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Here Be Dragons Exchange 2023

Hello, and welcome to the Here Be Dragons Multifandom Exchange! We're here to celebrate dragons through art and fic (1000 words or a finished piece of art, of any rating). All sorts of dragons are welcome, including dragons from various cultural traditions, original dragons, and dragons from any fandom.

As this is a dragon exchange, all stories must include a dragon! We've elaborated on eligible dragons below, but if you have any questions about the eligibility of a specific dragon please feel free to ask. Comments are unscreened.

Nominations are currently open at the tag set!

Quick Links: 2023 Collection | Tag Set | Evidence Post

Schedule:

November 29–December 4: Nominations
December 4–5: Nominations Cleanup
December 6–December 18: Signups
December 20: Assignments Out By This Date
January 22: Assignments Due
February 3: Work Reveals
February 12: Creator Reveals

*all due dates/reveals are at 11:59 PM EST unless otherwise noted

See the Here Be Dragons 2023 Rules & Info for full exchange guidelines!

Khazad Week 2022

Khazad Week is a Tumblr event all about celebrating Tolkien’s dwarves through your transformative work! Art, fic, edits, playlists, headcanons, moodboards and anything else you can think of are all welcome. To spark your imagination we’ve put together the following prompts, which you can choose to combine or use how you like. They are not mandatory—it’s all for fun! Since there are so few dwarves mentioned in canon, OCs are very welcome for every day. Still, at least one prompt each day fits our canon dwarves. Any content is welcome!

5th December: First age // Family // Longbeards

6th December: Second age // Diplomacy // Firebeards

7th December: Petty-dwarves // Courtship // Broadbeams

8th December: Khazad-dûm // Dwarrowdams // Ironfists

9th December: Erebor // Environment // Stiffbeards

10th December: Music // Religion and Spirituality // Blacklocks

11th December: Folklore and Myths // Diversity // Stonefoots

Further explanation of the Khazad Week prompts can be found here.

We will be tracking the tag #khazadweek throughout the week and beyond, though Tumblr’s tagging system being what it is, you may also want to @ this blog in your post to ensure that we see it!

Fandomtrees 2022 Sign-Ups Open

Fandomtrees is a mulitfandom gifting fest. Participants sign up with information about the fandoms, prompts, etc, they want, as well as any DNWs. Other people will then leave gifts under the trees, and the mod(s) will reveal those on the reveal date.

Schedule: (Updated schedule for 2022)
Sign-ups: November 17 - December 7
Gifting: November 19 - January 4
Reveals: January 5

Important Links:
Rules/FAQ
Sign-Up Post
AO3 Collection

Tolkien Latin America Week 2022

Tolkien Latin America Week will be a week dedicated to celebrate Latin American cultures, peoples and traditions through Tolkien’s Legendarium. I started my series of Tolkien, but make it latino a while ago and it inspired me to create this event. The event will be held on Tumblr.

It will start on November 21st (Monday) at 00:00 Brasilia time (what time is it in my country?). The week will end on November 27th, but feel free to post after the week is over. I’ll still check tags, mentions and submissions for a while.

Everyone is free to participate, you don’t have to be latino nor have deep knowledge about Latin America to celebrate this event. This is also a great opportunity for you to learn more about this region.

All creations are welcome - arts, graphics, gifs, fanfics, etc. - as long as they represent a Latin American element(s). It can be languages, cultures, traditions, anything from Latin America. Creations should be Safe for Work, no explicit content will be accepted to make this week accessible to everyone.

Please tag your contributions with #tolkienlatamweek and mention me @tolkienlatamweek.

Here are the prompts! They are not mandatory, but they can inspire you. Feel free to create outside these themes.

• Day 1 (November 21st): Valar | Festivals | Clothes | Traditions
• Day 2 (November 22nd): Maiar | Places | Nature
• Day 3 (November 23rd): Elves | Dances | Songs
• Day 4 (November 24th): Dwarves | Religious diversity | Languages | Foods
• Day 5 (November 25th): Men | Immigration | Migration | Cultural Diversity
• Day 6 (November 26th): Hobbits | Folklore | Stories | Tales | Superstitions
• Day 7 (November 27th): Freeform | OCs | Diversity (can be sexual orientation, gender, disability, neurodiversity or race)

German Tolkien Society: Pocast Interview with Brian Sibley

Brian Sibley is the editor of the new volume "The Fall of Númenor" and granted an interview about his work on the book to the German Tolkien Society as part of their Tolkien Podcast. The interview includes how this book came to be, what’s in it (and what’s not), how Brian Sibley became a detective in the Second Age and what Alan Lee had to do with all that.

Tolkien Secret Santa 2022 sign-ups open

The Tolkien Secret Santa 2022 sign-ups are now open on Tumblr.

Sign-ups will be open from November 7 through November 21.

