SWG News

Cultus Dispatches: Femslash Is a Political Act

Posted by SWG Moderators on 20 February 2023. Last updated on 25 March 2023.

Fans who have been reading and writing Tolkien-based fanfiction for more than ten years quite possibly remember a time when "femslash" wasn't even a term. While slash sites nominally accepted it, it really wasn't being written, and it's no wonder: As the last several Cultus Dispatches columns in our series on writing about women in fanfiction have detailed, the Tolkien fandom went through a pair of phases where writing about women and writing slash were controversial acts. Caught in the crosshairs of this dual intolerance (it was about ladies! and it was gay!!!), femslash really didn't stand a chance.

But, as we also detailed in last month's interview with Elleth, a concerted effort by fans to not just normalize but celebrate writing about women—and femslash in particular—has pushed back the tides of intolerance and introduced a whole new genre to the fandom. This month's column Femslash Is a Political Act (and Other Observations of Tolkien Fandom's Genre Non Grata) by Dawn Felagund looks at Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data about femslash: how many people write it, how many people read it, and who exactly are among those groups. The results show that femslash has skyrocketed in popularity among readers in recent years, portending that maybe it won't always be the new genre on the block (much less a "genre non grata"), possibly due to its use as a political expression by fans who feel marginalized based on gender, sexual orientation, or both.

Read & Review: The Fall of Númenor

Posted by SWG Moderators on 16 February 2023. Last updated on 8 April 2023.

Lyra opens her review of The Fall of Númenor with the observation that "Tolkien's literary legacy truly is the gift that keeps on giving. Whenever you think that your collection is finally complete, a new publication is announced." The question is, though, is The Fall of Númenor a worthwhile addition to your already groaning Tolkien bookshelf?

In our latest Read & Review column, Lyra reviews The Fall of Númenor, touching on its contents (and what it leaves out), its structure, and the artwork it contains by Alan Lee, concluding that "it is ... an immensely useful publication." You can read Lyra's complete "Review of The Fall of Númenor" here.

New Challenge: Cheesy Corn Chips

Posted by SWG Moderators on 13 February 2023. Last updated on 18 March 2023.

Two best friends share a first kiss, backed by a postcard-perfect sunset. A car chase twists through the streets of Paris before plunging through the Arc de Triomphe—while driving in reverse. The team of lovable and klutzy misfits pulls out a victory over the top-flight bullies, right at the buzzer. Such stories make us roll our eyes and groan but also hold the irresistible appeal of one more nacho chip or candy corn.

This month's challenge celebrates the corny and the cheesy in popular culture, the sappy and sweet and schmaltzy and saccharine. To participate, you will choose a prompt from a collection of corny, sentimental, and heartstring-rending pop-culture selections and use it to create a fanwork. As always, you can use any part of the prompt to inspire your fanwork and interpret it any way that works for you. Note that fanworks themselves do not need to be fluffy, sweet, or sentimental.

In order to receive a stamp, fanworks should be posted to the SWG archive no later than March 15, 2023. You can find Cheesy Corn Chips challenge prompts and complete challenge guidelines under the Challenge menu.

Please note that the Jubilee challenge remains open until February 15, so yes, that means that for a short while, there will be two challenges running!

New Archive Formatting Options

Posted by SWG Moderators on 11 February 2023. Last updated on 11 February 2023.

It recently came to our attention that center- and right-aligned formatting were not available on text fields on the archive. We have fixed this issue, so left-, center-, and right-aligned text should all be available. (Note that the <center> HTML tag, which has been deprecated since the Years of the Trees but has tended to continue to work, finally does not work. For those of you writing old-school HTML, we did try to keep it for you. Alas, the internet Ainur refused to hear our prayer. If you want to center-align text, please use the button on the rich-text editor or add a "text-align-center" class to your paragraph tag.) We've also added subscripts and a Paste from Word button.

For fun, we've also given everyone Font Awesome access, so you will be able to use Font Awesome icons in fanworks. (Why would you need subscripts or Font Awesome icons?? We don't know, but we know our community well enough to be sure someone will come up with a good use for them!) To use Font Awesome, click the flag icon in the toolbar and type the name of the icon you want.

Please let us know if you try to use these new features and they don't behave as you think they should.

Character of the Month: Ulmo

Posted by SWG Moderators on 4 February 2023. Last updated on 3 March 2023.

Ulmo is, in short, a complicated character. He is one of Tolkien's earliest characters, first appearing in the 1910s Book of Lost Tales. Like many of Tolkien's early Ainur, he is a tangle of contradictions: the only Vala to remain active in the lives of the people of Middle-earth after the Noldorin exile, yet delighting in scaring those upon whom he visited his blessings. He is both benevolent and terrifying (and, in some of the earliest drafts, a bit silly as well).

This month, Anérea tackles the first of a two-part biography of Ulmo, Lord of Waters, focusing on his realm and his relationships with the other Ainur (which, as his complex nature suggests, were also complicated). She also dives—pardon the pun—into some of the mythological correspondences between Ulmo and other sea deities, his special significance as a god of water in a legendarium where water places a central role, and biographical connections that possibly reveal how water—and Ulmo—came to be so central in Tolkien's imagination.

You can read Part 1 of Anérea's biography of Ulmo here.

Character of Month: Túrin, Part Three

Posted by SWG Moderators on 26 January 2023. Last updated on 23 February 2023.

Tolkien regarded Túrin's story as one of the most important in the legendarium, and it is one of the more complex to unwind textually. Presented by Christopher Tolkien in several forms (including its own volume), there are therefore many confluences and contradictions across what is already a long and tricky tale. For the past several months, firstamazon has been doing us the favor of further distilling Christopher's work into a highly readable three-part biography series of Tolkien's own walking disaster, Túrin Turambar.

