SWG News

New Challenge: Manwë's Mailbag

Posted by SWG Moderators on 14 November 2022. Last updated on 21 January 2023.

Every year, as our lives grow busier at the holidays, we run a two-month challenge that we try to make a little special. For this year's November-December challenge, Manwë's Mailbag, your prompt will be a postcard.

All prompts—that is, postcards—will be sent digitally. In addition, if you'd like to receive your postcard in the mail, we will send it to you! You can use any element of your postcard prompt—the image (or part of the image) or the text or???—to create your fanwork. As always, we encourage participants to get creative!

To request a postcard prompt, contact the mods, and we will send a digital copy of your card. If you would like us to mail your card as well, please include an address.

We are also still accepting postcard designs, which will be used as prompts.

You can find the full Manwë's Mailbag challenge guidelines here, including more detail on how to create a postcard.

Important Challenge Dates

November 1: Postcard design submissions open
November 15: Begin requesting challenge prompts (email us to request your prompt!)
December 1: Last day to request a postcard by mail and last day for postcard design submissions*
January 15: Last day to post a challenge response and receive a stamp** and last day to request a digital postcard prompt

* Postcard designs received after December 1 will be included in the digital collection of prompts available on our website for the January amnesty challenge.
** However, at noted above, January is our annual amnesty challenge, so technically if you post by February 15, you can still get a stamp.

Finally, a huge thank you to Grundy, who is generously covering the costs of printing and postage for this challenge.

Create a Postcard for Manwë's Mailbag!

Posted by SWG Moderators on 2 November 2022. Last updated on 14 November 2022.

On November 15, we will unveil our next challenge: Manwë's Mailbag. For this challenge, participants will receive a postcard from Middle-earth as a prompt. (Everyone will get a digital copy but, yes, Manwë's Eagles will be circumnavigating the globe to drop off postcards for those of you who want to receive actual mail!)

We are still firmly in X Marks the Spot territory, but in order to make our postcard challenge work, we will need postcards. And that's where you come in! We are looking for postcards to use as prompts for the upcoming challenge and invite you to try your hand at creating one or a few! For complete guidelines, check out our Manwë's Mailbag challenge page.

Character of the Month: Ulfang & Uldor

Posted by SWG Moderators on 2 November 2022. Last updated on 17 December 2022.

Ulfang and his son Uldor are notorious in the legendarium as two of the family of Mortal Men upon whose betrayal at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears the defeat of the Noldor and their allies seems to hinge. For this month's Character of the Month, Himring explores what we know of these two characters. What led to the betrayal? Who knew about it and when?

As is typical for the legendarium—especially the Silmarillion materials—the stories of Ulfang and Uldor raise questions as well. There is the ever-present matter of race in the legendarium, and Tolkien's casting of the treacherous Ulfang and Uldor as Easterlings. But there is (again in typical Tolkien fashion!) the matter of names too: Namely, why these characters have names suggesting negativity and betrayal.

You can read Himring's biography of Ulfang and Uldor here.

Cultus Dispatches: Writing Women in Fanfiction - An Analysis of the Data

Posted by SWG Moderators on 29 October 2022. Last updated on 26 November 2022.

If you have been writing or reading Tolkien fanfiction for any length of time, you probably remember Mary Sue. In the early-mid 2000s, she haunted the margins of our stories: the specter of a woman permitted into Tolkien's world to an extent that she changed the plot or even the characters. (Cue horror-movie scream.) Worry about Mary Sue—and whether our carefully crafted female characters were actually a Mary Sue, much like the slasher-film villain you only think is dead but is actually traipsing toward you with insidious purpose—permeated discussions of female characters and led some writers to abandon the idea of writing women at all. It just didn't seem worth it.

This month, in our Cultus Dispatches column, we begin a series on writing women in fanfiction. The first article in the series looks at data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey and what it shows us about the once fraught endeavor of adding a woman to your fanfiction.

Thankfully, the data shows, it is far less fraught today. Most fanfiction writers endeavor to add women to their stories, according to the data, and many use fanfiction as a vehicle to critique and repair Tolkien's depiction of women in the legendarium. But the fandom's historic distaste for seeing women in fanfiction lurks in the data as well.

You can read the article Writing Women in Tolkien Fanfiction: An Analysis of the Data here to learn more about what analysis of the survey data revealed. And if you create or read/view fanworks with women characters and wish to contribute to our latest Fandom Voices collection, you can contribute your memories of writing, creating, and reading about female characters here. Finally, don't forget that Cultus Dispatches is always open to contributions, so if you would like to contribute to our series about women characters in fanworks, comment here or email us and pitch your idea!

New Challenge: X Marks the Spot

Posted by SWG Moderators on 14 October 2022. Last updated on 14 November 2022.

Every year, we run a challenge that we call a Matryoshka after the concept of the Russian nesting dolls where you lift one doll to find another, smaller doll inside. Similarly, the Matryoshka challenge concept centers on the idea that you complete a prompt to find that it leads you to another prompt, which you must try to then incorporate into your fanwork-in-progress. The idea is that you are always building a fanwork but never entirely sure where it might end up going.

This month's X Marks the Spot challenge uses this concept with a twist. Instead of us sending a series of emails with prompts, you will choose your own prompts from a map of Beleriand. You may choose to complete a challenge using two, three, five, or seven prompts. (Seven is jaw-dropping and will earn you a special stamp—the least we can do for those of you willing to subject yourself to this! Let us know in the fanwork notes if you complete the Difficult level challenge.)

So how to participate?

Choose a starting location. Note that a few locations have special rules. You'll find these on the prompt list.

