Around the World and Web

October Challenge at tolkienshortfanworks

The October Challenge at the tolkienshortfanworks community on Dreamwidth has been posted. (New members are very welcome to join the community.)

The thematic prompt is Apple.

The formal challenge is to write a piece in blank verse. either unrhymed iambic pentameter (the most common kind of blank verse in English) or other similar unrhymed metre.

(For  bonus quotation prompts and more details on the challenges, see the linked Dreamwidth post.)

Fall for Tolkien: Scribbles & Drabbles

Scribbles & Drabbles (Fall For Tolkien):

An autumn exchange pairing artist with writers, with lower minimum requirements.

Artist Sign-ups end on September 25th

What counts as art? If you say it's art, it's art. Digital art. Drawings. Paintings. Music. Playlists. Mood boards. Animations. Toilet paper tube Elves. Cosplay. Your pet in cosplay. Photos. Crafts. Calligraphy. Maps. Food. Finger-painting. Sculpture. Paper Bag Puppets. I could keep going, but you get the idea. As the name 'scribbles' implies, you can submit your piece as 'unfinished' -- just think of how much Unfinished Tales has inspired people to create content.

Author & Beta Sign-ups are now open! Author sign-up end October 3rd.

What's the minimum word count? 100 words. As the name 'drabbles' refers to, your submissions need only be 100 words minimum to count. You can write a drabble, a scene, a character study, a dialogue exchange, a headcanon, a poem--you get the idea. And like the art, your piece is as 'finished' as you feel like it needs to be.

There is a website on Weebly (linked),  an AO3 collection, and a Discord.

More details and the schedule at the linked website.

Half-Elven Week starting on Tumblr on 13 September

Half-Elven Week will run 13 to 19 September on Tumblr, a week to appreciate Tolkien’s half-elven characters (characters who have the blood of elves and some other race, no matter if they are called so in the canon).

Characters and themes as prompts by day of the week:

Day 1 - Being Different; Doriathrim - Lúthien, Dior, Eluréd, Elurín, Elwing

Day 2 - The Choice; People of Sirion - Elwing, Eärendil, Elrond, Elros

Day 3 - Heritage; Númenoreans - Elros, his children and descendants

Day 4 - Power; People of Rivendell - Elrond, his children and descendants

Day 5 - Legacy; Princes of Dol Amroth - Galador, Gilmith and their descendants

Day 6 - Loss; Parents of half-elves - Melian, Thingol, Tuor, Idril, Beren, Nimloth, Celebrían, Elros’s wife, Imrazôr, Mithrellas, and others

Day 7 - Freeform

- prompts aren’t mandatory, only a source of inspiration. 

- all kinds of content are allowed - art, fanfiction, headcanons, meta, character analysis, moodboards, fancast, aesthetic, etc.

- OCs are welcome - children of Caranthir/Haleth, Aegnor/Andreth, any elf/other race pair

- book-related content is preferred, but movie content is still welcome

More details at the linked post.

September Challenge at tolkienshortfanworks

The September Challenge at the tolkienshortfanworks community on Dreamwidth has been posted. (New members are very welcome to join the community.)

This month, both parts of the challenge are in honour of Bilbo's and Frodo's birthday on 22 September.





The thematic prompt is based on Bilbo's farewell party: your piece must either contain mention of the

number 144 or the word "gross" (in any sense of that word).



The formal challenge is to write a piece based on any of the verse forms used by Bilbo, from any of Tolkien's works, whether simpler or more intricate–as, for example, I sit beside the fire, Attercop, Earendil, the Bath Song, or any others you can think of.

(For more details on the challenges, see the linked post.)

"Comrades of the Ring" by Joel Merriner (Foreign Policy)

Joel Merriner, a scholar of artwork based on Tolkien's legendarium, tackles how Soviet artists enacted their visions of Middle-earth within an authoritarian regime:

It has been 20 years since the premiere of film director Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring. As Amazon approaches completion of principal photography on season one of their $465 million TV reimagining of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Second Age, a continuation of the epic neo-medieval visuals that have become synonymous with Middle-earth appears inevitable.

However, the emergence in April of Leningrad TV’s Khraniteli (“Keepers”), a “lost” two-part 1991 Soviet television retelling of Volume I of The Lord of the Rings, has provided Western and young Russian Tolkien fans alike with brief but colorful insight into an alternative vision of the tale. This delightfully lo-fi production, with its earworm opening song, rudimentary special effects, and cobbled together costumes, has been labeled by some as symptomatic of a country on the brink of collapse. But, in fact, Khraniteli represents a rich sub-culture of resourcefulness and creativity in the face of oppression: the world of Soviet Tolkien.

Continue reading "Comrades of the Ring" on the Foreign Policy website.

Call for Proposals: Once and Future Fantasies Conference

Submissions are invited for the first conference co-sponsored by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts to take place outside North America, which will be hosted by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow on 13-17 July 2022.

