Everything But The Girls

When I started this site, I said I'd be writing some het fics. More than one reader has asked where the the het fics are. Good question! The muses haven't brought me many, to be honest. This is very strange, because the unfinished original novel languishing on my disk drive (who hasn't got one?) has a nearly all-women list of dramatis personae.

Writing fanfic about Tolkien's women characters can be challenging. Lord of the Rings has few female characters. I don't feel that the female characters in The Silmarillion are very accessible - everyone is a princess or queen or great lady. It's tempting to create originals (OFCs), but amongst Tolkien fanfiction readers, there is a lot of criticism of OFCs because of bad OFC fanfiction. 

The main het story I've written, Bright and Dark, showed me how difficult it was to eroticise the puissant beauties Tolkien pictured. I struggled to keep this story of Galadriel and her suitors out of bodice-ripping historical romance territory; the Tolkienesque language brought it frighteningly close at times. Another het story, The Third Way, focuses on the male character Maeglin's point of view as he enjoys raping a hapless woman. This was written as a present for a friend who likes darkfic and Maeglin.

My personal favorite of my het stories, Cuivienyarna, is a Tolkien fan indulgence as well as a story about the pleasures and fears of gender and sex. It's based on one of the most sexually ambiguous moments in Tolkien canon: his sentient-being creation myths. In Tolkien's Middle-Earth mythos, the first 144 paired-off Elves were set on earth at a place called the Mere of Cuivienen and woken up, pair by pair. They made words and sang and, presumably, did daily life activities until the Valar arrived. Me being me, I had to wonder: where does the sex come in? Hence this story. The elf-man Elen, the elf-woman Elenye, and the evil spirit clad in a prehistoric body, Telvido, are all mentioned in History of Middle-Earth materials.

For a wider range of Tolkien fanfiction with women characters, I recommend the Henneth Annun web site. There's lots of Eowyn stories, some Arwen and Aragorn romance, tales about Finduilas (mother of Boromir and Faramir), Idril, Aredhel, and of course Galadriel. The original female characters here give the genre a good name again, ranging from disposessed queens and female spies and soldiers to camp followers and canny whores. Guess which ones are my favorites?  

Original site content copyright Tyellas, 2009. Fan fiction on this site may include characters, settings, places, and languages that are the property of the Tolkien Estate, Tolkien Enterprises, and possibly New Line Cinema. No money or other remuneration is received for presenting these works. The work is the intellectual property of the author, is available for free to all global readers, and may not be copied or redistributed by any means without the explicit written consent of the author.