Fanfiction

The now transmedial storyworld of Middle-earth not only fascinates many readers and cinema fans, but also inspires thousands of fanfiction authors worldwide. But to what extent do fans who expand their favourite storyworlds by writing actually intervene in the character constellations? This question was the focus of the last lecture of our seminar's Degree Conference. This project group showed particularly clearly just how far enthusiasm for a topic can drive a research process: In addition to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit , a total of 28 completed fanfictions were read in order to manually extract the character occurrences for a network analysis - after all, there is currently no standardised automatic form of network creation for the narrative form of this genre.

The hobbit 's network created in this way shows a special form that is very typical of the history: The comparatively numerous main characters of the dwarven community with Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins are clustered in the centre. Around this "ball of hair" are grouped less strongly connected figures. The gender ratio of this narrative is also special: around 97% of the characters in the network are male (very weakly connected characters with fewer than 5 connections were only included in the network in exceptional cases).