We are taking a break this week from Mereth Aderthad interviews, and next week, we will be taking the site down briefly on Saturday, April 19, for a major software upgrade. We are swiftly approaching four years since we reopened the site after rebuilding it from the ground up in Drupal (and eighteen years since I built our original archive), so it seems a good weekend for a digression about some of the technical history of how the SWG came to be and continues to exist and why next week's upgrade is happening.
The SWG was not intended to be an archive. I did not have the skills for such an endeavor when the group was founded in 2005, but popular sentiment that we should be an archive (and not a writers' workshop, as I intended) pushed me to gain those skills very quickly. Our archive opened in June 2007. It was built in eFiction, an open-source fiction archive software developed by Rebecca Smallwood, who created it for her own Tolkien and other fan sites and then made it available to all.
The best way to describe eFiction compared to Drupal (our current software) is that both have the ability to make archives—fandom houses in this analogy—but eFiction is a dollhouse that you buy assembled, take out of the box, and can play with right away. You can decorate it and make small adjustments as you want, but you can't fundamentally change what it is without cracking it open and rebuilding it.
Several developers after Rebecca, eFiction stopped being actively maintained, and in 2016, our archive began to show the first signs that its aging software wasn't going to work for us forever. We began researching options and eventually settled on Drupal. If eFiction is a dollhouse, Drupal is a box of LEGO bricks. The essential shapes are there, but you put them together into the structures you want, and you are in no way required to build a house. You could also build a barn, windmill, or shopping mall ... or a house attached to a barn on top of a shopping mall with a windmill attached to the side. When we rebuilt the site in Drupal, this is what we did, first reconstructing the fiction archive more or less how it was in eFiction, then adding on lots more: the ability to archive other types of fanworks, a system for sharing news, a beta-reader directory, and lots of behind-the-scenes tools that help the mods and volunteers keep the site running with minimal fuss.
We are doing a major software upgrade on Drupal next weekend, so if you notice the site offline on Saturday morning Eastern time (afternoon in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and hopefully those west of me are still getting their morning coffee when it's back up), this is why. I'm looking forward to more effective HTML permissions (so that those of you working on pages with me don't get frozen out of edits by my admin powers!) and the ability to more seamlessly handle coauthored fanworks.
The developers of eFiction are almost never mentioned, but we owe so much to Rebecca, Tammy, Artphilia, and Sheep Control, whose work gave us our original home, where we learned and built our community so that we could one day move into the site we have today. Beyond us, so many communities and fanworks would never have existed without their generosity in sharing their skills and time.
If you want to meander more through SWG history, check out our Birthday Bash challenge, which centers on a new event from our history each day (and is almost over, so it's pretty complete as of this writing).
SWG News
New Challenge: Epic 80s
This month's challenge features hundreds of fresh prompts from the bodacious decade of the 1980s.
Cultus Dispatches: Communities Do Comment
Comment data from the SWG underscores community as an essential component to a robust commenting culture.
Instadrabbling Sessions for July, August, and September
Instadrabbling continues on the first Saturday of each month on our Discord server.
New Fanworks
Is it raining with you? by AdmirableMonster [Writing]
In the last days of Númenor, two very different men meet in Umbar and fall in love.
(Please note that while this work is heavily inspired by Disco Elysium, no knowledge of the game is necessary to read the fic!)
Read more ...Wrensong and Roses by Isilme_among_the_stars [Writing]
Concerned by his responses to the paraphernalia of healing, Fingon steals Maedhros from his room for an impromptu garden excursion. Maedhros battles with dark thoughts.
Read more ...Bon(e)fire by Fuin [Writing]
On the night before the battle, Caranthir and his ally share thoughts about their peoples' traditions:
Burning bones ward off evil.
Read more ...McShady by Babblecat [Writing]
Melkor has himself a bad time in the Void.
Read more ...
Updated Fanworks
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 ...Nasyalossë by Lovimmy3365 [Writing]
Erestor lay up against a tree, brown washed to black in the wet of the snow. The black disc of the new moon sailed across the dark sky. Erestor wished it were gone. He had no need to look into dark eyes any longer.
He was dying.
(AKA Erestor unwittingly travels back in time to the days between the Dagor Bragollach and the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, meets the sons of Feanor, Thingol and his ilk, many Laiquendi, many Dwarves, and Men besides, and THEN decides to solve the drowning of Beleriand himself. This has nothing to do with his personal problems. Nope. Not at all. Erestor is having regular feelings.)
Read more ...Until the Stars are All Alight by Dagstjarna [Writing]
Reembodied in Aman, Celebrimbor decides to return to Middle earth to help heal the darkness and hurt wrought by the ring.
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 ...The Mirror Crack'd by AdmirableMonster [Writing]
Rescued from a brutal Angband hunt, an ex-thrall with a strange and powerful artifact embedded in his spine is brought to Himring, for it is one of the only places in Beleriand which welcomes such folk. Though he has no memories of his life before, Anniavas slowly becomes accustomed to his new life and finds he has a queer connection with Maedhros, Himring's lord. As their intimacy grows, however, so do the dangers surrounding them, both without and within. What secrets are hidden inside the depths of Anniavas's lost memories--and how will those with whom he is forging and deepening bonds react, when those secrets are at last revealed?
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
Scribbles and Drabbles 2026
Scribbles & Drabbles is a fic and art exchange with a minimum word count of 100 words.
Tolkien Disability Pride 2026
This Tumblr event focuses on ALL creative works focusing on disability in Tolkien's universe.
Tolkien Gen Week 2026
Tolkien Gen Week will run from July 6-12, 2026 to appreciate all of the incredible characters and relationships within Tolkien’s legendarium that fall under the broad category of “gen.”
