We are excited to announce that we will be hosting an event on July 19, 2025 in celebration of our twentieth birthday! The event will be hybrid, with both virtual and in-person options, with the in-person event taking place at the South Burlington Library in Burlington, Vermont. For those able to attend in-person, we will also host community meals and other outings the weekend of the event.

In the spirit of the SWG's (almost) twenty-year history, the event will involve both research/scholarship and fanworks components, as we seek to showcase and celebrate the variety of ways that Tolkien fans engage with and illuminate his work through fiction, artwork, poetry, research, scholarship and meta, music, and other forms. If you'd like to present research, create a fanwork for the event, or attend either in-person or online, we encourage you to follow us on at least one of our social platforms so that you receive updates as they come in:

In the next few weeks, we will open the call for presenters for research, meta, and scholarship.

Right now, we are looking for volunteers to help with the various tasks we will be faced with over the next ten months. You do not need to be able to attend in-person to volunteer, and there is no minimum time commitment. Anything helps! If you'd like to volunteer, comment on this post, email the mods, contact us on any of our social media platforms, or post to the #town-hall on our Discord. Let us know if you'd like to be on the logistics committee (scheduling, tech setup and testing, weekend outings, etc.) or the promotions committee (graphics design, social media, presenter interviews, etc.) or both!

Click here to see the full information that's available for the Mereth Aderthad 2025 event.

SWG News

New Challenge: Allusive
Literature and art constantly refer back to each other using allusions, and this month's prompts are inspired by allusions to literature, myth, art, and history.

Cultus Dispatches: "The Rings of Power" Is a Ripple (So Far)
Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data for 2025 shows that "The Rings of Power" TV series has not had the same impact on the fandom as the film trilogies did ... so far.

New Challenge: Building Middle-earth
Let global architecture be your inspiration in this challenge, where you will work with a prompts that are architectural styles, locations in Arda, or both.

Instadrabbling Sessions for July, August, and September
Instadrabbling continues on the first Saturday of each month on our Discord server.

New Fanworks

Explain This by Elrond's Library [Writing]

Melkor demands an account of Mairon’s failures.

Read more ...

Message in a Bottle by StarSpray [Writing]

Over the course of his very long life he had found a handful of messages in bottles, but it had been a very long time. So when he found the glass bottle on his little stretch of pebbly beach, he picked it up with the intention of tossing it into his recycling. But it wasn’t, he found, just another beer bottle.

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Nerdanel/Nienna moodboard by Independence1776 [Artwork]

A Nerdanel/Nienna moodboard.

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Updated Fanworks

The Stars of Home by Idrils Scribe [Writing]

Elrohir has been found after his long abduction by the Black Númenóreans of Umbar. He comes home to Rivendell, but all is not well: the Elf-child that was taken is now a Man grown. War and darkness have left Elrohir deeply scarred, and even at home there is danger...

An alternate universe for the Under Strange Stars series, in which Elrohir goes with Glorfindel instead of running away from him after the events of Under Strange Stars. This story can be enjoyed without having read the original.

Many thanks to Grundy and Marchwriter for their excellent beta-reading and brainstorming.

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A Thousand Winds that Blow by StarSpray [Writing]

When uneasy dreams bring him back into Beleriand, Daeron finds a pair of twins who have lost their home, and an enemy who has lost himself. The Shadow's reach is growing ever longer, and if they are to survive, they must do it together.

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From That Rubble by StarSpray [Writing]

Fëanor shrugged, studying the contents of his wine glass. “Something must be done about that house. It will fall down eventually.”
“It does not follow that it must be you that tears it down single-handedly. Are you sure you do not want help?”
“It’s not as though I have much else to do. I need to build something new there,” he said after a few moments. “To do that, I must first clear away the old and broken things.”

Decades out of Mandos, too many things in Fëanor's life remain broken. He can't do anything except wait for his sons to come to him, but he can do something about the old and crumbling house where they once lived. 

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Eä's Redemption by AaronAzrael [Writing]

This is my new poetical attempt to add my own interpretation to Tolkien's Cosmology as to Eru's Creation and the Valar's minds and behind-the-scene providence reasons and mechanisms.. I often review Eä as part of our own world, just in another dimension, this is why I have always seriously thought on the matter who the Ainur are, who Eru is, how he matches our own religious pantheon, and this has been conducted after serious research of many esoteric teachings of our own planet's heritage.

Read more ...

Around the World and Web

Finwean Sibblings Prompt Fest 2026
A prompt-based fandom event aiming to focus on celebrating Finwë's children: Fëanor, Findis, Fingolfin, Lalwen, & Finarfin - ships, gen relationships, or character-centric

Gigolas Week 2026
Gigolas Week is a tumblr event focusing on the relationship between Legolas and Gimli

Innumerable Stars 2026
A character-based Tolkien fandom gift exchange is returning for another year of gifting.

Tolkien Sapphic September
Tolkien Sapphic September is a month long event focusing on Sapphic relationships and characters in Tolkien and adjacent materials.