The SWG's birthday is a rather inexact thing. The SWG was established on March 15, 2005, but we did not begin recruiting members until the end of July that year, making it so (just like an Elf) we have both a begetting day and birthday. However, as people trickled into the group across the course of several days, it is hard to pin down just one of them as our birthday.

It is, however, somewhere around this time, nineteen years ago. Nineteen, as a birthday, is pretty unremarkable, sandwiched between legal adulthood at 18 in many countries and the big 2-0 that marks the exit from teenagedom. Nineteen, in fandom terms, is pretty respectable, though. While there are some truly venerable fannish institutions, most do not last this long. In my research on archives, I have found some that lasted only a year or two. Most of the sites that seemed like big sisters to the SWG when it trickled to life at the end of July 2005 are now gone.

Just like a human birthday, we won't treat our nineteenth birthday as a milestone. We'll mark it and be mildly impressed that we've made it this far. But next year? Next year we turn twenty!

We are planning an event for our twentieth birthday next year. It will be hybrid, occurring both in-person and online. Because, as an organization, we have produced both fanworks and scholarship (the latter through a fannish versus academic approach), we will welcome presentations of both—watch this space in the weeks to come for more details on what this will look like, including a call for presenters if you want to share your work as part of marking our twentieth year!

Right now, we are working to secure a venue, and the most important thing we need is to know how many people would like to attend, assuming they are able to do so. This is not an RSVP or any kind of sign-up; we're not even collecting names. It is more of an attempt to gain a sense of whether we should expect a small gathering in a library community room or whether we should rent something larger.

Please answer the one question on this form to help us gather this information. It is also helpful if you can signal boost this survey outside of the SWG in any fandom spaces where it is acceptable to do so. This will not be an SWG-only event, and we want to welcome as many Tolkien fans as want to attend, whether they are SWG members or not.

Finally, thank you to everyone who has supported us in the many ways needed that we have nearly survived our teens! (If you're reading this, that's you!) It has been an incredible nineteen years!