What follows is the text of the paper I presented at the 2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies, hosted at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Adjustments have been made to formatting to address expectations of medium.

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That there have been many, many interpretations and adaptations of Tolkien’s Legendarium is obvious. The most prominent of them at this point [1] is likely Peter Jackson’s series of films, which have themselves been taken (in a sort of meta-neomedievalist [2] fashion) as being sources for other, yet later adaptations of Tolkien’s works, such as the Rings of Power series and no few computer-based games. Jackson’s movies are hardly the first adaptations of the Legendarium, however; they are not even the first cinematic adaptations, as the Rankin/Bass animated movies exemplify.

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Outside cinematic media, adaptations of Tolkien’s Legendarium ranged early on into visual arts, not only in covers for the books as published and in interior art from Tolkien himself and from Christopher Tolkien, but also interpretive works by such figures as Karen Wynn Fonstad, Ted Nasmith, John Howe, Alan Lee, and the Brothers Hildebrandt. No few of the images produced in adaptation have taken on pseudo- or semi-canonical status; while they are not themselves the work of The Professor, they are taken as being essential—or, at least, exceptionally helpful—to understanding and interpreting Tolkien’s works. Jackson’s reliance on several of those artists’ works for his films contributes to that taking, admittedly, but there are no few whose engagement with the Legendarium predates 2001 and whose visions of Bilbo, Frodo, and the rest long looked to calendar artwork and prints.

One artistic medium that has not received the sustained attention given to cinema or painting is that of the tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG). That the TTRPG is an artistic medium is argued convincingly by Daniel Mackay [3], and later discussions—along with the increasing multimedia presence of TTRPGs, generally—have served to refine and deepen the conversation surrounding its artistic nature, inherently reaffirming the status of the TTRPG as art. There is an extent to which all art is adaptational, of course, going to definitional questions of “adaptation” and how much representation is intrinsically adaptational, but, more concretely, the TTRPG is, in its origins and principal iteration—Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)—founded on an adaptation of the Legendarium itself.

Mackay speaks briefly to the notion of D&D as adaptation of Tolkien, referencing Dave Arneson’s “fascination with the epic fantasy works of J.R.R. Tolkien” as informing his original work with Gary Gygax to produce wargaming rules—and the D&D rules that emerged from them [4]. Gary Alan Fine also addresses the foundational role Tolkien plays in TTRPGs [5], as does Lawrence Schick in his synopsis of the early history of TTRPGs [6]. Schick’s synopsis also motions toward some of the fraught interactions between D&D and the Legendarium, though it stops short of commenting on a lawsuit that forced changes onto D&D that moved it away from the Legendarium in some ways [7]—for a time.

Despite its ostensible motion away from its antecedent in the Legendarium, D&D continued to borrow heavily from that set of source materials—and other TTRPGs did so as well, to varying degrees. Some, such as the Middle-earth Role-playing Game (MERP), even went so far as to license the Legendarium (and to expand upon what is presented therein [8], sometimes in ways that have not necessarily aged well). More recently, something of a full circle has been drawn as regards D&D’s direct engagement with the Legendarium, with Free League’s The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying, a D&D-compatible rules-set based on and parallel to the descendant of MERP, The One Ring Roleplaying. The adaptations necessary to the production of such games illuminate both how Tolkien continues to be received and how the medieval is mis/used to undergird and inform popular entertainments.

The game makes no secret of its origins [9], and could hardly do so, its primary sourcebook noting in addition to its title on its cover that it is “5th Edition [D&D] Roleplaying in the World of the Lord of the Rings™” and “Based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Said sourcebook divides itself into nine chapters [10]—Prologue, New Rules, Adventurers, Rewards and Virtues, Adventuring Phases, Fellowship Phases, The Loremaster, The Shadow, and The World—and an appendix, offering enough information for those already familiar with the fifth-edition D&D rules to begin a series of games taking place in northwestern Middle-earth in the years between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