Mods Fern, RC, Fea, Anna, and UE write in the announcement:

This event is an exchange of small digital gifts: you sign up and mention what you’d like to create and to receive, and we’ll match you with fellow Tolkien fans who’d like those kinds of gifts! You can read more about Tolkien Secret Santa at our event guide here, and there’s a mobile-friendly list of links here.



Also as in recent years, we have both the main gift exchange and two concurrent Advent Calendars. The Advent Calendars are when participants sign up to make bite-sized gifts, two of which will be posted each day for the first part of December. Read more about this optional part of the event here!

It is very exciting for us to be returning for a sixth year of Tolkien Secret Santa, and we are delighted to welcome both new and returning participants! We hope this event will bring you much joy, creativity, and community in a holiday spirit.

Survey: Asexuality and Aromanticism in Fanfiction

Sidney Garner, a Masters student at the University of Texas at Austin, seeks participants for a survey study about aromantic and asexual fanfiction and how those authors engage with the canon. You do not need to be on the aromantic or asexual spectrum yourself, only write characters in your fanfiction who are. You must be over 18 years of age to participate. Find out more details about participating in the study here.

The Lord of the Rings Secret Santa 2022 Prompt Meme Sign-Ups Are Open

The Lord of the Rings Secret Santa 2022 Prompt Meme sign-ups are open.

Time to sign up for the Lord of the Rings Secret Santa exchange! Slash, femslash, het and gen, fic and fanart; you can request it all.



Lord of the Rings Secret Santa started as a traditional exchange and has been running as a prompt meme since 2020.



This year's timeline (2022):



- Prompt Posting: November 1st to 30th.

- Claiming: December 1st to 31st.

- Collection Open for Posting: December 1st to 31st

- All Fills Due: December 31st.

You will be able to post up to 2 prompts, and the mods will do their best to make sure that at least one of your prompts is filled.



Please note that this is an FPF challenge. (i.e. Fictional, not real people fiction/RPF.) The challenge is open to all the Peoples and Ages of Middle-earth!

Admin posts are made to the Dreamwidth community and can also be followed on Tumblr.

Fills are posted to the collection on AO3. 

More details at the linked post.

 

November challenge at the tolkienshortfanworks community (Dreamwidth)

The November challenge prompts have been posted to the tolkienshortfanworks community on Dreamwidth. 

Here is our thematic prompt and our formal challenge for November:



The thematic prompt is: "spooky" or "eerie".

The formal challenge is "children's or nursery rhyme".



As always, the two prompts can be filled independently, if you wish, or combined with prompts from other challenges.

New participants welcome!

More details on the challenge in the linked post.

Call for Proposals: Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 – The Mighty and Frail Númenor

The Tolkien Society Seminar is a short conference of both researcher-led and non-academic presentations on a specific theme pertaining to Tolkien scholarship. The Society held three seminars in 2021 (Twenty-first Century Receptions of Tolkien, Tolkien and Diversity, and Translating and Illustrating Tolkien) and their online setting has seen increased interest with over 700 attendees from 52 countries at ‘Tolkien and Diversity’. After the seminar, all paper recordings from the seminars are uploaded onto the Tolkien Society’s YouTube channel. We are delighted to run hybrid seminars where delegates can enjoy discussions on Tolkien in person and online.

The Mighty and Frail Númenor will be held on Sunday 2nd July as a hybrid event at The Hilton, Leeds. This is a free event.

The seminar aims to examine the role that Númenor plays in Tolkien’s legendarium. Although the island was pivotal to the secondary world narrative of the Second Age, it also re-emerged consistently in Tolkien’s writing and thinking from The Lost Road (1936-37), through The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) and The Notion Club Papers (1945), to ‘Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner’s Wife’ (1965) and other late essays. Númenor, then, is central to the growth of Tolkien’s legendarium and is a catalyst for seismic change in Arda.

Although Tolkien consistently refers to Númenor as the greatest human kingdom, its overwhelming military splendour and grand civilisation mask its frailty, which only grows over time. As is seen with the fractions of the King’s Men and the Faithful, Númenor’s fall may have been inevitable from its conception. However, its legacy in the Black Númenóeans and the kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor evince that its legacy is still somewhat alive after its downfall.

Papers may consider, but are not limited to:

• Númenor’s historical significance
• Species, race, and hierarchy
• Gender
• Hubris, hamartia, corruption, and manipulation
• Political tension (internal and/or external to the island)
• Death and the lust for corporeal immortality
• Colonialism and post-colonialism
• Adaptations of Númenor
• Legacy and posterity in Middle-earth
• The metaphysics of time and age

The Tolkien Society invites abstract submissions of no more than 300 words, for a 20-minute paper and 5 minutes of questions. The call for papers’ deadline is midnight Friday 13th January 2023.

To submit an abstract for the seminar, please click here. The seminar welcomes papers presented in person and online.