Just as the title says, tomorrow is the opening day of our inaugural year of Tolkien Meta Week! TMW is part of our ongoing effort at showcasing the brilliant thinking, writing, and creation that Tolkien fans do on the legendarium and to emphasize that Meta Is for Everyone!
If you're hearing about this for the first time, here's the elevator pitch: Tolkien Meta Week will run between December 8th and 14th on the SWG archive and our tumblr. ALL meta is welcome: all subjects, all formats, and all levels of completion and polish. We will offer four daily meta prompts, but these are entirely optional. Do them on different days! Mix and match! Skip them entirely! Any nonfiction content about Tolkien is welcome for this event.
Tomorrow's (purely optional!) prompts are theory, infographic, The Silmarillion, and the Tolkien fandom. So share your theories about how the various details of the text work together! Or make a visual to share information about a favorite character or topic in the legendarium. Or share something nonfiction about The Silmarillion: a headcanon, a list of favorite resources, or a favorite bit of canon and what it means to you. Or talk about Tolkien fandom: what you notice about what we do, what brought you and keeps you here, or a favorite piece of your fandom history. Or something else entirely! (Prompts really are optional ...)
Here are the prompts for the week:
December 8: theory | infographic | The Silmarillion | the Tolkien fandom
December 9: open letter | podcast/audio | The Lord of the Rings | Tolkien's non-Middle-earth writings
December 10: literary analysis | wiki article | The Hobbit | adaptations
December 11: character study | video | Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, The Nature of Middle-earth, and The Fall of Númenor | books, articles, and meta about Tolkien
December 12: headcanon | meme | The Three Great Tales: The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin | compare Tolkien to another text
December 13: ship manifesto | personal essay | Tolkien's art | apply real-world disciplines to Middle-earth
December 14: research | list (including link collections) | The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien | Tolkien fanworks (with permission!)
Remember, if you are posting on Tumblr, tag #tolkien meta week so we can reblog your work. If you're posting on the archive, select Tolkien Meta Week as your challenge. (Meta shared on our archive should follow the usual rules about "Silmworks" unless you have posting access to our Beyond the Silmarillion section, in which case go wild.)
See the Tolkien Meta Week challenge for full details and prompt explanations!
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.
Read more ...Nerdanel/Nienna moodboard by Independence1776 [Artwork]
A Nerdanel/Nienna moodboard.
Read more ...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.
Read more ...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.
Read more ...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.
Read more ...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.