SWG News

Cultus Dispatches: 10 Important Moments in Tolkien Fanfiction History

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For this year's International Fanworks Day, the Organization for Transformative Works issued a "10 challenge" for fandom history, requesting "10 things" essays about fandom.

In this month's Cultus Dispatches column, Dawn takes on that challenge. In her own tenth year of studying Tolkien fanfiction and its history, she has selected (after much angst) ten key "moments" that influenced the fandom's history.

Tolkien-based fanfiction has existed for more than seven decades. What has kept fans interested in drawing from a seemingly bottomless well of stories about this imagined world? While, of course, a lot of it is the world itself (you're probably not reading this if you don't find the legendarium deep and worth exploring!), some of it comes from circumstances well outside anything Tolkien, his Estate, fans, and fandom had anything to do with.

You can read Dawn's "ten things" essay "10 Important Moments in Tolkien Fandom History" here.

New Challenge: Meet & Greet

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Every year, we run a Matryoshka challenge, which is a format that, to the best of our knowledge, we invented. (If we didn't, Morgoth did!) A Matryoshka is a cumulative challenge, where you construct a fanwork using multiple prompts that are revealed as you work. Find out more about the Matryoshka format here.

This year, we've added an interactive component. Instead of the mods sending you two/three/five/seven prompt emails, you will receive a single starter prompt and then can acquire the remaining prompts from other participants or in places where you find them posted online. Complete Meet & Greet challenge guidelines (and a list of participants to contact for more prompts) are here!

If you'd like to participate, request your first prompt here.

Many thanks to Cuarthol for this month's gorgeous banner and stamps!

And if you clicked to read this? You deserve a prompt! Here it is: Something happens in the middle of the night.

A Sense of History: In the House of the Fairbairns

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Tolkien fans and scholars like to find evidence of Tolkien's professional work as one of academia's leading Anglo-Saxonists in his works about Middle-earth. What is less often embarked upon is the search for evidence of Tolkien's Middle-earth work in his scholarly work.

For the past several months, as part of our Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook has embarked upon an analysis of the tower analogy Tolkien uses in his influential lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." In his latest article, Simon applies the use of towers in The Lord of the Rings to consider how a reading of this important symbol in The Lord of the Rings can be applied to Tolkien's writings on Beowulf.

You can read Simon's article "In the House of the Fairbairns" here.

Cultus Dispatches: Things Tolkien Fanfiction Readers and Writers Like to Do (Other Than Fanfiction)

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"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?

You can read this month's article "Things Tolkien Fanfiction Readers and Writers Like to Do (Other Than Fanfiction)" here.

Meet & Greet Instadrabbling

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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

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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.

You can read LadySternchen's biography of Olwë here.

A Sense of History: The Peaks of Taniquetil

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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.

You can read Simon's "The Peaks of Taniquetil" here.

Issue with User Pages Fixed (We Hope!)

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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.

screen capture showing the new site layout for the test account

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

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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.

You can read Anérea's interview with Mirra Kan here.

New Challenge: Resolution

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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.

View a list of the 2023 challenges here.