Around the World and Web

Tolkien of Colour Week 2023

Tolkien of Colour Week will run 31 July - 6 August 2023 on Tumblr and AO3.

Any form of content is welcome. Tag @tolkienofcolourweek in your post and #tocweek2023.

This year there is a Ao3 collection!

The prompts below are only suggestions. There are two sets of prompts - Peoples | Themes. You can use both sets of prompts or just one.

Day 1: Ainur | Faith, Hope, Festivals

Day 2: Elves | Home, Lands, Journeys

Day 3: Men | Ancestors/Descendants, Tradition, Stories

Day 4: Dwarves | Music, Artwork, Clothing

Day 5: Hobbits | Family, Friendship, Romance

Day 6: Mixed | Community, Language, Belonging

Day 7: Freeform | Intersectionality, Sexuality, Gender, Intersex, Disability

Call for Papers: 2024 Kalamazoo Congress

The 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies will be held in a hybrid format, Thursday through Saturday, 9-11 May 2024) at Western Michigan University. Six sessions on Tolkien are offered this year. Note that some sessions are in-person and others are virtual.

• Tolkien's Leeds Legacy: A Reconsideration of His Work as a Medievalist (In-person)
• Tolkien and "The Battle of Maldon" (In-person)
• Tolkien’s Problematic Medievalisms, A Roundtable (In-person)
• Flora, Fauna & Fantasy: Medieval Poets and J.R.R. Tolkien, co-sponsored with the Pearl Poet Society. (Virtual)
• Here Be Dragons: Tolkien at the Medieval Margins (co-sponsored with Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow: Virtual)
• Tolkien and Disability (co-sponsored with Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages: Virtual)

Proposals are due by 15 September 2023.

Call for Papers | Paper Proposal Guidelines

Multifandom Poetry Fest 2023

Welcome to the seventh annual Multifandom Poetry Fest, a prompt fest for poetry for all fandoms!

Rules

1) Leave a prompt in the form of fandom, characters or relationships, prompt. If you don’t want to specify the fandom or characters, you can say "any." One prompt per comment. Leave as many prompts as you like.

2) Reply to other people’s prompts with poems. The poems can be any length or form, or no form. Quality isn’t important--the point is to have fun, not to produce deathless works of art. (Any deathless works of art produced are just a bonus.)

The Multifandom Poetry Fest AO3 collection is here.

Get started leaving prompts and poems here!

LotR Ladies Week 2023

LotR Ladies Week will be a week-long event hosted on Tumblr, in order to celebrate the female characters in and around J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The event will run 17-23 July 2023.

We welcome all forms of fan creations centered around the women in the series: be it fics, fanart, edits, gifs, fanmixes, or whatever else you’d like to make!

Guidelines

• Tag your posts with #lotrladiesweek and mention @lotrladiessource
• We’re focusing on female characters from The Lord of the Rings itself & ones with connections to it, such as Second Age characters like Tar-Miriel, and characters from The Hobbit like Belladonna Took. There are many other amazing women from The Silmarillion and such, but this is the LotR ladies' chance to shine!
• Fanwork of all kind is welcome--art, fanfic, gifsets, graphic/aesthetic edits, fanmixes, headcanons, crafts, anything!
• Per our usual policy, we will not reblog NSFW content.
• Bigotry of any kind will not be tolerated.

Prompts

(Note: the prompts are completely non-mandatory and can be mixed and matched however you would like to use them! They’re just meant to provide a range of creative inspiration and you don’t have to use them at all!)

• Day 1: Hobbits | Warm colours | Resilience | Music/Lyrics | Fairytales & Legends
• Day 2: Women of the North | Cool colours | Love | Minimalism | Family
• Day 3: Dwarrowdams | Monochrome | Joy | Motifs | Language
• Day 4: Women of the South | Black & white | Courage | Typography | Parallels
• Day 5: Elves | Pastels | Grief | Portraits | Archetypes
• Day 6: Original Characters | Complementary Colours | Anger | Faceless | Textual ghosts
• Day 7: Freeform | Multicolour | Hope | Blending | Alternate Universes

Tolkien Pinup Calendar 2024

The Tolkien Pinup Calendar compiles a calendar of risque fanart of your favourite Tolkien characters! Most of the art is commissioned and in that way we are helping to support fan artists. There are other ways to participate, see the ‘roles’ section under FAQ.

In addition to the calendar, Main Commissioners can also submit fics inspired by the art! There will be an AO3 collection with the fics revealed at the end of the event.

Sign-ups are now open for main commissioners, artists, and donators!

To submit any ideas or view those others suggested, take a look at our Ideas Form post!

Frequently Asked Questions

Schedule

2023 Masterlist | Video | Downloadable Calendar for 2023

This is an 18+ event.

