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Tolkien fandom is an international, informal community of fans of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, especially of the Middle-earth legendarium which includes The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.

There are heavily contrasted internal divisions within the current "movement", which have wracked the fandom up to the present day and show no signs of reconciliation at any point in the future. Written preference for any one of a pair of two diametrically opposed internal factions can be met with swift reprisal, although the differences are not necessarily or in all cases divisive.

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) was published in 1954 and The Hobbit prelude in 1937, and bootleg paperbacks eventually found their way into colleges in the U.S.A. in the 1960s. The "hippie" following latched onto the book, but a great many did so for possibly misguided reasons; some openly stated that they felt the Dark Lord Sauron represented the United States military draft during the Vietnam War; an impossibility given the fact that the work was written by a World War I veteran during World War II and published over a decade before escalations in Vietnam. This led to "mainstream" groups to label LOTR as some sort of "hippie book", which was simply not the case: even Tolkien called them The Deplorable Cultus, stating that "Many American fans enjoy the books in a way which I do not".

The number of fans (and the number of people who will admit in public to being fans) has increased enormously due to the benefits of mass media and advertising, as has the number of people who have read of or at least heard of the books.