When I was 12 years of age, I got to be fixated on an epic scholarly arrangement. It was more than twice the length War and Peace or Infinite Jest; longer than the whole Harry Potter arrangement, and more than two times the length of The Lord of the Rings, the arrangement on which it was based.
Believe it or not—this 1.2 million word epic is a Lord of the Rings fanfiction arrangement. It's known as the Mellon Chronicles.
Taking its name from the Elvish word for "companion," the Mellon Chronicles takes after the misfortunes of a youthful Aragorn and Legolas. Like romance books, Westerns, and Sherlock Holmes, the Mellon Chronicles take after an equation: a large portion of the 36 stories start with Aragorn and/or Legolas voyaging some place; then one of them gets caught and normally tormented; and after that the other one salvages him. While this depiction won't not seem like it, the Mellon Chronicles were altogether nonsexual—"no slice, no muck," as the maxim went.
At its peak around 2004, the Mellon Chronicles had an active Yahoo Groups list large enough that it was mentioned as one of the biggest fan communities in a book about Tolkien scholarship.
The Aragorn/Legolas friendship was a popular fanfiction genre when the three Peter Jackson-directed movies were coming out in the early 2000s—probably largely thanks to the fact that Aragorn and Legolas were played by the extremely attractive Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom—and the Mellon Chronicles, written by the mysterious Cassia and Siobhan, or Sio, were the most popular of all. At its peak around 2004, the Mellon Chronicles had an active Yahoo Groups list large enough that it was mentioned as one of the biggest fan communities in a book about Tolkien scholarship; fan-made audiobook readings, Photoshopped story art, and YouTube videos; their own fanfiction awards; and a fanlisting. They set Lord of the Ringsfanfiction tropes that other fanfic writers faithfully followed.
Recently, I found Cassia and Sio’s old AOL and Hotmail email addresses linked on a late ‘90s fanfiction website, valarguild.org, and found that one still worked—Sio’s. She looped in Cassia, and the three of us had a long email interview about the Mellon Chronicles and the early days of Lord of the Rings online fandom.
The story of the Mellon Chronicles begins in another fandom. Cassia and Sio—both pen names—connected while writing Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice fanfiction around 1999. This was Cassia’s first online fandom, which she joined at around 18, and Sio’s second, after the TV show The Sentinel.
“She had written this super cool Star Wars story and I contacted her about it,” Sio said. “I was totally in awe of her, which we still laugh about now. But that led to us co-writing our first story, which was actually a Star Wars fic called ‘The Hunted.’”
When the first Lord of the Rings movie came out in late 2001, both Cassia and Sio wrote their own fanfiction—separately. First, in 2002, Cassia wrote a dark short story called “Captive of Darkness,” about a very young Legolas getting captured and tortured (including an implied rape) by evil humans before being rescued by Elrond. Then, Sio wrote a short story about Aragorn and Legolas’ first encounter called “First Meetings,” giving Legolas the history that Cassia wrote for him. After that, Cassia and Sio began collaborating on a story taking place immediately after “First Meetings.”
“It was a wonderful and humbling feeling to see it take on a life of its own like that.”
“I don’t think it was until we were halfway through writing the story that came after that, ‘Exile,’ that we realized this was going to be a series, since by then we realized that ‘Exile’ was going to have to end with something pretty drastic happening, that would then need to be fixed in the following story, ‘Return.’ Even then, we had no idea how long the series would become. Basically, we just kept going as long as the inspiration held,” Cassia said.
Inspiration held for three years, from 2002 until 2005. Cassia and Sio wrote collaboratively, coming up with ideas and outlines in “a flurry of emails back and forth,” and then each writer would choose sections to work on. Stories took from a few months to over a year to complete—and were a considerable amount of work. “I could easily spend between four to eight hours a day writing,” Cassia said. Sio added, “I was actually a horrible employee while we had the MC. I spent half the day writing in between work duties and keeping up with the [Yahoo Groups] List.”Cassia and Sio started the Yahoo Groups list completely by accident. Cassia set up the website to host the stories so they had an archive. They didn’t realize that Yahoo had an automatic Group Mailing List set up with the website, so when they started getting emails about stories they were totally surprised.
“We decided to let it go, thinking we’d only get like a couple of people actually reading,” Sio said.
A couple of people soon turned into a couple hundred, then a couple thousand—and many loved the Mellon Chronicles so much that they wanted to write stories for it as well.
“I think the first time I realized how much others were enjoying the world we'd created was when people started requesting to use our original characters and sometimes the backdrop of the MC world as a whole in their own stories,” Cassia says. “It was a wonderful and humbling feeling to see it take on a life of its own like that.”
The group members were so close that Cassia and Sio sent them Christmas presents each year—once, it was homemade bookmarks; another time, it was keychains. “One Christmas there was something like 13 different countries we sent Christmas gifts to,” Sio says. When the Mellon Chronicles ended in 2005, Cassia and Sio mailed a CD with the text of the entire series on it to every reader who wanted one.
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