The Lord of the Rings fanfic that’s over 10 times longer than the books

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy runs 558,003 words long, making it a lengthy book series by any measure. That said, modern fantasy authors have it beat. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series clocks in at 1,736,054 words, and there are still a couple books left to write. And The Wheel of Time series — which was begun by Robert Jordan and finished by Brandon Sanderson — runs a staggering 4,287,886 words.

But there’s another fantasy work that has them beat: At the Edge of Lasg’len, a Lord of the Rings fanfic jointly written by Stevie Barry and AnnEllspethRaven. This fic, which you can read for yourself at Archive of Our Own, the internet’s foremost repository of fanfiction, currently sits at 5.6 million words, and it’s not finished. If it were published as a paperback, it would run around 20,000 pages and weigh 62 pounds.

According to Slate, Ann only discovered fanfic in 2016 after watching The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, so the fic hasn’t been too long in the writing, either; for comparison’s sake, the 14 Wheel of Time books came out over a period of 23 years between 1990 and 2013. Ann and Barry have blown past its word count in a matter of years.

At the Edge of Lasg’len is a Lord of the Rings fanfic set in modern times

At the Edge of Lasg’len follows a character named Earlene who travels from New York to Ireland and gets caught in the lives of elves who never left Middle-earth for the uttermost West, as happens in Tolkien’s mythology. Character’s from Tolkien’s books, like Thranduil, end up mixing with original human characters in “a tale of social collapse, families that grow under one very large roof, battles against past and present traumas, prejudices, and the slow return of the great First Age Elves to the light of day.”

“Reading that first fic and encountering a complex written work that explored social, political, and deeply difficult emotional topics using these familiar characters—that was the lightning bolt,” Ann said. “These characters I already knew were really archetypes, able to be further sculpted and used as messengers for my own themes and narratives.”

Ann and Barry write At the Edge of Lasg’len together, with Barry working mostly on the human elements while Ann handles the elves. It’s not a terribly common practice, but it fits with the heavily collaborative and transformative nature of fanfic.

“Ideas spawned more ideas, and on it went,” Barry said. “I think we first started registering how very unusual the length was at around the 3-million-word mark.”

At the same time, the authors didn’t set out to try and write the longest fanfic ever. “What mattered was that they were well-written words,” Ann said. And they need a lot of words to tell this tale, which proposes to tell the end of the story started in the first book of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, “Ainulindalë,” where the author lays out how the godlike Ainar beings sung the world into existence. “But Tolkien never wrote how the song would end,” Ann said. “We are finishing the ‘Ainulindalë,’ writing the grand epic of how the First Music concludes.”

"That is why it was becoming one of the longest fics in existence—we bit off the big one. We probably each sat in our respective chairs, shrugged, and thought, well, we’re out of our minds, we won’t run out of things to do, it might be done before 7 million words, guess we’ll find out. Then we thought of another subplot and started typing again."

There are a lot of fan works out there on the internet, so it’s hard to tell if At the Edge of Lasg’len is really the longest work of fiction in the English language; it’s periodically traded the top spot back and forth with Future Shock, a Sarah Connor Chronicles, a Terminator fanfic. But regardless of how long it actually ends up being when it’s finished, Lasg’len is a potent reminder of what a powerful motivating force fandom can be, and how creative so many fans are.

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