The Tolkien Experience Podcast

For this week's episode, we welcome someone who has been influential in Tolkien film fandom from a very early point: Clifford "Quickbeam" Broadway!

As one of several volunteers who helps contribute to the online fan community located at TheOneRing.net, Clifford hosts a live podcast each Tuesday. He also co-produced a documentary entitled Ringers, which chronicles the experiences and perspectives of fans of Peter Jackson's film adaptations, as well as the larger TORn community. This episode is full of heart, so we hope you like it!

We are elated to have with us on this episode a superstar of Tolkien scholarship, John Garth!

John is a writer who is best known to fans of J.R.R. Tolkien for his autobiographical work about the author, entitled Tolkien and the Great War. He has also written numerous articles and other works about the author, and we are delighted that he agreed to be our guest just days before his new book is released!

Listen in to hear details about his latest work, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired the Writer's Imagination! We also cover our usual Tolkien Experience questions, so we get to hear about how he became a huge Tolkien fan early on! We hope you enjoy listening!

For this episode, we are stepping away from academia and diving into the exciting worlds of writing and music with Margaret Killjoy!

Margaret is a writer of book-length fiction, short fiction, and non fiction. Perhaps our listeners will be most interested in her short story "The Free Orcs of Cascadia" published in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. She is also well known for her contributions to music! Our listeners may be particularly interested in her band Feminazgul. You can learn more about Margaret from her website, and even support her on Patreon (where you can also access a lot of her work as a perk of signing up).

It is our absolute privilege to welcome to the podcast a very notable writer and Tolkien scholar: Una McCormack!

A quick glance at Dr. McCormack's website and you quickly learn that she is a New York Times bestselling author and a prolific writer of tie-in novels and short and long fiction. She is an ex-academic and loves to give public talks and engage with fans of science fiction and fantasy. What is less obvious, though, is that Dr. McCormack is also very involved with FanFiction and Fan Studies! We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we loved talking with this wonderful guest!

This week we journey into the realm of fan studies and fanfiction! Our guest this week created a website dedicated to stories fanfiction inspired by The Silmarillion, and has also completed excellent scholarship on fandom: Dawn Walls-Thumma!

Walls-Thumma's website The Silmarillion Writer's Guild is a place where writers of fanfiction that were inspired by Tolkien's work can share their stories, provide feedback for each other, and find a sense of community. We really enjoyed hearing her story about setting up the website, and think it is a great place to visit! You can also find some of her insightful and important scholarship published at The Journal of Tolkien Research. We really hope you enjoy this interview as much as we enjoyed recording it.