Tolkien fandom Tolkien fandom Tolkien fandom is an international, informal community of fans of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, especially of the Middle-earth legendarium which includes "The Hobbit", "The Lord of the Rings", and "The Silmarillion". "Fandom" is a term used to describe a specific type of fan subculture. "Tolkien fandom" in this sense sprang up in the United States in the 1960s, in the context of the hippie movement, to the dismay of the author (Tolkien died in 1973), who talked of "my deplorable cultus". A Tolkienist is someone who studies the work of J. R. R. Tolkien: this
J. R. R. Tolkien in a letter to his son Christopher: Tolkien was horrified by the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, referring to the scientists of the Manhattan Project as "these lunatic physicists" and "Babel-builders". During most of his own life conservationism was not yet on the political agenda, and Tolkien himself did not directly express conservationist views—except in some private letters, in which he tells about his fondness for forests and sadness at tree-felling. In later years, a number of authors of biographies or literary analyses of Tolkien conclude that during his writing of "The Lord of the Rings", Tolkien gained