The art of the fantastic has never been more visible than it is today. Streamed, read and written, drawn, painted, designed and modelled by amateurs and professionals, performed and played in theatrical events and games, and marketed the whole world over, the art of the fantastic occupies every available cultural niche with unprecedented energy and enthusiasm. This conference asks what the fantastic in the arts has to offer at this time of crisis, rooted as it is in the distant and recent past while remaining extraordinarily sensitive to the shifting landscape of the present and the infinite possibilities of the future.

The conference committee welcomes proposals for individual twenty-minute papers, pre-formed panels of three twenty-minute papers under a coherent theme, and roundtable discussions with three to six participants (ninety-minute sessions).

Suggested topics can include but are not limited to the following:  

• Fantasies of history and imagined futures
• Historical and contemporary fantasy media  
• Changes in the definitions of fantasy and the fantastic through history 
• Fantasies of national/cultural belonging and identity  
• Fantasy and the major challenges of the present moment 
• Fantasy as method for imagining alternative futures 
• Canonicity and its alternatives
• Radical re-imaginings and re-interpretations of SFF ‘classics’   
• Fantasy and temporality (hauntings, time-travel narratives, etc)  
• Fantasies shattering and coalescing  
• The relationship between fantasy and its audiences/consumers/co-creators   
• Borders and their usefulness (or lack thereof) in the fantastic  
• State of the Field-type contributions asking questions such as:  
  • Wither fantasy/fantasy scholarship?  
  • Developing theoretical approaches to the fantastic  
  • Historicising fantasy scholarship  
  • Fantasy pedagogies  
  • How to organise (or unorganise) the discipline?   

We invite submissions from researchers, practitioners and fans of all branches of the fantastic, whether within the academy or beyond it. We are particularly interested in submissions from researchers and practitioners who have been underrepresented in fantastic art and its commentaries. We warmly encourage younger or less experienced scholars and creatives to take part. We are committed to offering everyone a welcoming environment for interaction, speculation and enjoyment. We will also invite creative workshops for those interested in exploring the creative process (separate call for creative workshops to be released soon). 

To submit, please send us a 200-300 word abstract using our submission form by 22 October 2021. See the full call for proposals for more information.

Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang: Four Pinch Hits Available!

The admins of the Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang have four artworks in need of writers. They are willing to be flexible on deadlines!

The Silmarillion

• Galdor through the Ages, feat. queerplatonic/platonic Elenwë & Galdor.
• Mairon’s drag race, complete with fabulous costume art.

The Hobbit Movieverse

• Bagginshield AU, in which Bilbo is sent on a quest by his father and winds up in Erebor pre-Smaug.
• Murder mystery AU inspired by Cluedo, feat. Thorin/OFC, Kili/Tauriel, and Fili/OFC.

They can’t post the draft artworks publicly as it is unfair to the artists, but if any of these might appeal, please email tolkienrsb@gmail.com and ask for access to the gallery to see if you would like to write for one of them.

Call for Papers: Edited Anthology "Race, Racisms, and Tolkien"

Work on race in Tolkien studies began with scholars analyzing medieval sources for the created races of Middle-earth (Brackmann, Chance, Young, Luling, McFadden, Rateliff, Sinex, and Vink). The release of Jackson films accelerated debate over the issue of racisms, resulting in scholarship by film and postcolonial scholars (Battis, Hoiem, S. Kim, Nicklas).

Gaps in the existing scholarship reflect the extent to which systems of exclusions have hampered sustained engagement with the conflicting and complex constructions of racisms, imperialisms, and colonialisms in Tolkien's legendarium. The barriers include, but are not limited to, over-reliance upon arguments about authorial intentionality; about Tolkien being "a man of his time;" and about Tolkien's fictional multicultural marriages. In addition, a mostly white body of scholars have paid minimal attention to the question of Whiteness as a raced category (Redmond).

This project is grounded in contemporary sociological theories of aversive racism which, similar to Critical Race legal theory, focuses on analyzing socio-historical and contemporary systems (intellectual, organizational, institutional) rather than defining racism limited to individual feelings or behaviors. Previous attempts to defend Tolkien's work from sustained critical race, intersectional, or postcolonial analysis of his legendarium fall short today as rising neo-fascist and white supremacist groups claim Tolkien as part of their appropriation of medieval/ medievalist imagery for what they imagine was a "pure white" Middle Ages. Their strategies include using The Lord of the Rings to recruit new members (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/podcasts/the-daily-transcript-derek-black.html).

Virtual attacks against the organizers and presenters at the Summer 2021 Tolkien Society Summer Seminar on "Tolkien and Diversity" make the timeliness of this project clear. Medieval scholars, especially medievalists of color, are challenging white supremacist appropriation through the creation of Race B4 Race and new scholarship on race and the Middle Ages (https://acmrs.asu.edu/RaceB4Rac; Heng, Ramey).

