENS: TRANSCRIPTION OF FILM

Scene 20 The King of the Golden Hall (Extended Edition, The Two Towers www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5LP2o12Wzk

Bold text indicates quoted or paraphrased language from scenes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers and The Return of the King in which Éowyn is not present, or not conscious. She is spoken about, or spoken over, not spoken with.

[Camera cuts to close up on Théodred’s pale dead face, then pulls back to show Éowyn kneeling by the side of his bed, holding his hand. She kisses his hand. Camera pulls back to show Gríma entering through open door behind her, sort of slithering around the threshold to the hall outside.]

Gríma: “Oh, he, he must have died sometime in the night. What a tragedy for the King to lose his only son and heir. [He sits on the bed near her, places his hand on her shoulder] I understand his passing’s hard to accept, especially now that your brother has deserted you.

Éowyn: [Pushes back from bed, shaking off his hand, stands, backs away from him.] “Leave me alone, snake!”

Gríma: [Stands, following her, circling her as he speaks.] “Oh, but you are alone. Who knows what you have spoken to the darkness in the bitter watches of the night when all your life seems to shrink, the walls of your bower closing in about you—a hutch to trammel some wild thing” [He is closing in, the camera focusing on his face and movements, and then on her face when he passes behind her, ending up standing much closer, ending with closeup on both faces]. ”So fair [he touches her cheek, pushing her hair aside] so cold like a morning of fair spring still clinging to winter’s chill [his hand slides down and around her throat; her eyes close a moment, but she forces them open, looking at him, lips parted. ]

Éowyn: “Your words are poison.”

[She pulls away, leaves the room; he is left standing alone in the dark, looking at his hand.]

Gríma: 97 words; 55 (approx. 57%) of them are based on Tolkien’s dialogue and narration (see below).

Éowyn: 8 words, 2/25% based on from Gandalf’s dialogue (about Gríma). Her actions—resisting Gríma’s attempted rape—are even more significant.

TOLKIEN: THE LORD OF THE RINGS EXCERPTS

The Two Towers “The King of the Golden Hall”

Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel a daughter of kings. Thus Aragorn for the first time in the full light of day beheld Éowyn, Lady of Rohan, and thought her fair, fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood” (515). [Third-person narrative, Aragorn’s POV]

*****

“Down, snake!” [Gandalf] said suddenly in a terrible voice. “Down on your belly. How long is it since Saruman bought you? What was the promised price? When all the men were dead, you were to pick your share of the treasure, and take the woman you desire? Too long have you watched her under your eyelids and haunted her steps.”

Éomer grasped his sword. “That I knew already,” he muttered. For that reason I would have slain him before, forgetting the law of the hall. But there are other reasons.” He stepped forward, but Gandalf stayed him with his hand (520).

“Eowyn is safe now.” (520) [Dialogue; Gandalf’s revelation, confirmed by Éomer; Éowyn is never asked, never given the chance to say what she knows.]

The Return of the King, “The Houses of Healing”

“Alas! For she was pitted against a foe beyond the strength of her mind or body. And those who will take a weapon to such an enemy must be sterner than steel, if the very shock shall not destroy them. It was an evil doom that set her in his path. For she is a fair maiden, fairest lady of a house of queens. And yet I know not how I should speak of her. When I first looked on her and perceived her unhappiness, it seemed to me that I saw a white flower standing straight and proud, shapely as a lily, and yet knew that it was hard, as if wrought by elf-wrights out of steel. Or was it, maybe, a frost that had turned its sap to ice, and so it stood, bitter-sweet, still fair to see, but stricken, soon to fall and die? Her malady begins far back before this day, does it not, Éomer?” [Dialogue, reporting his thoughts about that first meeting]

“I marvel that you should ask me, lord,” he answered. “For I hold you blameless in this matter, as in all else; yet I knew not that Éowyn, my sister, was touched by any frost, until she first looked on you. Care and dread she had, and shared with me, in the days of Wormtongue and the king’s bewitchment; and she tended the king in growing fear. But that did not bring her to this pass!”

“My friend,” said Gandalf, “you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.

