In honor of twenty years of Back to Middle-earth Month (B2MeM) and as part of our ongoing effort to restore all of our Special Projects on our website, we are going "back to B2MeM" in our newsletters this month to look back at the history of B2MeM on the SWG.

2007 was the year. Tolkien fandom clearly felt that they needed a monthly holiday, and B2MeM seemed to fit the bill. Middle-earth News posted a "Celebrate Middle-earth Month" (CMEM-07) challenge that was a minor reworking of the anonymously submitted B2MeM 2006 challenge. The SWG and the drabble community There-n-Back Again both posted their own challenges. There-n-Back's challenge was participatory in nature: a daily drabble prompt based on "the alphabet of Middle-earth."

Our challenge on the SWG took a different approach, partly due to the fact that, as Silmarillion creators, we weren't really going back to anything; our corner of the fandom—while impacted by the films leaving theaters—relied less on film fans than the Lord of the Rings fandom did. Our event was presented as a "journey through the history of Arda" with a new place-based quotation from The Silmarillion each day.

When B2MeM 2007 debuted, the SWG's website was less than a year old. Beyond a mention in the newsletter, B2MeM 2007 never existed on our website; it was presented entirely on our LiveJournal community. In the interest of historical preservation, we've compiled the original challenge text and the thirty-one quotes we shared that year. You can find the B2MeM 2007 text and quotes here.

Like the 2006 challenge, B2MeM 2007 was rather haphazardly embarked upon. While researching the history of how it came to be, I was unable to find a single email mentioning it, either in my personal email or in the moderator email. It seems the event came back around on the calendar, I felt we needed to participate too on the SWG, and the quote idea was likely a low-effort way to do our part. This would be the last year that B2MeM would fly by the seat of its pants, and beginning with the 2008 event, it would become increasingly elaborate with the focus less on simply appreciating Tolkien's world and more on creating fanworks about it.

Remember that B2MeM is still alive! You can find more about this year's event here.

Just about twenty years ago, an anonymous person sent a challenge to the LiveJournal community Middle-earth News. The Lord of the Rings films had been out of theaters for over a year at that point, and energy in the Tolkien fanworks fandom was beginning to flag. The challenge was to make March a "Back to Middle-earth Month"—B2MeM for short—to remember one's love for Tolkien and keep the energy in the fandom high.

The SWG, along with several other Tolkien groups, picked up the challenge and promoted it in their own spaces. For us, it was a humble beginning for B2MeM: just an announcement in the March 2006 newsletter and nothing more. There were no prompts, no reminders, no roundups of what was created for the event. But March, it seemed, had been staked out in the minds of Tolkien fandom as B2MeM for the foreseeable future.

We're remembering this history as part of our ongoing effort to get all of our Special Projects back online, especially as B2MeM turns twenty years old this year. B2MeM 2006 never even had its own page on our site—our archive wouldn't open for three months after the first B2MeM—and its historical importance lies more in what would follow than the 2006 event itself. (B2MeM 2006 does have its own page now, in the interest of documenting its place in the SWG's historical record and Dawn's completionist tendencies.) B2MeM 2006 seems mostly to mark something magical about fandom, which is how an idea tossed out to the world can be picked up and take on a life of its own. I sometimes wonder if the anonymous person who invented the original B2MeM challenge stuck around in the fandom to see how big their idea would become in the coming years!

The SWG, B2MeM ... both are Tolkien fandom institutions that grew from a small idea. Remember that we support fandom endeavors whenever we can. If you have an idea for a fandom event, we will promote it in our Around the World and Web section, and we set up channels on our Discord server for events that aren't big enough for their own server but want a place for participants to learn and chat about their event. And for bigger projects, like the recent Fëanorian Zine, we collaborate around hosting as well. Decades of people having ideas and seeing them through has kept the Tolkien fandom alive.

Twenty years later, although no longer an SWG event, B2MeM is still alive. You can find more about this year's event here.

If Christopher Tolkien's work with his father's writings made anything plain, it was how prolific a writer J.R.R. Tolkien was. Yet he didn't follow the trajectory of most other famed 20th-century fiction writers, with multiple novels and a trove of short stories in print. As we know well, as fans and creators based on The Silmarillion, much of his work was posthumous.

But he was prolific, having authored hundreds of essays and poems and fragments beyond his major works, and while coming up with titles is one of the more anxiety-inducing parts of the process for many writers, it doesn't seem to have been for him. At least, it isn't evidenced in the variety of titles that grace his works, some of which may surprise even the most well-read Tolkien fans.

