A common way to teach children about narrative structure is through the concept of the story mountain: a character climbs through the rising action, reaches the turning point at the summit, and then lets gravity take hold as their choices pull them through falling action and resolution. The metaphor can be extended further when we consider that every story—every mountain—arises from the strata beneath, from the stories and myths and beliefs of a culture that came before.

Our upcoming Mereth Aderthad 2025 event on July 19 will feature twelve presentations of meta and scholarship, each accompanied by fanworks that tackle the same topic. Each week, we are featuring interviews with the fanworks creators whose work will be presented at Mereth Aderthad, and this week, Shadow spoke with two creators whose work draws deep from around the roots of the mountain.

Bunn is writing a story for cloudyhymn's presentation "The Design of Dragons and the Doom of Dwarves" and creating art for Savannah Horrell's presentation "By Guile Committed: Comparing Tolkien’s Thieves to Beowulf," both of which rely heavily on Germanic myth, folklore, and literature. Bunn's story draws on cloudyhymn's theory that Dwarves and dragons share the same origin, with dragons a corrupted form of Dwarves, similar to one of Tolkien's theories that Orcs derive from Elves.

Likewise, bunn is making art for Savannah Horrell's presentation on thieves in Beowulf, the best-known work of Anglo-Saxon literature and a source of Tolkien's inspiration. (The Hobbit can certainly be understood as Beowulf fanfiction!) "People often feel that Tolkien kind of appears out of nowhere with a bunch of ideas," they told Shadow, "but I think he's very much rooted in a tradition, it's just the tradition is ... about a thousand years old, and not much had been written in it in the intervening period. I feel Elrond would have loved Tolkien." For this one, bunn is drawing on Savannah's connection between the thief in Beowulf and Tolkien's numerous thieves.

Shadow likewise interviewed me. I am writing fiction for Savannah's presentation, likewise drawn to her identification of the connection between thieves in the two works, though I spoke more to Shadow about planning Mereth Aderthad than the "thieves' triptych" that will be my creative contribution.

You can read Shadows interview with bunn here and Shadow's interview with Dawn (me) here.

If you want to catch up on other interviews you might have missed, you can find all of the Mereth Aderthad interviews here.