Things and people are always getting lost in Tolkien. In trying to come up with a clever title (I lost), I just searched my digital Silmarillion for the word "lost," and Tolkien uses it forty-nine times. It's not surprising, given that his stories are generally about people taking long walks over vast swathes of land, sometimes in large and unwieldy groups, and featuring objects that are always getting tossed into remote places or being squabbled over. People and things are easily lost under such conditions.

While I can't help you if you get lost with a group of Elves dragging their feet over a mountain range or if you lost something dropped into a volcano, I can help you not get lost on the SWG archive. As of this writing, there are 5,509 fanworks archived with us. That puts the SWG on par, stats-wise, with the big Tolkien archives founded in the early 2000s. It can also mean that, when you're looking for something specific, it can be hard to find.

The SWG was originally an eFiction site, so when we rebuilt in Drupal, we kept the basic structure used by eFiction for organizing fanworks in place: the ability to see lists of all fanworks in the order they were added/updated, all fanworks for a particular tag, or a filtered list of fanworks meeting the searcher's exacting specifications.

If you just want to see what's new on the site, start with the Fanworks dropdown on the menu at the top of the page. Here, you can see everything that's been added or updated, or you can see all of a particular type of fanwork (e.g., Artwork or Link Collections). If you click on All Fanworks, click one link further to include Beyond the Silmarillion fanworks to truly get EVERYTHING.

But if you're feeling lost in finding what you want, you probably don't want everything. There's 5,509 things in that everything, after all.

If you want all fanworks with a particular tag, at the bottom of the Fanworks dropdown menu, there is an option to "Browse Fanworks By." Use this if you want to see fanworks by a specific creator or tagged with a specific character, genre, or relationship. (If you really love that genre, character, or relationship and want to know when something is added or updated with that tag, you can also follow tags from here. You can also click any tag on the site and end up with a list of all fanworks for that tag, and follow the tag from there.)

But what if you want something really, really specific? Like you want an adventure story including Glorfindel but not Ecthelion. Or an Adult-rated Anairë/Fingolfin fanwork, but no violence please? Under the Tools menu, use Find a Fanwork to really narrow down those 5,509 fanworks to exactly what you're looking for across nearly all available tags.

Finally, the SWG site is built by us, for us, the Silmarillion fanworks fandom. If there is a feature or tool that we don't have that you'd like to see, hit REPLY and suggest it!