For this month's challenge, we've used the titles Tolkien's many and varied works as prompts. Title Track offers 125 titles of chapters, poems, essays, lectures, fragments, and drafts to inspire your fanworks. Note that you work does not have to be about the text it titles (although it can be!) As always, we encourage creative interpretations of the prompts in any way that encourages you to create Silmarillion-based fanworks.

If you'd like the stamp for creating a fanwork for the challenge, it needs to be posted to our archive no later than 15 March 2026. Because February is Black History Month, we encourage creators to consider featuring a character of color and have a special stamp for fanworks that do. Let a moderator know if you've earned this stamp (replying to this email is a good way to reach us!) All of our challenge guidelines can be found here.

With the introduction of Title Track, we are bidding adieu to another year of the Resolution challenge, but note that Resolution does not close until after 15 February, so you still have time to get stamps for those amnesty fanworks.

Every month, Anna (IdleLeaves) generously hosts an instadrabbling session on our Discord server. For many of us, we are in the depths of winter. For all of us, life brings its usual stresses and challenges, and it is easy to put writing, art, and creative expression at the bottom of the list. A couple hours making fanworks with fandom friends can be a welcome oasis amidst the stressors of life.

Instadrabbling is a long-running Tolkien fandom tradition. More than twenty years old, instadrabbling was first held on Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and prompts were four words chosen at random from the closest book at hand. One of the advantages of Discord has been the ability to bring instadrabbling back. If you've never participated before, instadrabbling involves a group of creators meeting on chat, someone throws out a prompt or four, and everyone writes a drabble (or whatever comes to mind). We share our creations in the server and admire each other's work. Instadrabbling is low-pressure and casual, and all are encouraged to participate to whatever degree they are comfortable.

Instadrabbling doesn't have to be drabbles, and it doesn't have to be writing. It doesn't even have to be Silmworks; we are open to all Tolkien-based fanworks! We've had participants make art; we've had participants use the prompts to add on to longer stories. And of course stopping by just to read and enjoy the fanworks is very much encouraged!

We hope you can join us today at 6PM/18:00 UTC (find this in my timezone)! If you're not on our Discord server, you can join here. Just scroll down to the #instadrabbling channel!

In the quiet months of the year, we are making new again some parts of our site that have become buried or forgotten so that they can be enjoyed for the first time by our newer members and rediscovered by those of us who have been around for a bit longer.

The SWG was founded in 2005, and our archive opened in 2007. At twenty years, that feels venerable ... but there was an entire era of online Silmarillion fanfiction that existed before we did. Penned mostly in the years of the Lord of the Rings films, these stories represent some of the earliest examples of Silmarillion fanfiction and established tropes, fanons, and pairings that persist to this day. (Hello, Russingon! ... or MaeFin, as we called you back then ...)

Fanlore places the first Silmarillion fanfiction on Fanfiction.net in 2000, and in the year between June 2003 and June 2004, the Silmarillion section on that site roughly doubled in size. Some of the first of these stories, therefore, are now twenty-five years old or more. Written at the fruitful intersection of burgeoning interest in Tolkien brought on by the LotR films, increasing access to home internet, and the advent of platforms like Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal that allowed fans to build fandom communities, these first stories show how Tolkien fans were conceptualizing Middle-earth collectively and creatively.

In 2010, SWG moderator Angelica began working on a project aimed at archiving some of these stories on the SWG. The Library of Tirion asked for recommendations from SWG members of their favorite pre-2007 Silmarillion fanfiction, and Angelica worked tirelessly to contact authors who, by then, had sometimes been out of the fandom for years, seeking permission to archive their stories with us.

Although we have not added to the Library of Tirion for some years now, it remains on our site and is a good starting point for reading some early Silmfics chosen by our members for their importance, either to them as individuals or to the fandom as a whole. At a time of the year when many of us are in the doldrums of winter and others sweltering through the heights of summer, these stories offer an escape back to some of the first imaginings that can be found online of our beloved Silmarillion characters and stories. Check out the Library of Tirion here.

As part of our ongoing effort to restore Special Projects on our site, we are spotlighting projects that are fully back up and running so that the fanworks created for them can be enjoyed again, in many cases by fans who weren't involved in the fanfiction community when the works debuted. Akallabêth in August was published in August 2009, with at least one new fanwork appearing daily throughout the month and into the first week of September 2009. The goal of the project was to retell the Akallabêth in fanworks—creators signed up for a specific event from the Akallabêth—and the final project included forty-three stories, poems, and works of art. The fanworks were presented in what, looking back, was an online zine with a customized site layout designed to look like an illuminated manuscript.