That the game expects to take place when it does—“the year 2965 of the Third Age” of the world [11]—marks it off as immediately an adaptation of Tolkien’s works. Tolkien’s narrative attentions largely focus on years surrounding the placement of the game, with The Hobbit taking place in 2941 and The Lord of the Rings taking place mostly though not exclusively in 3018-3019 [12]. While Tolkien does provide some information about the events between, it is largely in the kind of glossed description he shares with the chronicle form; 2965 is lumped into an entry covering 23 years and concerning Aragorn [13]. The game does situate itself in with those events, certainly. For one, a posited letter from Gandalf appears to address Aragorn, though not by name, and makes reference to Tolkien’s chronicle-like entry [14]. Too, the game offers simplification and expansion [15] of Tolkien’s chronicle-entries for the years 2941, 2942, 2951, 2956, and 2957-2965 [16]—necessarily and obviously adaptations of Tolkien’s words to a new medium.

The overt adaptations of time do not stop with accounting for years. Progress of the game is explicitly tied to the narrative forms the main line of the Legendarium (The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings) adopts. The game expects to consist of a series of Adventuring Phases punctuated by Fellowship Phases and the occasional Yule [17], corresponding broadly to such Tolkienian narrative arcs as Bilbo’s journey from the Shire to Rivendell and the time as Elrond’s guest [18], Frodo’s from the home of Tom Bombadil to Bree and the brief time there before the attack of the Nazgûl [19], or even the turbulent history of Túrin and his occasional periods of peace and respite [20]. The Yule phase is another expansion, thus necessarily adaptation, of Tolkien’s work; while the holiday is noted in the Shire-calendar [21], it receives remarkably little narrative attention, but in the game, it is a vital part of character development and progression [22], as well as offering a convenient in-game span for administrative needs [23]. In terms of game-structure no less than of narrative temporal context, then, the game clearly works from and makes explicit changes to its source materials.

Similar adaptation occurs in the geography presented in the primary sourcebook for the game. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings famously provide maps of portions of Middle-earth [24], and the latter offers some discussion of geography in its Prologue and at other points across its narrative. The game grounds itself in that geography, to be sure, quoting from Lord of the Rings in something like epigraphs for the ninth chapter—“The World”—and major sections of the same, as well as presenting the locations in Eriador named in Tolkien’s Prologue, discussed in the Council of Elrond [25], and the like. There are gestures towards other portions of Middle-earth that feature in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but Eriador is asserted as the primary location of the game [26]. This is something of a departure from the Legendarium, which directs most of its narrative attention outside Eriador, either south and east of it as in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, or west of it as in The Silmarillion.

As with narrative time, the geographies of the game receive expansion from their antecedents in the Legendarium [27]. One example is Annúminas, which the indices to The Lord of the Rings report as mentioned thrice, once in each volume, and while it is the case that an editorial remark notes a preference for first-mentions, a number of other locations in the place-index receive an “etc.” note suggesting more appearances than are explicitly detailed [28]. Consequently, it can be understood that while Tolkien’s text makes mention of Annúminas, it does not much dwell upon it. The game, however, devotes several pages to the city, its surroundings, and its inhabitants [29], not only giving details about the status of the ruined city and changes to it in recent years, but also describing remaining populations in the area and the possibilities of things to be found therein.

Another example of geographical expansion comes in the treatment of Bree and its surroundings. In the main line of the Legendarium, Bree is an early respite for Frodo and his companions, one described in some detail and in which Frodo and his companions spend a small amount of time that receives expanded narrative focus [30]; it is one stop along their way, and not the only one, although it is an important one. As with Annúminas, however, the game expands greatly upon the description of Bree and its surroundings given by Tolkien [31]. Not only are the surrounding towns—Archet, Staddle, and Combe—described in detail in the game (as opposed to the glancing mentions given in the main line of the Legendarium), major inhabitants of each and Bree are named and described. Individual locations within the area are presented and developed, and cultural fixtures including schools and festivals are noted. Indeed, Bree is cited as being an ideal “home base” for the players’ characters, a venue where they can have met, from which they can proceed on the adventures that occupy most of the time spent in the game, and to which they can return to recuperate [32]. The shift in attitude toward the location from one stop along the way to a repeated refuge marks yet another adaptation of source material on the part of the game.

