kurosmind
replied to your post “kurosmind
answered your question “Honest question to the Bagginshield…”

Anyway, on a more serious note, I wonder if there was some occurring at the beginning of 2013 that started the whole “One” trend? Maybe a spike in soulmate AUs prompt on tumblr or something? or there was something about the fact of dwarves falling in love only once…

There’s two pieces of Canon that could back it up – (to paraphrase) Tolkien’s quote about dwarves loving only once or not at all, and that many dwarves never bother to get into relationships especially because their population is only 1/3 women (which I think combined with Gimli’s statement based on the LotR appendix that dwarf men and women are indistinguishable is what led to a lot of the gender play fic we see in the Hobbit fandom, and the general liberty with which authors treat dwarven conceptions of gender despite lack of canon representation of female dwarves or in fact any dwarf in a relationship). 

The other is the similar statement that Elves only love once* (*some terms and conditions may apply, for example Finduilas in Children of Hurin, so Elves are monogamous unless it’s plot related apparently). Furthermore, that elves actually fade if their love is denied, as a broken heart is one of the few things that can kill these immortal beings besides injury. Kinda goes along with Tolkien having so many of his races be Biologically Catholic as I like to call it, so he never has to address things like infidelity in immortal relationships, they’re all strictly monogamous by default. 

That I think combined with popular soulmate trends which may have indeed been doing the rounds early in 2013 may have lead to someone using “One” as shorthand to describe a soulmate, and applying that to Tolkien’s world. As I’ve said elsewhere, I totally understand why it’s a useful word, it just rubs me the wrong way because Tolkien’s world is SO linguistically based and unlike most other fandoms where fanon runs rampant because the writers didn’t provide backstory on every little thing, Tolkien actually HAS provided backstory on an exhaustive amount of Middle Earth’s culture and history, so there’s a lot of fanon where there doesn’t really need to be any. Again, which is totally fine, I just hope that people are conscious of what is fanon and what is canon because the canon can in fact be very rich and rewarding to work from and a lot of stuff that ends up in fanon often comes from other fandoms and carries with a lot of very tired, overused tropes (so many yaoi tropes…. so many…). 

TL;DR The “One” thing is not without basis in Tolkien’s world, he just never used that word for it, and I’m still not sure who was the first author to apply it to Hobbit fic.