Topics include but are not limited to: Anti-Semitism; Catholicism/Christianity & racism; Colonial Imperialism; Ecological Imperialism; Eugenics, Neo-fascist & White Supremacist Fans; Romantic Nationalism & Tolkien; Social Darwinism; and Whiteness. Work on the legendarium, film adaptations, games, and fan creations (art, fiction, cosplay, especially racebending) is welcome.

Familiarity with Dimitra Fimi's and Helen Young's monographs is strongly recommended. The following approaches are most relevant to the project: critical race, cultural history, intellectual history, intersectionality, fan studies, neocolonial, postcolonial, and reception theories.

Proposals (500 words), a working bibliography, and an author biography (150 words) are due by 10 January 2022. Papers will be due 10 December 2022. Contact Robin Anne Reid at robinareid@fastmail.com for more information. If interested scholars would like a copy of a Working Bibliography on the topic or have questions about their proposal, feel free to email the editor at the address above.

Days of Awesome Ficathon

Days of Awesome is an annual Jewish character ficathon in honor of the Jewish high holiday season. Originally founded by Livejournal user jadelennox in 2007, the goal of this project is to create a venue for fans of all backgrounds to write fic about Jewish characters and their Jewish identities–which are all-too-often under-represented in canon and fanon, and, when they are represented, they’re often represented as Jewish in name only.

We’re also here because while we love other holiday fic challenges, they so frequently don’t correspond with holidays that are important on the Jewish calendar. We wanted to change that with a festive little celebration around the Jewish holiday season!

Days of Awesome has a collection on Archive of Our Own that will open on Erev Rosh HaShana (Monday, September 6, this year), and stay open through the Hebrew month of Tishrei (until October 6)–a length which spans the entire Jewish high holiday season, and includes the holidays of Rosh HaShana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Sheminei Atzeret, and Simchat Torah!

The only firm requirement is that your focal character be Jewish. If they’re canonically Jewish–great! If they’re not canonically Jewish, that’s okay too. But we would ask that if it is a situation in which you headcanon a particular character as Jewish, or are writing an AU in which they are Jewish, you please make the fic about their Jewishness. If you have a Jewish OC that you want to write about–if, for instance, you want to explore what it would be like to be a Jewish character in the world of the Hunger Games, or His Dark Materials–go for it! Again, we would just ask that the fic be about that character’s (or those characters’) Jewish experiences. If you wanted to be extra festive and seasonal, you could write about some of the characters celebrating one of the seasonal holiday, or a fic on one of the themes that is explored throughout one of these days.

All fandoms are game, and there are no length requirements, and you can upload as many pieces as you’d like within the month.

The Days of Awesome tumblr has more information about the ficathon.

Call for Papers: Trans Fandom (Transformative Works and Cultures)

The scholarly journal of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), Transformative Works and Cultures, is currently accepting submissions for its special edition "Trans Fandom." Since its inception as a field, fan studies has been obsessed with gender, yet discussions of gender have tended to focus on binary genders, with other gender expressions often pushed to the margins, enclosed in parentheses, mentioned but not engaged, or highlighted as areas of future research. Although fan scholars have acknowledged the existence of trans fans and emphasized the importance of gender nonnormativity in many aspects of fandom, and although queer and trans theories have been utilized in analyses of fans’ transformative works and fan behaviors, surprisingly little work has focused on trans fans, trans ways of doing fandom, and depictions of trans bodies within fan works. Only recently have serious considerations of what fandom might mean for trans individuals and trans considerations of fandom emerged.

This special issue seeks to widen our knowledge of trans fandom. We invite submissions that engage with trans theory as a lens for analyzing fandom, case studies of trans fans’ experiences of fandom, considerations of trans bodies in fan fiction, trans theorizations of cosplay cross-dressing, and so on. In particular, we seek work that centers trans people—that is, individuals who express their gender identities in a variety of ways, including but not limited to transgender, transsexual, nonbinary, gender fluid, genderqueer, agender, intersex, or otherwise gender nonnormative.

We welcome both longer conceptual pieces (6,000–8,000 words), case studies (5,000–7,000 words), and shorter symposium pieces (1,500–2,500 words), which might include editorials, reflections, commentaries, synopses of relevant earlier research, and so forth.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:
            * Trans bodies in fan fiction, fan art, and other transformative works.
            * Using trans theory as a lens for considering cosplay, fan art, reader response/audience reception, etc.
            * Trans fans' experiences of fandom.
            * Trans genealogies of fandom.
            * Intersectional and decolonized considerations of trans fans and fandom.
            * Teaching trans studies with/through fandom.
            * Demographic and generational changes in fandom.

Papers are due January 1, 2022. See the full call for papers for complete guidelines and more information.