One other element of adaptation that bears attention in the game is that of the presentation of race within it. Within the context of TTRPGs, the term functions as something of a blend of discernable ethnic group and species, with members of different “races” often having divergent languages, beliefs, understandings, and physical features that transcend phenotype, as well as often but not always able to fall into romantic and sexual relationships that result in viable, fertile offspring. In this, they largely follow Tolkien, whose Elves and Men are able to give rise to children who can themselves have children, despite being sundered by mortality; whose Elves and Orcs are in their origins a single people, although treated vastly differently by the divine powers at work in their world; and who, as one commentor observes, “conflates race, culture, and ability” [33]. In Tolkien, and in the D&D that borrows at such length from him, there is a strong push towards the idea that “racial difference equals differences in ability, and even morality” [34], and if it is the case that there is argument about such points [35], that necessarily means there is enough in evidence to permit such arguments to occur, and to continue to occur.

Following prevailing TTRPG trends, the Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game excludes penalties associated with being members of one of the player-character races (although it still ascribes them to antagonist groups, following Tolkien’s model). The game does emphasize cultural rather than racial alignment among player characters, although there is some racialization at work: “All cultures presented in this volume belong to the Free Peoples, brave nations that refuse the darkness and are often at open war with it” [36]. It also awards benefits to members of those cultures and peoples and, usefully, does offer some differentiation within them [37]. At times, there are even further adjustments to make based on locality [38], marking out further degrees of adaptation from Tolkien’s works, which tend to present the various cultural groups within races as monolithic in terms of practices (although it might well be noted that the narrative focus across the main line of the Legendarium is on a relative few families, some of whose members live for millennia or longer and which might therefore reasonably be expected to display some homogeneity).

Many of the adaptations by the game of the Legendarium serve to facilitate play. The adjustment of time allows players to inhabit a span where their characters are not and cannot be overshadowed by the major events of already-presented stories while still positioning them in a time when events will be sufficiently familiar as to be readily available for reference and understanding. Playing TTRPGs represents substantial investments of time and resources, and players are not apt to have the stories on which they labor—and it is labor—be relegated to the kind of footnote that encapsulates the deaths of Brand and Dáin II Ironfoot [39]. Setting the stories the game tells in the gaps between Tolkien’s own stories prevents such a thing from happening; there is not a grand narrative going on where the players know about it, so their own stories take on a greater feeling of importance.

The different geographical focus functions similarly, and it helps explain, besides, how such stories as the players tell can exist and not be taken up by the previously-existing narrative; chroniclers cannot be expected to document that of which they are unaware, and it is eminently plausible they will be unaware of events in regions they do not occupy or with which they do not have much exchange. But that they are not already told does not mean they are not worth telling, and players working to have their stories take place in the gaps still allows them to participate in the Middle-earth they presumably love.

The expansion of cultures and subcultures from Tolkien to the game serves to facilitate play by offering players options. One fairly consistent trend among TTRPGs and within individual examples of each is that, as time proceeds, they offer their players more options for play. In D&D, this has meant more spells, more equipment, more races, more classes, more feats—more, more, more. Players generally respond well to having additional choices, as they permit for more exact portrayals of the kinds of characters whose stories they want to tell. While in Tolkien, the cultures represented by such groups as the Fellowship of the Ring are relatively restricted in terms of background and expertise, TTRPG players are more apt to want a breadth of such things from which to draw, and Nepitello et al. provide that to them, giving them more ways to immerse themselves in the Legendarium—and not always in ways Tolkien himself treats at great length, so that greater senses of exploration and agency can develop.

