Choose a Name for Our New Column!
Our temporarily titled "location bio" will focus on the landscapes and locations of Middle-earth. We need your help naming it!
SWG News
New Challenge: Tengwar
Each day for thirty-six days, we feature a randomly chosen letter from the Tengwar as a prompt.
A Sense of History: Crossroads
In the ongoing series on towers in Tolkien's work, a thread runs through "The Lord of the Rings," revealing the divine assistance of Varda in the travails of the Fellowship.
Cultus Dispatches: Canon Deviations, Multifandoms, and Original Content
Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data gives some insight into what connections, if any, exist between fanfiction and original fiction.
New & Updated Fanworks
[Writing] Tengwar (working title) by cuarthol
For the Tengwar prompt challenge. To be updated as new prompts are completed.
Current up through 'Anca'
[Writing] I Stood Aside by Flora-lass
Maedhros' horror at the burning of the ships. Inspired by a painting (see notes).
[Reference] Thálatta! Thálatta! by Simon J. Cook
While he never climbs the stairs of this Elf-tower, in Lothlórien Frodo Baggins descends a flight of steps to look into Galadriel’s Mirror, wherein he first sees the sea. This post examines the view.
[Writing] Words of Wisdom by AdmirableMonster
One or more drabbles about Pengolodh and his babysitter Salgant.
[Writing] Les Mots de Sagesse by AdmirableMonster
Plusieurs petites histoires qui parle de Pengolodh et Salgant pendant des moments differents.
[Writing] "Tengwar" ficlets by chrissystriped
Fics written for the "Tengwar" challenge.
[Writing] Upon Cirith Thoronath by StarSpray
A horrid cacophony of cries erupts ahead of them, as orcs appear—up the cliff on hidden ledges, on the path, with bows and swords. And behind them rises a figure of darkness and flame. The heat rolls down the path over them, bringing the smell of burning flesh and bitter fear with it. Someone…
Current Challenge
Tengwar
A daily prompt of a Tengwar letter per day. Read more ...
Random Challenge
Noegyth Nibin
Create a fanwork about the Petty-dwarves. Read more ...
New in References
Thálatta! Thálatta! by Simon J. Cook
[]While he never climbs the stairs of this Elf-tower, in Lothlórien Frodo Baggins descends a flight of steps to look into Galadriel’s Mirror, wherein he first sees the sea. This post examines the view.
[]
With Gildor Inglorion we finally climb the stairs of Elostirion and look on the view, and what we see appears to reveal a hidden thread in the story of Frodo Baggins. This post reads two annotated translations of two Elvish songs to step through a crossroads in the narrative to arrive at the tower on the margin of the story, wherein is a stone that is a window onto Valinor.
Grief, Grieving, and Permission to Mourn in the "Quenta Silmarillion" by Dawn Walls-Thumma
[]In a book as full of death as the Quenta Silmarillion, grief and mourning are surprisingly absent. The characters who receive grief and mourning—and those who don't—appear to do so due to narrative bias. Grief and mourning (or a lack of them) serve to draw attention toward and away from objectionable actions committed by characters.
Beyond the Silmarillion
[Writing] Waybread (The Waybredlik) by Himring
[]Lembas speaks out.
[Series] Apr 1st Stories by Uvatha the Horseman
[]Once a year on April 1st, a canon character from LOTR or the Silmarillion gets pranked.
[Writing] Crossing Forest River by Dawn Felagund
[]Bilbo recounts, in verse, the attempt of Gandalf, Beorn, and him to cross the Forest River after the Battle of Five Armies. Written for the Hungarian Tolkien Society's 2024 Mailing Competition.
Around the World and Web
Monstrous May 2024
Monstrous May is a Tumblr event where, for each day of the month of May, there is a prompt involving and invoking the monstrous.
Fellowship of the Fics: Modern AU May
During May, Fellowship of the Fics offers modern AU prompt lists for setting, character occupation, and dialogue on Tumblr.
May challenge at tolkienshortfanworks
The May challenge has been posted to the tolkienshortfanworks community on Dreamwidth. Thematic challenge: name; formal challenge: acrostic. As usual, these can be filled independently and freely combined with other prompts such as the SWG challenges. New participants welcome!
May 2024 Calls for Papers
Conferences and publications that have open calls for papers in May 2024.
Angbang Week 2024
All new, unpublished fanworks about the Angbang (Melron) ship are welcome during this Tumblr event, running 6-12 May 2024.
SWG News
Cultus Dispatches: Things Tolkien Fanfiction Readers and Writers Like to Do (Other Than Fanfiction)
Posted by SWG Moderators on 3 February 2024. Last updated on 24 February 2024.
"Fandom" is a huge construct, and every imaginable way of engaging fannishly with a text has probably been tried by at least one person (and likely many persons). In this month's Cultus Dispatches column, Dawn Walls-Thumma looks at data from the 2020 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey related to how participants engage in the Tolkien fandom beyond reading and writing fanfiction.
What kinds of fannish activities are common among readers and writers of Tolkien fanfic? Less common? Does this differ whether the participant reads fic or writes it as well?