Just Leave a Comment Fest 2023

Just Leave a Comment Fest will run on Tumblr from 10-14 July 2023 with the objective of leaving as many comments during that time as possible. Daily themes are below but do not have to be used; the purpose is to rack up as many comments as possible.

Themes:
July 10: Old Fics/New Fics
July 11: <2K Words
July 12: AUs
July 13: Rarepair/Platonic
July 14: Surprise Flavor!

Post your totals at the end of the week using the tag #justleaveacomment.

July Challenge at tolkienshortfworks (Dreamwidth)

The July Challenge for tolkienshortfanworks on Dreamwidth has been posted. 

The thematic challenge is:

a contrast in temperature, such as: hot/cold, sweltering/freezing, fire/ice, etc.



The formal challenge is:

news.

How does current news spread in Middle-earth? 

Is it sung by bards and minstrels? Are there town criers? Are there broadsheets in large cities? Do military or administrative subordinates make regular reports?

Alternatively, can you imagine Valinorean radio or podcasts? A Fourth-Age website? 

These prompts can be filled separately and freely combined with other challenges.

More details on the tolkienshortfanworks challenges at the linked Dreamwidth community post.

New participants welcome.

Interchanging Melodies: Online Summit on Tolkien and Religion

Interchanging Melodies aims to bring together diverse (a)religious voices to dialogue, lecture, and reflect on Tolkien's theology, his religious outlook, and (a)religious engagement with Tolkien from scholars and fans. The featured speakers will engage with topics from Tolkien from atheist/agnostic/animist perspectives to Tolkien and spiritual direction.You will have access to pre-recorded and live talks and interviews with Tolkien aficianados, where you can engage with them, ask the big questions about Tolkien, and incorporate these engagements into your own Tolkien experience.

Everyone will have access to lectures and interviews from ten notable Tolkien scholars that you can watch live or at your own pace. We will host online spaces where you can nerd out with other Tolkienists, ask speakers questions, and discover where you can interact with the featured Tolkien scholars' ongoing work.

Registration is donation-based, which can be free if that is what you can afford.

The complete Interchanging Melodies speaker list, schedule, and sign-up form can be found here.

Tolkien Gen Week 2023

This is a week to appreciate all of the incredible characters and relationships within Tolkien’s legendarium that fall under the broad category of “gen.” There is a great wealth of wonderful gen content in the Tolkien fandom, but those creations are not always the most visible because of the shipping-focused nature of fandom at large. This week is an effort to give them the appreciation they deserve.

Tolkien Gen Week began in 2018 and occurred again in 2020, 2021, and 2022, and we’re back for more from July 4-10, 2023!

Any content and creations are welcome as long as it is non-romantic and non-sexual! You can create edits, gifs, fanart, fanfic, fanmixes, and more! Please tag your posts with #tolkiengenweek AND @ mention this blog @tolkiengenweek so they can be easily found. If your submission turns into a long post, please put what you can beneath a “Keep reading” divider. You may also post your creations to our AO3 collection.

Below are some prompts for each day of the week. They are not mandatory, but they are here to inspire you. This post will lead to an explanation for each one.

1. DAY ONE: Family ● Mentorships ● Community
2. DAY TWO: Friendship ● Animals ● Group Dynamic
3. DAY THREE: Gray Spaces ● Enemies and Rivalries ● Fealty
4. DAY FOUR: Solo ● Work and Craft ● Language
5. DAY FIVE: Culture ● Diversity ● Traditions
6. DAY SIX: Environment ● Places ● Objects and Symbols
7. DAY SEVEN: Freeform

This event is being organized by @arofili. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to message this blog or my main.

For further clarification, check out our about, FAQ, code of conduct, and prompts pages! Happy creating!!

Independent Archives Survey

I have been running an independent archive for over sixteen years now. During that time, I've watched the Silmarillion Writers' Guild go from one archive of many in a crowded field to one of the only independent archives that remains active. Furthermore, the options available to build your own archive have dwindled, leaving fans who want a greater variety of archive choices without much of one.

Last year, I started thinking about how to support the rekindling of independent archives and drafted a tutorial for how to build an archive in Drupal (the platform the SWG uses) that I plan to record this summer. However, this is not the only approach. The recent attention drawn to various issues with the OTW/AO3 has only hastened the importance of fans having the option again of building their own archives.

It's my first day of summer break. I have two months to tackle what I can of this issue, so to get a handle on where people are on the subject and where it's best to focus my energy, I've put together a survey on independent archives.

If you create or read/view fanworks, I want to hear from you! You do not need to have interest in independent archives. Responses are anonymous, and the survey will remain open through 7 July 2023.

You can take the independent archives survey here.

Signal boosts and reblogs are much appreciated so that I can hear from as broad a group of participants as possible.

Going forward, I will be tagging Tumblr updates related to this work #independent archives.