The ways in which the adaptations of the Legendarium, and in which the Legendarium itself, treat Tolkien’s own antecedents do, in some respects, also facilitate play. That there is some need to simplify and streamline (what is known of) “what really happened” is not a new argument [40]. In some ways, it follows Tolkien’s own comments about secondary sub-creation [41]. In the case of the game, the simplification serves to facilitate secondary belief, the kind of immersion that allows a player to inhabit and animate a character—necessarily an incomplete person—within a world whose complexities cannot themselves be fully presented or enacted; the simplification of character demands a simplification of world to be consistent and coherent. In the case of Tolkien, writing for an audience not necessarily familiar with the antecedents but with a sense of them gleaned from non-academic sources and their pervasiveness in popular culture, something similar is at work.

More broadly, the adaptations the game makes to the Middle-earth presented by Tolkien mimic adaptations Tolkien makes to his medieval antecedents in ways that are, themselves, recursively mimetic of medieval practice. That is to say, many of the medieval sources from which Tolkien worked are themselves iterative bodies of work, gatherings of stories that develop from small mentions and are added to by later works across decades and longer. King Arthur offers one easy-to-identify example of such, growing from someone mentioned in Gildas and Nennius to a figure of renown in Geoffrey of Monmouth to a pillar of national identity and dynastic legitimacy by the time of Malory—and the sprawling body of Arthuriana does more yet. Tolkien’s non-Legendarium writings work with and contribute to that body, and even Middle-earth partakes of such things in no small part. For the game, then, to add to Tolkien in adapting him is thus only its authors doing as Tolkien did and as his own sources did; it is a reiteration of the medieval, a suggestion that audiences continue to employ not only the materials but also the methods of their predecessors.

There is, of course, more work to do to illuminate Tolkien’s reception and the mis/uses of the medieval in popular culture. A more detailed investigation of MERP and its descendants could easily be done, given more time and resources than usually pertain to papers presented at conferences. Other games could be interrogated similarly; earlier conference presentations at ICMS offer examples [42]. and each such could be treated in more depth. The unfortunate infatuation of a number of rapacious and execrable people and groups with the Legendarium, their uses of it to cloak their malevolence, misanthropy, misogyny, racism, and any number of other ills, can be and should be more thoroughly interrogated, if only to be more emphatically and effectively opposed. Each bit of explicatory work, each bit of inquiry that tends toward such ends, helps us all, and we can all use as much help as can be found.

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[1] Given the presentation of this paper at the 2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies, its dates of composition can be guessed. That they will not be stated is an artifact of the author being somewhat desultory in effecting that composition and ashamed of the same.

[2] That is to say, a neomedievalist work that has itself become the source-reference for later works’ “medieval” trappings, much as Jackson’s films are neomedievalist in looking back to Tolkien as a source-reference for their own “medieval” trappings, while Tolkien’s works look more or less directly back to medieval sources. Thus, Tolkien’s works are medievalist, Jackson’s are neomedievalist, and those taking Jackson as a source can be called meta-neomedivalist—although it can be admitted readily that a certain amount of silliness begins to crop up in layering terms to this extent (and the presumably logically demanded deeper layerings to follow).

[3] Daniel Mackay, The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art (McFarland & Company, 2001).

[4] Ibid., 14-15.

[5] Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds (University of Chicago Press, 1983), xiii.

[6] Lawrence Schick, Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games (Prometheus Books, 1991), 17-34.

[7] Sources addressing the lawsuit, itself a problematic thing, include (but are hardly limited to) the following: comments from Gygax available at https://web.archive.org/web/20121007050950/https://www.enworld.org/forum/archive-threads/57832-gary-gygax-q-part-iv-4.html#post1026737; Scott Baird, “Lord of the Rings’ Complicated Legal History with Dungeons & Dragons,” ScreenRant, 2 May 2020, https://screenrant.com/lord-rings-dungeons-dragons-dnd-race-controversy-lawsuit/; and Nickolas Ricketts, “Cease and Desist: Don’t Mess with Tolkien,” The Strong National Museum of Play, 22 April 2021, https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/cease-and-desist-dont-mess-with-tolkien/.

[8] Schick, 189-98.

