The apparent lack of female characters in Tolkien’s Middle-earth Legendarium is a decades old criticism; certainly the imbalance in character development between Tolkien’s male and female characters is hard to miss. Fanfiction has provided Tolkien fans with a way of addressing this, but the lack of canonical characterization for many of Tolkien’s female characters presents fanfiction writers with Tolkien characters who are essentially blank slates. This paper proposes a methodological approach using corpus linguistics and digital texts to study how these characters are depicted in Tolkien fanfiction. I use the character of Lothiriel as a case study to examine how corpus linguistics can be used to find trends in fanfiction depictions that can then be applied to the study of Tolkien fanfiction as a whole and provide a deeper understanding of how Tolkien fans connect with the Professor’s work through this medium.