Akallabêth in August had been an annual challenge since 2006, so what made us, in the challenge's fourth year, want to do a much bigger project? At the time, Silmarillion fanworks tended to be much more First Age-focused—and specifically First Age Noldor. Creators who focused on the Second Age often described feeling much as Silmarillion creators had a few years prior, in general Tolkien fanfic spaces, which focused heavily on Lord of the Rings in the wake of the films' popularity. This sense of wanting to create something for Silmarillion fans (rather than simply grumbling about the number of Legomances and Tenth Walkers and other LotR-focused fics) was a big part of what inspired the SWG, and the same philosophy underlies Akallabêth in August. The goal is not to have less First Age Noldorin fanworks but to spotlight, celebrate, and encourage works about the dramas of the Second Age!

If you've never checked out the Akallabêth in August fanworks (or if it's been awhile), there are many wonderful works from creators who were among the most respected Second Age writers and artists of the mid-late 2000s. You can find the fanworks here.

Every now and then I like to use this space in the newsletter to highlight some of our less-expected fanwork types on the SWG archive, especially since so many new members have joined us in the last year. In the long arc of fanfiction archive history, the first fanfiction archives in the early 2000s were hand-coded, meaning that the webmaster had to code and upload each story by hand, with a smattering of automated archives built using custom code where authors could upload their own stories. In 2003, eFiction was released, which let webmasters quickly and easily set up an automated fic archive without needing to know how to code. eFiction archives proliferated, and when AO3 opened in 2008, it operated a lot like the eFiction archives people had become accustomed to.

The unifying thread in this history is stories and fiction. There were practical reasons why fanworks archives were nearly always fanfiction archives, but it did shape our tendency to hear "fanworks archive" and assume it will be mostly or all writing-based fanworks.

The SWG used to be an eFiction archive, and it was challenging (though not impossible) to modify the code to post fanworks other than fanfiction or text-based fanworks. When eFiction stopped being updated and we discussed migrating to a different software, Drupal won out in part because it was not as text-centric as other options like Wordpress, which let us build other fanwork types into the archive.

Art was the obvious and big one that we added, but some of our lesser-known fanwork types may be useful for sharing fanworks you've made that (because of the eFiction/AO3 bias toward fanfiction) you never considered appropriate for archiving. Link collections are a big one. If you have a collection of references about a topic or character, a list of fanworks that are essential reading/viewing on a topic or character, or a collection of songs, art, poetry, or whatever inspires you to create Tolkien fanworks, a link collection lets you preserve and share these lists.

Playlists are similar but are collections of audio like music or podcasts that connect in some way to Tolkien's world or fanworks. Maybe you have playlists that act as a soundtrack for a chapter or a fanwork you created. Maybe you have a list of songs that put you in the mood for making Tolkien-inspired art or other fanworks. All are welcome!

Series are probably the most familiar, having been a part of the eFiction software and that, like many eFiction features, were later echoed as well on AO3. Series limit you to collecting works that are posted on the SWG and are most often used to collect your fanworks that belong to a single story arc or other collection. However, you are not limited to just your fanworks in a series, making them a good choice if you create collaboratively with other writers and arists or for putting together collections of notable fanworks archived on the SWG.

If you're not sure how to get started adding one of these unexpected fanworks to our archive, just reply to this email, and our site moderators will point you in the right direction!

Two years ago, we announced our Year of History: an endeavor to ensure that historical materials that had become unavailable or difficult to access due to our site migration and closure of various social media would continue to be available. This was and is a big job. The SWG is twenty years old, so that is twenty years of fanworks, conversations, and documents that trace our evolution from a small Silmarillion-focused social group—one among thousands at the time—to one of the only Tolkien fanfiction archives still online.

Working with the editors of The Fëanorian Zine pushed us to resurrect the Special Projects section of our site, where the zine would be hosted, and we've slowly been bringing the various special projects hosted there back online.

These are mid-2000s static HTML pages. Some of them used PHP includes, which was very fancy technology to me at the time! But beyond that and the obligate linked stylesheet, all that makes them tick lives in those HTML files, and when we migrated from a site that was partly static HTML pages and partly eFiction to a site that was entirely Drupal, the effect on many of our special projects was like dumping a bucket of freezing water over them. They technically still lived on the site, but their layouts and displays were broken when Drupal took over the site, and many of the links no longer worked.