[9] References to the text of the game are to Francisco Nepitello et al., The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying (Free League, 2022).

[10] The structure is perhaps a subtle nod to the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring.

[11] Nepitello et al., 7.

[12] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (Ballantine, 1988), Appendix B. I acknowledge that my citations differ from those prescribed by Tolkien Studies; I am not publishing this paper in that journal, and I do not have the preferred editions of the texts on my shelves, so I have to cite the ones I have. That said, I will do what I can to ensure that readers with other editions than mine can do something to find my references.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Nepitello et al., 6.

[15] Note that simplification, here, is somewhat subjective. Taking as an example the respective entries for 2941, Tolkien’s ranges to 75 words and displays a Flesch Reading Ease of 72, while Nepitello et al. present 82 words with a Flesch Reading Ease of 65.3—yet the syntax in the latter is more consistent and the formatting makes for seemingly easier reading. Expansion, however, is more overt; again, Nepitello et al. appear to use more words than Tolkien, and they offer details of years that Tolkien glosses.

[16] Nepitello et al., 9.

[17] Ibid., 14.

[18] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (Ballantine, 1988), Chs. 1-3.

[19] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Ballantine, 1988), I, Chs. 7-10.

[20] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (Ballantine, 1988), Ch. 21.

[21] Tolkien, Return, Appendix D.

[22] Nepitello et al., 111.

[23] I note with some interest the parallels between the Yule Phase and the Winter Phase of the Pendragon RPG (cf Greg Stafford, King Arthur Pendragon, 5th ed. (Arthaus, 2005), 106-11).

[24] In printing of The Hobbit I have, the maps precede the text on unnumbered pages; in that of The Fellowship of the Ring I have, they appear between the Foreword and the Prologue.

[25] Tolkien, Fellowship, II, Ch. 2.

[26] Nepitello et al., 178-79.

[27] The notable exception in Nepitallo et al. is the Shire, although this can be understood as reflecting the extensive description of the same Tolkien provides in the Prologue to the Lord of the Rings.

[28] Tolkien, Return, Index of Places.

[29] Nepitello et al., 179-82.

[30] Tolkien, Fellowship, I, Chs. 9-11.

[31] Nepitello et al., 182-192.

[32] Ibid., 178.

[33] Paul B. Sturtevant, “Race: The Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre,” The Public Medievalist, 5 December 2017, https://publicmedievalist.com/race-fantasy-genre/.

[34] Ibid.

[35] See, for example, Ruth Lewis, “Provoking Thoughts: Reflections on the Section ‘Legacies of Tolkien’s Whiteness’ in the Call for Papers at the Kalamazoo Medieval Conference in the July 2020 Beyond Bree,” Tales after Tolkien: Travels in Genre and Medievalism, 27 July 2020, https://talesaftertolkien.blogspot.com/2020/07/guest-post-ruth-lewis-provoking.html.

[36] Nepitello et al., 26.

[37] Ibid., 28-43.

[38] Ibid., 183.

[39] Tolkien, Return, Appendix B.

[40] Geoffrey B. Elliott, “Thoughts about Rich Burlew’s ‘The New World’ Articles,” Tales after Tolkien: Travels in Genre and Medievalism, 25 June 2016, https://talesaftertolkien.blogspot.com/2016/06/thoughts-about-rich-burlews-new-world.html.

[41] Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” in “The Monsters and the Critics” and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (HarperCollins, 2006).

[42] A pair of easy-to-find examples are Geoffrey B. Elliott, “Laying Down the Law in the Pendragon RPG,” described at https://elliottrwi.com/research/abstracts/#Laying_Down_Law_Pendragon_RPG, and Geoffrey B. Elliott, “Playing with Medieval(ist?) Religion in Forum-Based Play-by-Post Roleplaying Games: A Case Study,” Tales after Tolkien: Travels in Genre and Medievalism, 17 June 2023, https://talesaftertolkien.blogspot.com/2023/06/playing-with-medievalist-religion-in.html.

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