FellowsHub is an interactive reference portal for studying mid-twentieth-century fanzines and fan culture surrounding the works of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973). The site is based on the extensive collection of Tolkien-related fanzines gathered by Sumner Gary Hunnewell of Arnold, Missouri and donated to Marquette University. Mr. Hunnewell began assembling his collection of historical fanzines in the 1970s. A prominent Tolkien fan, Hunnewell has published and presented under the name Hildifons Took. 

FellowsHub is a collaboration of Raynor Memorial Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Lab, Library Information Technology Department, and Department of Special Collections and University Archives.

Overview

FellowsHub is the first iteration of an ambitious project to digitize and make accessible the extensive Tolkien-related fanzine collection of Sumner Gary Hunnewell (a.k.a. Hildifons Took).

FellowsHub currently provides access to selected Tolkien-related material within fan magazines (i.e. zines) published from 1956 to 1968. The site allows full-text searching across the corpus of digitized fanzine material.  

Individual records for the zine titles, their creators, and the Tolkien-related items within each issue can also be browsed thanks to faceted taxonomies built using metadata culled from the zines and indexed by the open-source Drupal content management platform. Visitors can export zine data as XML files for further analysis.

Item-level records link to digital scans of the fanzine content, enabling visitors to read through the zines themselves.      

The FellowsHub team is extremely grateful to Sumner Gary Hunnewell for his amazing work in Tolkien Fandom Review. Hunnewell’s detailed bibliographical indexes guided the selection of fanzine material for this project and the creation of metadata at all levels.  

Copyright

Copyright law will prevent FellowsHub from publishing every fanzine in the Hunnewell Collection. The FellowsHub team has worked with Marquette’s Office of the General Counsel to devise a strategy for determining which fanzines can be published. For more information, see The FellowsHub Journey Continues: An Adventure in Copyright.  

If you are a copyright holder who believes FellowsHub has published your work without your permission, please email William Fliss. Valid claims will result in the content being taken down from the site.

FellowsHub is a non-commercial site published for the purposes of scholarly research and enjoyment by fan enthusiasts.

As part of the transcriptions process from the original printed manuscript, the following unique formatting conventions were adopted.  Please note the following which may appear in the full text:

Unique Formatting

As part of the transcriptions process from the original printed manuscript, unique formatting conventions were adopted. Please view the unique formatting page for more information on what may appear in the full text.

Project Team

FellowsHub is an intensely collaborative effort by full-time staff and part-time student workers and interns at Raynor Memorial Libraries. Success has depended on professional expertise drawn from multiple units across the library.

Professional staff:

  • William Fliss, Tolkien Archivist
  • Elisabeth Kaune, Coordinator of Technical Services
  • Eric Kowalik, Instructional Designer
  • Brendan Lenzner, Web and Digital Scholarship Technologies Librarian
  • Danelle Orange, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship and Programs
  • Elizabeth Wawrzyniak, Digital Humanities Specialist

Student Workers and Interns:

  • Zach Belyaev
  • Omar Campos
  • Abigail Joranger
  • Elliott Neal
  • Mark Wisniewski