”Think you that Wormtongue had poison only for Théoden’s ears? Dotard! What is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among their dogs? Have you not heard those words before? Saruman spoke them, the teacher of Wormtongue. Though I do not doubt that Wormtongue at home wrapped their meaning in terms more cunning. My lord, if your sister’s love for you, and her will still bent to her duty, had not restrained her lips, you might have heard even such things as these escape them. But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?” (866-7, emphasis added”) [Dialogue, Gandalf, his theory about Gríma’s lies to Éowyn]

Works Cited

Abrahamson, Megan. “Medievalizing Aredhel.” Presentation, ICMS 2026.

Adler, Gillian. “‘Writing History, Writing Trauma’: The Rape of Igerna in the Medieval Brut Narratives.” Medieval Feminist Forum, vol. 56, no. 2, 2021, pp. 48-72, scholarworks.wmich.edu/mff/vol56/iss2/3/

Baker, Dallas John. “Writing Back to Tolkien: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in High Fantasy.” Recovering History Through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives, edited by Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien, and Nike Sulway. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, pp. 123-43.

Cooper, Mariah. Representations of Rape and Consent in Medieval English Laws and Literature. Arc Humanities Press, 2024. Gender and Power in the Premodern World.

Crowe, Edith L. “Power in Arda: Sources, Uses and Misuses,” Mythlore, vol. 21, no. 2, article 40, 1996, pp. 272-77, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/40. Rpt. in Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan, Mythopoeic P, pp. 136-49.

Eckman, Zoë. “An Oppressive Silence: The Evolution of the Raped Woman in Medieval France and England.” Medievalists.net. 2011, www.medievalists.net/2011/02/an-oppressive-silence-the-evolution-of-the-raped-woman-in-medieval-france-and-england/

Horeck, Tanya. Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film. Routledge, 2004.

Larsen, Kristine. “‘The gift which was withheld I take’: the Rape of the Sun Maiden in Tolkien’s Legendarium.” Mythopoeic Online Midsummer Seminar 4 2025, dc.swosu.edu/oms/oms4/schedule/18/.

Miller, T. S., and Elizabeth Miller. “Tolkien and Rape: Sexual Terror, Sexual Violence, and the Woman’s Body in Middle-Earth.” Extrapolation, vol. 62, no. 2, June 2021, pp. 133–56.

Moore, Clare. “Elmar, Aerin, and Aredhel: Female Enslavement in Tolkien’s Legendarium,” Mythlore, vol. 43, no. 1, article 9, 2024, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol43/iss1/9/.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol 16, iss. 3, Autumn 1975, pp. 6–18, doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.

Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York UP, 2001.

Reid, Robin Anne. “Light (noun, 1) or Light (adjective, 14b)? Female Bodies and Femininities in The Lord of the Rings.” The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on Middle-Earth Corporeality, edited by Christopher Vaccaro, McFarland, 2013, pp. 98-118.

Turner, Wendy, Christina Lee, “Conceptualizing Trauma for the Middle Ages.” Trauma in Medieval Society, edited by Wendy Turner and Christina Lee. Brill, 2018, pp. 3-12.

Whitaker, Lynn. “Corrupting Beauty: Rape Narrative in The Silmarillion.” Mythlore, vol. 29, no. 1, article 5, 2010, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol29/iss1/5/.

I’ll be developing this into a publishable article (though I will probably submit it as a conference presentation at the Journal of Tolkien Research just to get it out there since I imagine it will take a while to work my way through All The Other Things that I have DEADlines for . . . .

But here are a couple of paragraphs for context for the list of topics. I’ve included the Works Cited is provided because, well, one must cite!

ETA 5/17: I did post a cleaned-up version as a Conference Presentation at the Journal of Tolkien Research!

Reminder: my posts are always free for everyone, and I hate/loathe AI with a longstanding passion.

