@JustinHowe @SFRuminations You got me curious, since “Lai” is a term sometimes used for songs, and I stumbled onto this:

https://t.co/RYToBaFBDx

See especially paragraph 14 and the footnote attached to it! That’s just one paper, though, and for other works, it’s claimed she translated Latin or English… @JustinHowe @SFRuminations But my impression is that vast amounts of writing has always been something like what we’d call “fanfic”: the idea of someone (or an institution) having sole ownership of a narrative or characters is, in the bigger scheme of things, pretty recent and anomalous, I think.