Meet & Greet Instadrabbling
Posted by SWG Moderators on 30 January 2024. Last updated on 24 February 2024.
February 15 is the International Fanworks Day, and we will be celebrating this year with an instadrabbling session the following weekend, on 17 February 2024 at 13:00/1PM until 17:00/5PM UTC (see this in your timezone) and again on 18 February 2024 at midnight until 2:00AM UTC (see this in your timezone). This instadrabbling session will also be a part of our Meet & Greet challenge and will provide one way to collect prompts for this challenge.
What is the Meet & Greet challenge? Every year, we run a Matryoshka challenge where participants receive two or more prompts, which you open one by one to create a fanwork that responds to each new prompt as you go.
This year, our Matryoshka challenge comes with a twist. We will send participants only the first prompt. It is up to you to seek out additional prompts from other participants in the challenge!
You can interact directly with other participants to pick up more prompts. SWG moderators also have prompts to give out; connect with us here! If you prefer not to interact directly with anyone, you can seek out prompts posted publicly to participants' social media.
The Meet & Greet challenge begins on February 15, but you can sign up now to get your prompts as soon as the challenge starts. Complete Meet & Greet challenge guidelines are here.
What is instadrabbling? Instadrabbling is a long-standing community activity in the Tolkien fanfiction fandom. A group of friends gets together on chat, someone throws out a prompt or four, and everyone writes a drabble (or whatever comes to mind).
On the SWG, we meet on the #instadrabbling channel on our Discord server. Discord invites will be posted on the dates of instadrabbling to our tumblr or can be requested at any time from the moderators. This year, we will celebrate International Fanworks Day with instadrabbling, which also offers the opportunity to grab prompts for the Meet & Greet challenge!
Character of Month: Olwë
Posted by SWG Moderators on 24 January 2024. Last updated on 27 April 2024.
Olwë is one of those characters about whom we know little but who looms large. When the exiled Noldor set out across the sea, Olwë disappeared in their rearview mirrors, but his life to that point is anything but drab. He makes the Great Journey, loses his brother (literally), endures separation from his Noldorin friends, becomes a king, traverses the sea via island, raises a city from the sand, stands up to Fëanor, and watches as his people endure one of the greatest crimes of Elves toward other Elves. Eventually, he sails to Middle-earth to aid in the War of Wrath, but he remains in the margins of the Noldorin history there, as indeed he wished.
In this month's biography of Olwë, LadySternchen highlights these key events in Olwë's life, bringing forth what makes him such an intriguing character.
A Sense of History: The Peaks of Taniquetil
Posted by SWG Moderators on 19 January 2024. Last updated on 10 February 2024.
For the past several months, as a part of our column A Sense of History, Simon J. Cook has been analyzing the tower analogy in Tolkien's lecture-slash-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," including critical interpretations of the analogy. Although, on paper, most Tolkien fans know that Tolkien's professional work as a philologist and enthusiast of Northern medieval literature influenced his writings on Middle-earth, rarely do we see this emerge as clearly as in the latest installment in this series, where Simon traces the 1936 appearance of the Beowulf-tower (changed from a rock garden) to the appearance of towers looking West toward Númenor (added to earlier versions of the text). Simon draws a connection between the towers of Middle-earth and how the mysterious tower of Tolkien's "Monsters and the Critics" should be interpreted.
Issue with User Pages Fixed (We Hope!)
Posted by SWG Moderators on 13 January 2024. Last updated on 13 January 2024.
For some months now, we've been dealing with an issue where pages with /user in the URL occasionally recall what is known in the Drupal community as the White Screen of Death: a blank white screen and ominously simple black text that states, "The website encountered an unexpected error." This issue appeared to be related to one of the contributed modules we use for member profiles. Over the past few months, Russandol and Dawn have been reworking this section of the site so that member profiles no longer use the problematic module but only core software fields and functionality.
Today, we completed the migration of the rebuild and all data from the old module into the new fields. Ideally, you should not notice a change! However, if you are a registered user, it would be helpful to us to check your member profile to make sure that your preferred name, pronouns, and member biography all look as they should.*
Due to this change the way you update your member profile is now slightly different. After logging in, if you click the Edit tab on your member profile, you will see three tabs at the top of the page: General, Profile, and Volunteer. Click on the Profile tab to update or add a preferred name, pronouns, userpic, or biography. The image below shows what the new layout looks like.
We've tested the site following the changes, but members should be alert to anything that seems off, and we appreciate reports of problems. We maintain an issues tracker for known problems with the site, and this is a good place to start if you're noticing something isn't working as it should and want to know if it's been reported. We always welcome reports of problems in the comments there, in the #town-hall channel on our Discord server, or by contacting the mods.
* While working on these updates today, we noticed that images that should be displaying inline (i.e., next to each other rather than one per line) were not displaying correctly but were displaying as blocks (i.e., one per line). This is not related to the update, and we will be working on updating our stylesheet this weekend to correct this issue.
Tolkien Fanartics: Interview with Mirra Kan
Posted by SWG Moderators on 6 January 2024. Last updated on 27 April 2024.