In this third and final installment, Túrin's life picks up after Beleg's death, where he ventures next to Nargothrond. This is the moment where his already unlucky existence begins to be ruinous on a much larger scale, leaving people and entire settlements destroyed in his wake, and his own life forfeit to his tragic circumstances.

However, as firstamazon notes, mortal Men "are the game-changers in Tolkien’s legendarium," placing Túrin in a line of Men whose deeds shaped kingdoms and the entire history of Arda. Sadly, his best efforts could not overcome Morgoth's curse, but in a eucatastrophic arc typical of Tolkien, his mortal successors generally fare better (and Tolkien's writings on the Last Battle suggest that Túrin may yet get the final word against Morgoth).

Read the third part of firstamazon's biography of Túrin. And if you missed them, you can find Part One and Part Two on the site as well.

A Sense of History: The Fall of Gondolin

Posted by SWG Moderators on 21 January 2023. Last updated on 8 April 2023.

Tolkien was, of course, extremely well-read in ancient and medieval history, conversant in many of the dead languages that the rest of us read only in translation. Much of his work was, not surprisingly, grounded in this history.

The Fall of Gondolin is one such episode.

In this month's A Sense of History column, MirienSilowende looks at the Fall of Gondolin and the ancient and medieval history that may have informed Tolkien's writing of it. She uncovers numerous historical sources that detail some of the more noteworthy sacks and falls of great cities much like Gondolin, renowned for their splendor and elevated status within their worlds.

Of course, these historical inspirations are more than just an interesting aside in the legendarium but can also become building blocks for expanding on the legendarium via fanworks. For example, some of the historical sources MirienSilowende provides go into detail about what happened to the survivors once the city was overthrown by an enemy military. While Tolkien provides few details on this for Gondolin, reading historical sources that possibly informed his construction of the story generates inspiration for fanworks about these untold tales of Gondolin's people.

You can read MirienSilowende's article "The Fall of Gondolin Reflected in History" here.

Feedback Wanted: Member-Run Events

Posted by SWG Moderators on 7 January 2023. Last updated on 4 February 2023.

At the end of 2021, we asked our members what they'd like to see us build on our site in the coming years. There was significant support for all of the options, and we spent the past year expanding our archive to accept fanworks of all types. The only item on the list we haven't yet completed is the ability for members to host events on our site.

This one is a much more ambitious lift: building an entirely new feature vs. extending existing functionality. During 2023, we will be chipping away at hopefully getting this figured out, built, and up and running. To get us started, we need as much feedback as possible on what people would want to see this feature include.

So what even are "member-run events"? Basically, we'd provide you with what you need to set up an event, share information with your participants, and have participants post their fanworks, all using our site and resources. If your event would benefit from having a website or archive behind it, we would provide you with the tools to set that up. We've seen some excellent events run by members on our Discord, so we'd love it we could extend this further to offer our website and archive to those events that would benefit from it.

To get a preliminary sense of what event admins and moderators are looking for, we have set up a survey to collect feedback. All feedback is welcome, whether you already run an event, are thinking about it, or just want to share an opinion. Contacting us through the site is also welcome.

New Challenge: Jubilee

Posted by SWG Moderators on 2 January 2023. Last updated on 17 February 2023.

Every January, we kick off the year with a challenge to nudge us to recommit to our creative lives by creating a fanwork for one 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 during the month of January with one of our challenges as inspiration!

This year we are doing something slightly different. This January, any challenge from January 2017 onward is fair game. Is there a challenge from before your time you think would have been fun? Do it now! Did you start a fanwork for a challenge long ago but never completed it? We hope this gives you motivation to finish! If you have no unrealized or unfinished projects (congratulations, we are in awe), choose from any of the past challenges—just pick a prompt you haven’t done before. And if you’re utterly exhausted after the past year and/or the holiday season but ready to go on a reading binge or appreciate some art, this challenge includes commenting stamps!

You can find the full Jubilee guidelines here. If you want a list of past challenges, see our Challenges by Date page.

2023 Is Our Year of History!

Posted by SWG Moderators on 31 December 2022. Last updated on 4 February 2023.

Dear SWG members and friends,

This year, the Silmarillion Writers' Guild will turn eighteen years old. If it was a person (and sometimes it feels like it is!), it would be a legal adult in most parts of the world. Having started humbly as just a Yahoo! Group and LiveJournal community in 2005, it represents a tremendous achievement for everyone involved that we've worked to build this group into what it is today.

The past few years have been years of progress. We were challenged by our aging software and met that challenge by migrating the site to Drupal, allowing us to continue to build and expand. The SWG now accepts all types of fanworks, and we've added new features like a beta directory and our Beyond the Silmarillion section. We've transcended our name in more ways than one: more than writing, more than just The Silmarillion. We're also pleased to host a vibrant Discord community that holds regular events, most of them run by our members.

Eighteen years, however, represents a lot of history as well. When we moved to the new site, much of that history preserved on our old site could not be easily moved. If 2021 and 2022 were years of progress, 2023 is set aside as a year for history, and over the next year, we will work to restore these historical artifacts to our site so that the SWG's history is easily available for all to enjoy.

The past few years have been rough for Tolkien-based fanworks archives. The closure of Yahoo! Groups, deprecating software, and changing internet use habits have all impacted small archives, never for the good. We've seen many sites close or become inactive. We recognize that the SWG's success amid these losses is an anomaly, and it is not an accident: it is the result of our members, who are committed to our community and archive, and your willingness to share your fanworks, time, and enthusiasm with us. We are grateful to embark on another year with all of you, in which we look forward  to continuing to grow the SWG.

Best wishes for a wonderful 2023!

Dawn, Russandol, Grundy, Lyra, Angelica, Elleth, Janeways, and Saelind
SWG moderators