Decide your level of challenge and follow the paths on the map to complete that many prompts. Note that the prompt list will show next locations, and hovering over a location on the list will show you its prompt. As always, prompts are intentionally open-ended and often have multiple interpretations. How you satisfy a prompt is entirely up to you, and we encourage creative thinking and the shameless exploitation of loopholes presented in the prompts.

All fanwork types are eligible for this challenge.

Ready to start your journey? For more information on the X Marks the Spot challenge and to view the map and prompts, click here.

In order to receive a stamp for your fanwork, your response must be posted to the archive on or before 15 November 2022. For complete challenge guidelines, see the Challenges page on our website.

Finally, many thanks to Grundy, who planned and designed the map and graphics for this month's challenge!

A Sense of History: The Plague in Gondor

Posted by SWG Moderators on 14 October 2022. Last updated on 18 November 2022.

For almost three years now, we've all had plagues on our minds. History is littered with examples of highly contagious and deadly diseases that dispatch with large swaths of the population with frightening ease.

In this month's A Sense of History column, MirienSilowende looks at the plague that afflicted Gondor, before spreading northward to wreak havoc on the northern domains of mortal Men, in the middle of the Third Age. As her article shows, the plague in Gondor shares some elements with real-world plagues, namely the Black Death.

You can check out MirienSilowende's The Plague in Gondor here.

Fanfiction Book Club: Novelettes

Posted by SWG Moderators on 9 October 2022. Last updated on 2 December 2022.

The Fall of the House of Usher ... The Birds ...The Little Prince ...The Call of Cthulhu ... what do they all have in common?

Answer: they all have word counts of 7.5k – 20k, and so meet the common definition of a novelette!

Often a forgotten middle child between the short story and novella, novelettes will be the focus of our next SWG book club on 25th-27th November hosted by Narya and polutropos. Submissions should be complete and in their entirety, and must meet the SWG criteria for a Silmarillion fanwork (these are pretty broad ... basically anything that isn't covered in detail in The Hobbit or the main body of The Lord of the Rings will qualify).

Sign-ups are now closed, but the book club is open to all who want to participate in the discussion! See below for the schedule.

Please endeavour to attend the sessions of at least two other authors. We won't enforce this as we know people will have other commitments throughout the weekend, but book clubs only work well when you are willing to engage with other fanworks besides your own!

You can participate in the discussions without signing up as an author if you prefer—there's no need to submit the form, and no minimum time commitment. Turn up to whichever sessions suit your schedule.

If you've never participated in one of our fanfiction book clubs before, our book club FAQ has more information.

Schedule

Friday, November 25

Find the Friday book club schedule in your timezone.

18:00 UTC: Stars Above, Voice Within by Melesta

19:00 UTC: Break

19:30 UTC: wear this now in memory by starlightwalking

Saturday, November 26

Find the Saturday book club schedule in your timezone.

15:30 UTC: So do our Minutes Hasten to their End by maglor_my_beloved

16:30 UTC: Break

17:00 UTC: No Longer Mourn by JazTheBard

18:00 UTC: Break

19:00 UTC: Dream Walking by Torpi

20:00 UTC: Break

20:30 UTC: Hearken Still Unsated by polutropos

Sunday, November 27

Find the Sunday book club schedule in your timezone.

11:30 UTC: Inside Fëanor by 2Nienna2

12:30 UTC: Break

13:00 UTC: Living Reflections of Shadow by jamcake_muses

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19:00 UTC: Touch of a Vanished Hand by elfscribe

20:00 UTC: Break

20:30 UTC: Gone with the Harp's Echo by Narya

Do You Want to Read SWG Fics as eBooks?

Posted by SWG Moderators on 1 October 2022. Last updated on 1 October 2022.

If you have ever wished that it was possible to download a favorite story on the SWG as an ebook, you are not alone. We have been trying to add ebook downloads almost as long as the archive has existed, but the software to do so is never quite what we need to work with our current setup. So this remains an ongoing goal, but in the meantime, downloading SWG fics as ebooks can be done.

In a new FAQ, Anérea investigates two plugins, Save-as-eBook and ePub-Creator, that work with the SWG archive and allow you to save stories as ebooks. Check out the FAQ on ebook plugins here and happy reading!

Character of the Month: Tinfang Warble

Posted by SWG Moderators on 30 September 2022. Last updated on 2 November 2022.

Tolkien was a young man when his earliest work on the "Silmarillion" emerged in the form of the Book of Lost Tales. Full of whimsy, the Lost Tales present a version of Middle-earth where enchantment reigns and Faerie is a place where mortals sometimes land.

From this earliest work comes Tinfang Warble: a mysterious character whose eerie music enchants its mortal listeners and makes the stars burn brighter. Tinfang first appeared in Tolkien's writings even before the Lost Tales, and his character evolves along with Tolkien's work on the tales until he disappeared from the legendarium altogether. Tinfang survives in the two renowned (doomed) musicians of the legendarium: Daeron and Maglor. The difference between Tinfang's character and these later evolutions illustrates the stark shifts the legendarium underwent as it progressed from the Lost Tales to its final form. This month's biography, by Dawn Felagund, explores what we know of this obscure character and his shifting role in the legendarium.

You can read Tinfang Warble's biography here.

Cultus Dispatches: Tolkien Fanfiction and Demographics

Posted by SWG Moderators on 30 September 2022. Last updated on 29 October 2022.

In a lot of communities, you can get a sense of who is present just by looking around yourself. In online communities—especially online fan communities, where pseudonymity is a cultural norm—it can be harder to know just who you share your online spaces with.

This month's Cultus Dispatches column looks at Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data from 2015 and 2020 to answer that question: Just who is in this fandom? Who is present? Who is missing? And why are some groups of people heavily represented in the fandom while others are barely present or absent altogether?

Remember that Cultus Dispatches is always open to contributions! If you'd like to share a piece of fandom history, consider writing an article for the Cultus column.