Elfcon - "Elfconners" - Debate

Debate

Resentment at these restrictions led to accusations that other people were wrongly denied access to the material, and the issue resulted in a hostile split beginning in 1994 among the (then) more prominent Tolkien's fans, and accusations of secrecy and cabal-forming against the editorial team.

The first public reflection of the conflict appeared on the Tolklang mailing list on 28 October 1996 with a post by Lisa Star, the editor of the fanzine Tyalië Tyelelliéva, entitled Failure of Elfconners. In her post, Star impatiently calls for rapid publication of the material then in possession of the group for at least four years. In a reply of 4 November 1996, the four team members counter that they do not have the permission to publish all material, and even if they did, it would take years to decipher and edit it, and that Star's outrage was due to a misunderstanding. In 2004, Hostetter states that he still does not have (and never will have) permission to publish any of his group's work with Tolkien's papers without the review and approval of the Tolkien Estate's lawyers for copyright reasons.

On 6 November 1996, David Salo posted on the list a detailed and very critical report of a visit to Hostetter in Washington, D. C. ("I felt surprised, especially at the extreme insularity of his group. I did not and do not feel that to be a healthy attitude"). In a reply on the following day, Hostetter dismissed Salo's report as insulting and partly false. The conflict continued both online and offline for several years.

Since the late 1990s, portions of the disputed material are being published in the E.L.F. journal, Vinyar Tengwar, and in Parma Eldalamberon. While this seems to have appeased some critics of the "Elfconners", much remains unpublished.

In a 2001 article in Wired, Erik Davis reports on the issue, adding allegations that the "Elfconners" had attempted to prevent publications by other scholars: "…the Elfconners have behaved as informal copyright police, pressuring other linguists not to publish their dictionaries and grammars". Hostetter claims that he has never objected to Fair Use of Tolkien's works, but argues that dictionaries of Tolkien's languages (and potentially, though less clearly, grammars, depending on the proportion of quoted to original material), due to their wholly derivative nature, do not constitute Fair Use, and thereby violate the Estate's copyright, drawing parallels to Marc Okrand's Klingon and to the Estate's lawsuit against Michael Perry's Tolkien chronology. The latter suit was eventually dismissed by a district court after Perry made substantial changes to the work that satisfied the Estate's original objection to its publication, and the parties reached an out-of-court settlement.

For the critics of the "Elfconners", the story is reminiscent of similar scholarly controversies surrounding unpublished philological material (for example the Dead Sea Scrolls and the mycenaean Thebes tablets) in which some scholars are accused of having abused their privileged access to unpublished material to enhance their own prestige. The editorial team, in reply to this charge, notes the fact that, unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, Tolkien's manuscripts are owned by and under the copyright of the Tolkien Estate, which thus has the right to restrict access to them and their publication as they see fit. Some have drawn comparisons to the dispute resulting in the creation of Lojban, wherein Loglan creator James Cooke Brown attempted to assert copyright over the language, a claim contested by the creators of Lojban, the Logical Language Group. However, the copyright dispute never went to court, as Brown decided to press a trademark infringement case instead.