Seven in '07 is the latest to come back online. This was our very first special project, focusing on the house of Fëanor and inspired by the calendar date 7/7/07. The SWG's archive opened on June 6 that year. Apparently, sometime in mid-June, I realized that the calendar that year contained the date 7/7/07, and that was an opportunity we could not pass up. On June 13, I opened a call for submissions for Seven in '07. My husband and I were in the middle of buying our first house. We moved in on June 29, without internet. My sister handled the updates to our web server, and Tárion Anaróre, one of my comoderators, handled announcements. Seven in '07 debuted on July 1 and featured a Fëanorian a day until the fateful date of 7/7/07 (Amrod and Amras shared a day). I have a distinct memory of logging into the internet at a Panera Bread to look at the project because I still did not have internet. Later, the project was popular enough that we decided to add pages for Nerdanel and Celebrimbor, which were posted at the end of July.

The central concept was that each day's character would have a short biography, presented along with fanfiction and fan art about that character. Oshun authored the biography for Fëanor, which also marked a turning point toward more detailed Character of the Month biographies that she'd lead for over a decade before passing into the West in 2024.

It was a big moment for our group, orchestrated in about two weeks and endeavored only about a week after opening the fanworks archive that is now the center of our site and itself a significant accomplishment at the time. Seven in '07 would encourage future special projects: opportunities to present and promote Silmarillion fanworks in a way that we hoped made them special (and I'll admit that I loved designing all those static HTML pages and their obligate linked stylesheets!)

As the Fëanorian Zine attests, we are still open to new special projects, so if you have an idea or would like to collaborate, just reply here or email the moderators to start the conversation!

Each year, we generally offer ten shiny new challenges for creators on our site. Sometimes, each challenge will have dozens or even hundreds of prompts. The aim of the challenge mods is to offer innovative approaches to making new fanworks while also having something for just about everyone. We want Silmarillion creators to be able to turn to our site and find something in our challenges to dismantle their writer's block or encourage a new approach to writing about the legendarium.

But with each challenge running for just a month, this means that creators often can't participate in all of them and get the stamps. Our challenges never close, so creators can always use past challenges to inspire fanworks and tag those challenges when posting their work. But practicality means that we only hand out stamps for the month the challenge is officially underway. Except in January! In January, creators can go back to the previous year's challenges and choose one they missed, pick a new prompt, or finish a fanwork they started but didn't finish.

Called New Year's Resolution, our annual amnesty challenge aims to encourage our members to do something creative or fannish to start the new year. You can find a recap of 2025's challenges here.

January becomes an odd month challenge-wise. Our Great Beleriand Bake-Off challenge is still running, with new prompts through January 15th. Both Great Beleriand Bake-Off and New Year's Resolution will give stamps to fanworks posted no later than February 15th, when we will unveil the next challenge.

Wishing all of our members and friends an inspiring New Year!

This week, we were very pleased to be able to host The Fëanorian Zine, a gorgeous full-color fanzine with fiction and art from thirty creators, which can be read and downloaded for free on the SWG. At over 150 pages, it promises hours of enjoyment if you're lucky to have time off during the December holidays. The SWG moderators would like to offer our congratulations to editors JoeTamy and StarsOfArda and all of the zine's contributors for their achievement! We hope you will check it out and share your appreciation if you enjoy it! (Note that you must be logged in to our site to comment. If you're not an SWG member and want to pass along your compliments, you can reply to this email too, and we will forward it to the editors.)

When JoeTamy and StarsOfArda first contacted us about hosting the zine, this nudged us to get the Special Projects section of our site back up and running. Since the first special project in 2007 (Seven in '07), special projects have taken a variety of forms and are sometimes, like The Fëanorian Zine, done in collaboration with other fandom groups. When we migrated the archive from eFiction to Drupal, the formatting broke on many of our special projects, which were sometimes housed on custom webpages. It has been easy to put off the work of getting these back up and running again, but we've begun to do so, and if you visit the Special Projects page (housed under the Extras menu), you will see The Fëanorian Zine now keeps company with Mereth Aderthad 2025 and two historical special projects, Akallabêth in August and Back to Middle-earth Month 2008, which are in the process of being restored.

Special Projects is an area of our site we hope will continue to grow, including supporting projects outside the SWG that benefit from the infrastructure we can provide through our website and archive. When the SWG was founded in 2005, we were committed to collaborating, not competing, with other fandom groups and projects, and that value remains important to us. If you're considering a special project or know someone who is, we'd love the help support your project if we can!

Finally, tomorrow (Sunday, December 28) we will host a live reading on the theme of celebrations on our Discord. It's not to late to sign up if you want to be on the program, but if you're not sure, there will be an open mic session at the end. Fanworks, excerpts, and passages from Tolkien on the theme of celebrations are all welcome! Find more information, including the program so far, here. The reading will begin at noon Eastern Time (find this in my timezone) on the #live-readings stage channel on our Discord, found under SWG Events. The channel will open a half-hour early to provide the opportunity to tech and sound checks from participants. We hope you can join to listen in or read!