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During the past few years, I worked with two medievalists (Chris Vaccaro and Steve Yandell) to edit Queer Approaches to Tolkien, and I just turned in my feminist killjoy bibliographic essay for a forthcoming collection edited by Cami Agan and Clare Moore, Great Heart and Strength: New Essays on Women and Gender in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, a collection which builds on Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan’s Perilous and Fair: Women in the Life and Work of J. R. R. Tolkien. Looking at those recent publications shows a pattern in which Queer Tolkien scholarship tends to focus primarily on male characters and feminist scholarship tends to focus primarily on female characters with minimal discussion of sexualities. This split is not unique to Tolkien studies. In her 2013 review essay of four monographs on gender in the Middle Ages, Diane Watt argues that:

the terminology of both the history of sexuality and queer theory has become gender exclusive: homosexuality has come to mean, in common academic usage, male homosexuality; gay history is gay male history; queer sexualities are all too often queer male sexualities. Women are not given equal weight to men, and the histories of male and female sexualities are still artificially separated.

The handout shows the results from my analysis of a monograph, two edited collections, nine essays: Chance’s Queer Creature; Kisor and Vaccaro’s Alterity; Reid, Vaccaro and Yandell’s Queer Approaches; and essays by Brown, Fox-Lenz, Gilbert, Mendro, Pacheco, Queripel, Reid, Vaccaro, and Vogt-William. I will be adding more data as relevant (for example, Clare Moors and Rory Queripel’s special issue on asexuality/aromanticism in the works of Tolkien should be live on the Journal of Tolkien Research soon.

When it comes to the topics of queer scholarship, I counted 141 topics which, not surprisingly given the theories and assumptions in queer theories, almost entirely consist of individual characters. There are a few outliers (discussion of species [Ents, Dwarves, Elves, etc.]; objects associated with a character such the “Mirror of Galadriel” and the “Eye of Sauron” [in both cases, the object is analyzed while the characters of Galadriel, Melkor, and Sauron also appear]); and one genre (the Apocalypse). I agree with Kisor who suggests the Tison Pugh’s work on queer theory and medieval genres has a great deal of potential for Tolkien studies although I would add that given the multitude of genre influences Tolkien scholars have and are identifying in Tolkien’s legendarium, those interested in queering genres need not limit themselves to the medieval!

I group the topics by the number of publications that analyze a character in the context of a queer approach. At this point, I’m not distinguishing whether the queer analysis focuses on any of multiple sexualities or on any of a multiple areas of alterity; that will come later. Of the 141 topics, forty-six of them are characters or groups of characters who are the focus of two or more publications. Not surprisingly, the runaway favorites are Frodo (in nineteen publications) and Sam (in fourteen), with Gimli the only character so far in seven publications. Only one female character (Rosie) appears in the top ten characters (and most of the time, she is there only in connection with Sam; only exception is when she’s in a threesome with Sam and Frodo). Only seven of the forty-six characters (15%) are women: joining Rosie are Éowyn, Galadriel, the Entwives, Lúthien, Shelob, and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. More female characters, including a number from The Silmarillion, appear in the longer list of characters who are, so far, discussed only in one publication: twenty-three of ninety-five, or 24%. I expect these percentages to change in the future when I finish collecting and analyzing more publications.

SEVEN-NINETEEN PUBLICATIONS
Frodo 	19
Sam 	14
Gimli	7

SIX PUBLICATIONS 
Aragorn 
Bilbo
Gollum/Sméagol
Merry
Pippin
Turin

FIVE PUBLICATIONS
Beleg  
Legolas
Orcs 
Rosie
Saruman
Ents

FOUR PUBLICATIONS
Boromir  
Éowyn
Faramir
Fëanor
Galadriel
Gandalf
Hobbits
Pippin

THREE PUBLICATIONS
Beren  
Entwives
Farmer Giles
Lúthien
Melkor
Sauron
Shelob
Smith
Treebeard
Thingol
Ainur 

TWO PUBLICATIONS
Aldarion  
Aulë
Beorn
Bombadil (Tom)
Denethor
Dernhelm
Dwarves
Elves
Fingon
Lobelia S-B
Maedhros
Niggle
Uruk-hai
 