One of the effects of Tolkien's broad-reaching world-building is that the people on the margins of the map (and the texts) invite fanworks creators to tell their stories. In this month's Tolkien Fanartics article, our art editor Anérea had the opportunity to chat with Mirra Kan, whose work embodies the concept of moving characters and peoples from the margins of Tolkien's works to center them in her own.
Self-taught and a self-described orientalist, Mirra Kan focuses on the peoples of Middle-earth who live in the south and east. She seeks to show these characters—who are often depicted simply as enemies in the text—as real people from complex cultures. Among the Easterlings and Men of the South were "heroes fighting and dying for the sake of a better future for their children," Mirra reminds us, and her art represents their cultures and tells their stories.
New Challenge: Resolution
Posted by SWG Moderators on 5 January 2024. Last updated on 16 February 2024.
Happy New Year! To help you start 2024 off right, we’re giving you a chance to catch up on any challenges you missed in 2023. Our annual amnesty allows you to pick from any of the previous year’s challenges. Whether finishing that epic novel for the challenge that ran away or making a sketch or writing a drabble, the idea is to make something fannish with one of our challenges as inspiration!
You do not need to use a new prompt to be eligible for this challenge. Participants can choose to complete any of the previous year's challenges. Did you miss a challenge you wanted to complete? Do it now. Did you start a fanwork for a challenge but never completed it? Here is your chance to finish. If you didn't leave any unrealized or unfinished projects behind you (congratulations!) or if none of the unfinished challenges strike your fancy, choose from any of our past challenges. (For a summary of the 2023 challenges and direct links, see the Challenge Prompts section below!)
You will receive a stamp on your 2024 collection for any challenges that you complete now*, as well as a stamp for the New Year's Resolution challenge on your 2023 collection. When you post to the SWG archive, please make sure you select the 2023 challenge you're completing and the New Year's Resolution challenge.
*If you choose to complete a challenge older than 2023, we will not be giving out past stamps; you will, however, receive your January 2024 stamp.
Cultus Dispatches: Duel of Surveys
Posted by SWG Moderators on 23 December 2023. Last updated on 3 February 2024.
What is better than fandom data? MORE FANDOM DATA!!! This month's Cultus Dispatches column offers a rough, taken-with-a-huge-grain-of-salt comparison between the 2020 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey and the recent OTW 16th Anniversary Survey.
The surveys offer a few points of glancing comparison: time active in fandom, attendance at fan conventions, and use of fandom platforms. The latter offers some particularly interesting conclusions, offering evidence that Tolkien fans go all Galadriel when it comes to migrating from Lothlorien to new fandom sites and adopting new technology.
A Sense of History: Never Mind the Dwarves
Posted by SWG Moderators on 16 December 2023. Last updated on 20 January 2024.
In A Sense of History this month is something a bit different: Never Mind the Dwarves by Simon J. Cook. If you've been following Simon's work over the past few months, you know he has been interrogating the tower analogy in Tolkien's lecture/essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," in many cases pushing back on the work of established scholars (who have not all reacted well to his series). This month's column is a much lighter approach, itself an analogy that blends scholarship, fiction, and fandom. I asked Simon how he would introduce his own piece:
We all know that feeling of hearing a scholar speak about Tolkien's stories and wondering how a human being could so utterly fail to notice the actual art. Words drop from their lips like acid rain falling on virgin snow. Yet one brave band of scholars has broken out of this mould. While spurning imagination, as all scholars must, they nevertheless have seen with their own eyes the profound architecture of the stories that the rest of us love. What is the secret of those very few who take this left-path of scholarship? What allows them and nobody else direct and unmediated vision of the Truth? Simon's research has long grappled with this question and, after many many weary hours rummaging in the archives of the Lore section of the 'Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza', he now reveals the story of the Boffin Stone, which even today may be touched by those who know how to access the hidden chamber in the highest tower of the Fanatics Plaza.
Comment here if you riddle out who Peregrin Boffin is in the piece! (Hint: He's from The History of Middle-earth ...)
Tolkien Fanartics: Mapping Arda, Part II
Posted by SWG Moderators on 2 December 2023. Last updated on 6 January 2024.
Many readers mention the vast expanse of time covered by The Silmarillion. Less often mentioned is the vast expanse of geography. Spanning three continents, The Silmarillion is a series of tales that, more often than not, center on migrations and battles that involve moving groups across the landscape or heroes undertaking long-distance quests across awe-inspiring terrain.
In this month's Tolkien Fanartics column, Anérea turns to the land mass at the center of most Silmarillion tales: Beleriand. From the sky-stabbing peaks of Thangorodrim down the shores of the Great Sea, Beleriand is a realm whose forests, mountains, and rivers shape the lives and journeys of the people of The Silmarillion. Selecting maps from seven fan cartographers, Anérea considers the various ways that fans use the variety of canon details left by Tolkien—maps, stories, and even data—to visualize his world anew. Their maps stand as fanworks in their own right, while their original depictions of the familiar stories can also inspire and inform new fanworks in turn.
You can read Anérea's "Mapping Arda, Part II: Travels through Beleriand here.
