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Tolkien Meta Library

The Tolkien fandom has over the decades collaboratively created so many pieces of headcanons and meta interpretations, but the posts floating around in fandom spaces can be easily lost or overlooked. Especially all the posts languishing on inactive pages until someone happens to find and share them again.

Thus the Meta Library project to store and organize them! A fun and useful resource for the fandom to read existing world-building contributions, and to make previous work on a topic easy to access, build upon and credit. Because this is intended as a resource, the individual analyses are not necessarily being endorsed nor are necessarily in agreement with each other.

View or contribute to the Tolkien Meta Library here!

Call for Proposals: Tolkien Society Autumn Seminar: "Translating and Illustrating Tolkien"

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 has so far held two seminars in 2021 (Twenty-first Century Receptions of Tolkien and Tolkien and Diversity) and their online setting has seen increased interest with over 700 attendees from 52 countries at ‘Tolkien and Diversity’. We are delighted to be running 2021’s third and final seminar, which will be held online and will be free for all, on the theme of "Translating and Illustrating Tolkien." The date of the seminar is 6 November 2021.

Tolkien’s appeal has led to his fiction and non-fiction being translated into over fifty languages. The art of translation is immensely complex and when discussing the Dutch translation of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien himself saw the task as “formidable”, offering his own supportive intervention to achieve a satisfactory result. The author’s invented names and languages prompt the question of how the translator should approach Tolkien’s immense mythology. Recent scholarship has emphasised the need for a wider range of Tolkien’s work to be translated in order for readers to gain a fuller understanding of Arda and the author’s development. But with a wealth of translated texts existing already, this seminar hopes to spark new interpretations about old texts and for unacknowledged translations to be brought to light and examined.

An illustrator of his own work, Tolkien had a keen eye for the visual representation of a text. He admired the work of illustrators such as Pauline Baynes, Cor Blok and Ingahild Grathmer (the Queen of Denmark) and others who illustrated the original English and translated versions of his texts. The manner in which illustrators have engaged with Tolkien’s stories varies dramatically and can often be influenced by culturally specific ideas. This seminar hopes to re-examine renowned illustrations of Tolkien’s work while calling for new or overshadowed illustrations to be discussed.

Papers may consider, but are not limited to the following:

• Translations/illustrations of Tolkien’s fiction/non-fiction
• The role of the translator/illustrator
• Translations/illustrations and their context
• Translations’/illustrations’ reception

The Tolkien Society invites abstract submissions of no more than 300 words, for a 20-minute paper with 5 minutes of questions. The call for paper’s deadline is the end of the day Friday 3rd September.

See the full call for proposals for more information and submission information.

Tolkien Villains Week, August 16-22

Tolkien Villains Week is a new fandom event that runs from 16-22th of August, 2021 on Tumblr. It is designed to celebrate the darker side of Tolkien’s work, or its villainous characters. During Tolkien Villains Week, fans are prompted to write, draw or make content focusing on the antagonists of the Tolkien universe, along with looking into the darker deeds performed by those traditionally considered as good.

Tolkien Villains Week accepts all kinds of fancontent, ranging from art, fics, edits, crafts, cosplays, meta, memes… the key thing is that it fits the theme of the event! Participation happens either via the submission form (opens Aug. 16th) or through posting the work on your own blog and tagging it with #tolkienvillainsweek and mentioning this blog @tolkienvillainsweek.

Tolkien Villains Week Rules
Tolkien Villains Week FAQ
Tolkien Villains Week Prompts and Explanations

Darkest Night Exchange: Sign-Ups Open

The Darkest Night is an exchange fest celebrating dark themes in fanworks. You sign up with a list of characters/ships to create a fanwork (either fanart or fanfic) for another person, and someone else will do the same for you. This exchange is run on Archive of Our Own. It's time for Darkest Night 2021 to rise again! Note that the dates have shifted from past years. The Darkest Night schedule:

• Nominations open: August 6 
• Nominations close: August 13 (8:00PM EDT)
• Sign-ups open: August 14 
• Sign-ups close: August 22 (8:00 PM EDT)
• Works due: September 26 (8:00PM EDT)
• Works revealed: October 3 (8:00PM EDT)
• Creators revealed: October 10 (8:00 PM EDT)

Sign-ups open on August 14 and close on August 22 at 8:00 PM EDT. You can request 4-10 fandoms, with 1-20 characters or groups per fandom, as well as 2-40 free-form tags per fandom. You can also choose your medium per request: fanfiction, fanart, or both. Offers work the same way: 4-10 fandoms, 1-20 characters or groups per fandom, and 2-40 free-form tags per fandom. You can choose to offer either fanfiction, fanart, or both. We use OR matching, meaning that you will be matched with someone who requested at least one of the characters/ships, freeforms, and mediums, you offered, but probably won’t match on all. See the Darkest Night community for more on sign-ups.

Darkest Night Exchange: Nominations Open

The Darkest Night is an exchange fest celebrating dark themes in fanworks. You sign up with a list of characters/ships to create a fanwork (either fanart or fanfic) for another person, and someone else will do the same for you. This exchange is run on Archive of Our Own. It's time for Darkest Night 2021 to rise again! Note that the dates have shifted from past years. The Darkest Night schedule:

• Nominations open: August 6 
• Nominations close: August 13 (8:00PM EDT)
• Sign-ups open: August 14 
• Sign-ups close: August 22 (8:00 PM EDT)
• Works due: September 26 (8:00PM EDT)
• Works revealed: October 3 (8:00PM EDT)
• Creators revealed: October 10 (8:00 PM EDT)

Nominations open on August 6 and close at 8:00 PM EDT on August 13. You may nominate 6 fandoms, with 5 characters/groups in each, and 10 additional tags. There is no rarity requirement regarding which fandoms can be nominated from. RPF, Crossover Fandoms, and Original Works are all allowed. Non-traditional fandoms such as songs, poetry, anthropomorphism, etc. are also allowed. See the Darkest Night community for more on nominations.