ONE PUBLICATION
Apocalypse
Ar-Pharazôn
Arthur (Fall)
Brandybucks
Cacharoth
Camellia S-B
Celeborn
Celebrían
Celebrimbor
Celegorm
Círdan
Cradoc
Curufin
Daddy Twofoot
Dark Riders
Drogo
Eärendil
Eärnur
Eärwen
Elrond
Elros
Éomer 
Eriol
Eye of Sauron
Farmer Maggott
Finarfin
Finduilas
Finrod
Finwë
Fosco
Gaffer (Gamgee)
Gatekeeper at Bree
Gilraen
Glaurung
Grímhild
Grishnákh
Gudrún
Guinever
Haleth
Hamá
Harfoots
Heorrenda
Högni
Huan
Humans
Huor
Húrin
Idril
Indis
Istari
Kullervo
Lalaith
Maglor
Maiar
Manwë
Masti
Melian
Mírel
Mirror of Galadriel
Mordred
Morwen
Nazgûl
Nienna
Niënor
Nokes
Otho Baggins
Prentice
Primula Brandybuck
Radagast
Ring of Power
Sandyman
Smaug
Tar-Ancalimë
Teleri
Théoden
Thranduil
Thorin Oakenshield
Tídwald
Tooks
Torhrthelm
Tuor

Works Cited

Robin Anne Reid, Wanted: More Feminist Queer Medievalists in Tolkien Scholarship”

“About.” Medieval Feminist Forum. scholarworks.wmich.edu/mff/about.html.

Alberto, Maria K. and Dawn Walls-Thumma. “Roads Go Ever On and On: Fan Fiction and Archival Infrastructure as Markers of the Affirmational-Transformational Continuum in Tolkien Fandom.” Fandom: The Next Generation, edited by Bridget Kies and Megan Connor, U of Iowa P, 2022, pp. 149-60. Fandom and Culture, Series Editors Paul Booth and Katherine Larsen.

Bitel, Lisa M. Women in Early Medieval Europe, 400-1100. Cambridge UP, 2002.

Brown, Sara. “Monstrous Feminine, Deviant Mother: Tolkien’s Shelob and the Grotesque Maternal.” Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 20, iss. 2, article 9, 2024, school ar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol20/iss2/9/.,

Chance, Jane. Tolkien, Self and Other: “This Queer Creature.” Palgrave, 2016.

Croft, Janet Brennan, and Annika Röttinger. “Something Has Gone Crack”: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War. Comarë Series No. 41, Walking Tree Press, 2019.

Croft, Janet Brennan, and Leslie A. Donovan, editors. Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien. Mythopoeic P, 2015.

Drout, Michael D. C. “The Influence of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Masculinist Medievalism.” Medieval Feminist Newsletter, vol. 22, iss. 1, 1996, pp. 26-27, scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1400&context=mff.

Fox-Lenz, Alicia. “Contemporary Reflections of War: Soldier-Servant Relationships in The Lord of the Rings and Downton Abbey. Croft and Röttinger, pp. 345-56.

Franson, Craig. “Why so Weird about Tolkien?: The Founder Fantasies of Silicon Valley.” American Id Newsletter. 29 May 2025, americanid.substack.com/p/why-so-weird-about-tolkien.

Gilbert, Felicity. “Mighty Men of War: The Impact of Gender and War in the Work of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Croft and Röttinger, pp. 319-43.

Kirk, Elizabeth D. “‘I Would Rather Have Written in Elvish’: Language, Fiction and The Lord of the Rings.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 5, iss. 1, 1971, pp. 5-18.

Kisor, Yvette. “‘We Could Do with a Bit More Queerness in These Parts’: An Analysis of the Queer against the Peculiar, the Odd, and the Strange in The Lord of the Rings.” Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 16, iss. 1, article 4, 2023. scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol16/iss1/4/.

Krueger, Bonnie, and Beth Roberston. “A Brief History of MFN and SMFS.” Medieval Feminist Newsletter, vol. 22, no. 1, 1996, scholarworks.wmich.edu/mff/vol22/iss1/3/.

Lochrie, Karma. Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t. U of Minnesota P, 2005.

Lochrie, Karma, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, editors. Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Medieval Cultures, vol. 11. U of Minnesota P, 1997.

McCormack, Una. “Finding Ourselves in the (Un)Mapped Lands: Women’s Reparative Readings of The Lord of the Rings.” Croft and Donovan,, pp. 309-326

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. Western Michigan University’s Medieval Institute Publications. scholarworks.wmich.edu/mff/.

