The Tolkien Society

What happened

By the late 1960s The Lord of the Rings had become a campus phenomenon. The cheap American paperbacks of 1965 — first the unauthorized Ace edition, then the authorized Ballantine one (see The Ace Paperback Affair) — had put the book into a vast new readership, and the slogans of "Frodo Lives!" were being scrawled on subway walls. Not every admirer liked the company the book was keeping. Vera Chapman, then in her early seventies, was dismayed to see Tolkien claimed by the drug culture, and decided that the book's serious readers needed a home of their own.

Chapman had credentials for the job. Born in Bournemouth in 1898, she had been one of the first women to matriculate as a full member of Oxford University, at Lady Margaret Hall. In November 1969 she announced the formation of the Tolkien Society in the fanzine The Middle Earthworm and in a New Statesman personal column that reached newsstands on 6 November, the date the society counts as its founding. The inaugural meeting followed on 29 January 1970. In its early years the society was a London affair: members met in Chapman's flat in north London and kept in touch through a photocopied newsletter, Belladonna's Broadsheet, named for the pen-name she used in the society — Belladonna Took, after Bilbo Baggins's adventurous mother in The Hobbit. Chapman served as the society's first secretary, and in 1975, at 77, published the first of her own Arthurian novels, later collected as The Three Damosels.

In June 1972 she persuaded J. R. R. Tolkien himself to become the society's honorary president. When Tolkien died in September 1973, the title was retained in perpetuo; his daughter Priscilla later became honorary vice-president on the same terms. The American counterpart of the period, the Tolkien Society of America founded in 1965, went a different way, merging in 1972 into the Mythopoeic Society.

A year after Tolkien's death, a suggestion in a fanzine called Nazgul led to the first Oxonmoot, held on 13–15 September 1974 at the Welsh Pony pub on George Street in Oxford. Delegates visited the Bodleian Library and the Eagle and Child — the pub where The Inklings had met — and laid a wreath at Tolkien's grave in Wolvercote Cemetery, reciting verse in his invented languages. They agreed to meet again every year. They still do.

Why it mattered

The Tolkien Society gave the counterculture's favorite book a second, quieter constituency: readers who treated Middle-earth as literature and as a Secondary world worthy of close study. Its two periodicals divide that work neatly. Amon Hen, the members' bulletin, appears six times a year with news, letters, and art; Mallorn, the annual journal, is peer-reviewed and publishes scholarship on Tolkien's languages, sources, and reception. The society registered as an educational charity on 7 July 1977 — the same year The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, reopened the whole legendarium to study.

Just as important was the calendar. Members raise a Birthday Toast to "the Professor" on 3 January. Tolkien Reading Day, launched in 2003, falls on 25 March, the date in the book when the Ring goes into the fire. A spring gathering, a summer Seminar that began in 1986, and Oxonmoot in September — traditionally timed near 22 September, the shared birthday of Bilbo and Frodo — turned private reading into shared ritual. Local branches, called smials after the hobbit word for a burrow, carried the society beyond London and beyond Britain.

For fantasy culture more broadly, the society was a proof of concept. It showed that a fandom could organize around a single author and a single imagined world, sustain itself for decades, and produce real scholarship alongside costumes and pub quizzes — a pattern later echoed by communities around Dragonlance, The Wheel of Time, and A Song of Ice and Fire.

Legacy

Since 1991 Oxonmoot has been hosted by Oxford colleges, among them Lady Margaret Hall — Chapman's own — from 2009 to 2014, St Antony's from 2015 to 2019, and St Anne's from 2021. Attendance usually runs to a few hundred; the 2018 gathering, which coincided with the Bodleian's major Tolkien exhibition, drew more than 300. Each weekend still closes with Enyalië, the remembrance at the Wolvercote grave where Tolkien lies beside his wife Edith under the names Beren and Lúthien.

The society's fiftieth anniversary was marked by Tolkien 2019, held on 7–11 August 2019 at a hotel in Birmingham, the city of Tolkien's boyhood. Planned for around 500 attendees — roughly twice a normal Oxonmoot — it was billed as the largest celebration the society had ever staged. Since 2014 the society has also presented annual Tolkien Society Awards for scholarship and fandom, and it has placed blue plaques at sites connected with Tolkien's life.

The society's constituency shifted as Middle-earth moved from paperback to screen. Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy brought a new generation to the books, and later adaptations such as The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power kept the society's commentators busy — part of the long, often contentious The Tolkien Rights Saga in which it has no commercial stake. Its role has remained what Vera Chapman intended in 1969: a place where Tolkien is read closely, argued over, and toasted, in Oxford and wherever the smials have spread.