A recent edition of the New York Times Magazine Sunday crossword featured the following clue:

“81 (across): Fictional creature made of slime”

Though I came to this clue late in the game, I got the answer pretty quickly. My first guess was the Marvel comics’ character “The Man-Thing” — a swamp monster from the 1970s who frightened his victims so completely they literally burst into flame—but the answer only had three letters, and the last one was a “c.” So I knew the answer was “orc.” It’s one of those words that the crossword editors can’t get enough of, like Brian Eno’s last name or the French word for water.

As soon as my middle-aged crossword brain had supplied the answer, my teenage nerd brain took issue. The answer was “orc” but it shouldn’t have been.

Orcs, at least as conceived by J.R.R. Tolkien in “The Lord of the Rings,” were NOT made from slime. According to The Silmarillion (the equivalent of the Old Testament of Tolkien mythology), the origin of orcs was uncertain, but seemed to have to do with elves being “corrupted” by the original Dark Lord, Morgoth, way back in the earliest ages of the world, thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings.

The slime birth idea was introduced by Peter Jackson in his film version of The Fellowship of the Ring—one of many pointless add-ons that seemed to be designed to evoke earlier fantasy and horror movies. The use of this “non-canonical” detail as a clue did no credit to the Times Crossword (at least in the eyes of this strict Tolkien literalist), whose editors come off as mere Middle-Earth dilettantes.

On the other hand, I did no credit to myself by getting so annoyed. I am a Tolkien fan, but I am not a fan of being a Tolkien fan. When I first read the books, in my pre-teens, Tolkien was not cool. As far as I could tell, he never would be.

My love of his work was a private thing, a deeply nostalgic and comforting retreat from the outside world, a way to stay sane as a socially awkward kid in suburban New Jersey. I never discussed it with anyone else— in fact the subject made me almost physically uncomfortable. I knew a lot of trivia, and took private satisfaction in it, but sharing that knowledge—one of the most common joys of the modern fandom experience—felt deeply uncool, even humiliating.

It wasn’t just Lord of the Rings that made me feel this way. I was a huge Monty Python fan, but got embarrassed when anyone else started reciting the skits out loud. I was obsessed with The Who, but was outraged when I saw one of the girls in my high school dancing—dancing!—to “Baba O’Riley.”

I know: I sound unbearable. But my attitude towards Tolkien was more that just snobbery—there was something protective in it, as if other people’s experience of his work could somehow taint mine. Tolkien’s books served as a kind of emotional bolt-hole when life got too intense, and remained so even deep into my adult years. I reread Lord of the Rings when my mother died; I reread it when I broke up with my first serious girlfriend; I reread it after September 11th.

This almost narcotic emotional comfort—which had to do with the intense nostalgia and Catholic-tinged sorrow behind Tolkien’s work—is one of the reasons I can’t be level-headed about adaptations of his books. I loathed the Peter Jackson trilogy, and didn’t even bother to watch his version of The Hobbit. I’m usually pretty broadminded about this type of thing: I have no problem when Hollywood changes some detail from the Marvel comics I read as a kid; I am perfectly calm when J.K. Rowling tweets some alteration to the Harry Potter universe; I will give any Shakespeare production the benefit of the doubt, no matter how modern the setting; and I love to hear Beatles songs remixed out of all recognition. But alter Tolkien? I am affronted.

Today—thanks in large part to Jackson’s films—everyone has at least a working knowledge of Tolkien’s universe. The same way everyone knows that Darth Vader is Luke’s father, everyone knows that there are nine Ringwraiths; that Galadriel is the queen of Lorien, and that hobbits expect to eat two breakfasts a day. One of Stephen Colbert’s signature bits involves his status as a Tolkien expert. Audiences love it when he geeks out and recites the names of the Valar, or drops a reference to the wizard Saruman into a monologue on the GOP’s latest insanity. And more to the point, almost every one of these jokes lands.

When I finished the crossword that day, I clicked on a “Words to Know” link below the puzzle, which took me to a piece from June 19, 2020 that defined the word “Orc” for puzzled NYT crossword enthusiasts.

The piece itself was straight forward, and had some interesting information about non-Tolkien related uses of the word, but it was the comments that caught my attention. The first was pure nerd-level snark, quibbling with the writer’s comparison of Orcs to gnomes. A few lines down, someone introduced a major point of Tolkien’s fictional theology, which is that none of his supernatural characters had the ability to create life on their own. That is the sole prerogative of Eru, the analogue to God in Tolkien’s world. Therefore the article’s assertion that Tolkien’s orcs were “created by Morgoth…” was false.

This comment in turn made someone else point out that the traitorous wizard Saruman did not “create” his army of specialized orcs (as depicted in the movie), but crossbred some of Sauron’s orcs with regular humans (a detail that is incredibly disturbing if you think about it too long.)

Finally, someone else chimed in to sound a “nerd alert,” but meant it as a compliment. If you had told 13 year old me that being a Tolkien nerd would one day be celebrated in the New York Times, I would have not believed you.