Mendro, Hannah. ‘“‘Wondered at this Change’: Queer Potential and Telling Silence in the Relationship of Legolas and Gimli.” Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 18, iss. 2, article 8, 2023, scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol18/iss2/

Pacheco, Derek. “‘Funny Queer Fits’: Masculinity and Desire in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3, 2021, pp. 263–82. muse.jhu.edu/article/840215

Pugh, Tison. Queering Medieval Genres. Palgrave, 2004.

Queripel, Rory M. “The Mariner (and his wife): Queering Aldarion’s (A)sexuality,” Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 18, iss. 2, article 12, 2023, scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol18/iss2/12

Reid, Robin Anne. “Bibliography: Feminist, Gender, and Queer Tolkien Scholarship.” Writing from Ithilien. 29 Apr. 2026, robinareid.substack.com/p/bibliography-feministgenderqueer

Reid, Robin Anne, Christopher Vaccaro, and Stephen Yandell, editors. Queer Approaches to Tolkien: Essays on the Many Paths to Middle-earth. McFarland, 2025. Studies in Tolkien. Series Editor Robin Anne Reid.

Reid, Robin Anne, Christopher Vaccaro, and Stephen Yandell, editors. Queer Approaches to Tolkien: Essays on the Many Paths to Middle-earth. McFarland, 2025. Studies in Tolkien. Series Editor Robin Anne Reid.

Vaccaro, Christopher. “‘Dyrne Langað’: Secret Longing and Homo-amory in Beowulf and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 6, 2018, scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol6/iss1/6.

Vaccaro, Christopher, and Yvette Kisor, eds. Tolkien and Alterity. Palgrave, 2017.

Vogt-William, Christine. “Brothers in Arms: Death and Hobbit Homosociality in The Lord of the Rings.” Inklings: Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik, vol. 34, 2017, pp. 81-95

Watt, Diane. “Why men still aren’t enough.” GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 16, iss. 3, 2010, pp. 451-464/

Recommended Medieval Blogs & Substacks:

15th Century Feminist: 15thcfeminist.substack.com/

Shield of Skuld: shieldofskuld.substack.com/

Holly A. Brown: substack.com/@hollyabrown

Lacey Bonar Hull: thehistoriansdesk.substack.com/

Lucy Allen: readingmedievalbooks.wordpress.com/

CFP: “Tolkien, Barfield and the Inklings: Questions of Influence”

Pacific Asian and Modern Language Association Conference (F2F): Nov. 12-15 2026.

Deadline for submitting abstract: May 25, 2026

Danny Smitherman, organizer:

This session welcomes contributions on the topic of literary, philosophical, or intellectual influences between any of the members of the Inklings, especially between J.R.R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield, and the robustness of those claims. Verlyn Flieger’s assertion in Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World, that the languages of Middle-earth developed just as Barfield says human languages do in real life, is perhaps the model of influence, and is well known, respected, and analyzed. But Flieger's argument remains almost entirely circumstantial. The connection between Barfield’s work and thought, and Tolkien’s imaginative creations, remains tentative rather than real and robust if we only look for influences between the two. Is there a more direct connection between the writings of the two? What about influences between other members of the Inklings? And what exactly constitutes "influence"? Any and all original scholarship on this topic is welcome.

The 2026 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 15th through Saturday October 17th.

Virtual sessions will take place via Zoom throughout the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Registration will open up in mid-July. The registration fee is expected to be around 50 USD.

Click here to see the various areas (to choose which one best suits your proposal)! If you have any questions, scroll down to find the Area Chairs’ contact information.

Click here to submit your proposal: the deadline is 5 PM EDT!

You may submit a proposal for a single presentation (by one or two authors), but NEPCA also accepts proposals for full panel presentations (3-4 thematically connected presentations), and for a roundtable discussion (on a specific detailed focus with 4-6 people who actively engage in a discussion).

Timeline: after you submit your proposal, you should receive confirmation that it was received within 24 hours. You should hear if your proposal is accepted or not within three weeks.

Information on scholarships will be available in mid-July.

Lots more information at NEPCA’s website!

I’ve presented at their virtual conference before and can highly recommend the conference (for, many reasons including that their registration fees are the lowest of any of the conferences about!)