Chromatic Characters Podfic Anthology II Accepting Submissions

The Chromatic Characters Podfic Anthology is collecting short podfics that center characters of color in different fandoms to release as an anthology and as a collection of individual files. This should be a low-stress project, even for people who are new to podficcing, due to the word-count: 1500 words or less (with many being as short as 1-2 minutes.)

This year's submission deadline is September 12th, and we will post on September 30th.

Our theme for this year's anthology is community. It's optional—all podfics are welcome as long as they follow the rules laid out in the Submission Guidelines—but feel free to let it inspire you if you'd like.

If you’d like to get a sense of this project, you can see the previous CCPA anthology here.

Complete guidelines and submission instructions are available on the Chromatic Characters Podfic Anthology page.

Oxonmoot 2021: Programme Posted and Registration Open

Oxonmoot is an annual event hosted by The Tolkien Society which brings together Tolkien fans, scholars, students and Society members from across the world. Oxonmoot 2021 is being held over four days, from the afternoon of Thursday 2^nd September until lunch time on Sunday 5^th September. For the first time, this will be a hybrid event bringing together online delegates with those attending in person at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Register to attend Oxonmoot online
Register to attend Oxonmoot in-person
Talks and papers programme

The deadline to submit a proposal for an activity has been extended to 1 August 2021. Find more about how to submit an activity here.

Tolkien OC Week: fandom event for original characters and underdeveloped characters

Tolkien OC Week is a fandom event focusing on original characters and underdeveloped characters in Tolkien's world which will be held on Tumblr during the week from  26th July - 1st August 2021 for the first time. 

The event schedule for 2021:

Day 1 (26th July): Shipping - create a piece of fanwork about an OC that you ship with a canon character.

Day 2 (27th July): Family members - create a piece of fanwork about a character who fills a gap left in a family tree (e.g., Legolas’ mother, Maglor’s spouse, Aragorn and Arwen’s younger children).

Day 3 (28th July): Background characters - create a piece of fanwork about a character who is in the background of canon scenes and is either never mentioned or barely mentioned in the story (e.g., an extra from Laketown, a Teler defending their ships during the First Kinslaying, the Haradric man that Sam sees die) and show their view of the events.

Day 4 (29th July): Self insert/reader insert - create a piece of fanwork that includes yourself being in Middle Earth, or write a reader insert story.

Day 5 (30th July): Worldbuilding - create a piece of fanwork about a character who lives in a different place or time from the main canonical events (e.g., a character from Rhûn, a character who stays in Valinor after the Darkening, a character living in Gondor when the kings were still ruling etc.) and flesh out their world.

Day 6 (31th July): Forgotten characters - take a character who is neglected (e.g. Bob and Nob in Bree, Eärwen) or abandoned by Tolkien (e.g. Trotter the hobbit) and make them your own by creating a piece of fanwork about them. Or, completely redesign a canon character to make them yours (e.g., Gil-Galad becoming Fin-Galad).

Day 7 (1st August): Freeform - create a piece of fanwork about whatever resonates with you.

More details in the linked post.

Call for Papers: Tolkien Sessions at Leeds International Medieval Conference 2022

Paper abstracts are currently being sought for the following Tolkien sessions for the Leeds International Medieval Congress, to be held at the University of Leeds on 4-7 July 2022. These sessions are organised by Dr Andrew Higgins and sponsored by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow.  The special thematic strand of the conference will be “Borders” which is reflected in several of the suggested sessions.

Paper submissions are being sought for the following sessions (for descriptions, see the full call for papers):

• Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches
• Tolkien and Medieval Poets: A Session in Memory of Richard C. West  
• Crossing Borders in Middle-earth 
• Borders between Life and Death in Tolkien’s Legendarium
• Family Ties:  The Limits of Kinship in Tolkien’s Middle-earth
• Orientation, Transgression, and Crossing Borders of Middle-earth
• Tolkien as a Gateway to Interdisciplinary Teaching: A Roundtable

Paper titles and abstracts are due by August 31, 2021 and should be 150 words maximum. Conference presentations will be 15-20 minutes long.

"The Nature of Middle-earth" Available 2 September 2021

On 2 September, a new compilation of Tolkien's unpublished writings will become available: The Nature of Middle-earth, edited by Carl F. Hostetter, a Tolkien linguist whose has worked previously on Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon. In an interview with Hostetter, Tolkienista's Cristina Casagrande describes Hostetter as playing "the role of a descendant of the forgotten Ælfwine, bringing back the seeds of the Tree."

"Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time," says Hostetter in the interview, "I started work on what would become The Nature of Middle-earth nearly 25 years ago, when I received a bundle of photocopies that Christopher Tolkien referred to as 'late philological essays'." According to the interview, NoMe will include Tolkien's writings, previously published in Vinyar Tengwar, “Ósanwe-kenta,” “Notes on Órë,” and “The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor,” as well as late writings on Elven reincarnation.