Because Stephen Colbert is Faramir!
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How much do I love this? By a lot!
Sidewaysedly, with ithiliana's feedback I submitted the following paper proposal to the Tolkien area at Kalamazoo for next year:
Constructing Lothίriel: Rewriting and Rescuing the Women of Middle Earth from the Margins
Scholars of fan studies believe that fanfiction can be seen as an interpretive and analytical act that gives insight into the reception of a text by its audience. This paper will examine the depiction of Tolkien’s female characters in The Lord of the Rings and related works through the lens of fanfiction: How do Tolkien’s most loving and devoted readers, his fans, view the women of Middle-Earth? In the case of significant characters like Éowyn and Arwen, quite a bit is known and thus fan-writers have various resources to work with as source references, including the texts as well as the earlier drafts of the novels as published in The History of The Lord of the Rings. In the case of other characters such as Lothíriel, their presence is little more than (quite literally) a footnote. As a genre of literature, fanfiction functions both as derivative work (in that some writers conscientiously choose to ascribe to Tolkien’s canonical texts and display a wealth of knowledge of these texts, linguistically and historically) and as transformative work as writers choose to select, ignore, or rewrite those aspects of Tolkien’s work they find problematic. In the body of scholarly work on Tolkien and fanfiction thus far, little attention has been paid attention to how writers have chosen to characterize the women characters, or what stories, genres, and tropes have been used in these stories. By reading the poems, short stories, and even novels that fans have written inspired by these characters, a new picture of the women of Middle Earth emerges: one in which women aren’t always fabulously beautiful or amazingly brave, but take their place alongside the male denizens of Tolkien’s universe all the same. This paper will contain several case studies of how various fan-writers have adopted and adapted Tolkien’s creations to tell their own stories of these characters.
I'm not sure when I'll find out whether it's accepted or not, but I have my fingers crossed!!