Within the past two months, we've welcomed forty new members to the SWG site, as well as many more to our Discord. As we just turned twenty years old, this makes it a good time to introduce ourselves to our newcomers and, for those of you who have been around longer but maybe aren't entirely sure what we're about or how you fit in, to run down the many ways you can participate in the SWG.
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild was founded in March 2005 and opened its doors in July 2005 on Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal. We were originally a community for sharing and discussing fanworks, but I (Dawn) happened to mention in my very first post to that community about the future possibility of building an archive, and we did. In June 2007, our eFiction-powered archive opened for the first fanworks. At the time, there were dozens of Tolkien fanworks archives, but we were the only one that focused solely on The Silmarillion.
Today, twenty years later, we are still centered on that website and archive (now Drupal-powered), which contains more than 6,000 fanworks of all types, from fiction to playlists and art to essays. If you create fanworks, we welcome you to archive your new and past Silmarillion-based fanworks with us. (Once you post five fanworks or 10,000 words, you will gain posting access to the Beyond the Silmarillion section and can archive anything Tolkien-related with us.) Use the My Account dropdown to post a fanwork or access things like your fanworks list, favorite, and comments. If you'd like to check out eighteen years of fanworks but don't know where to start (understandable!), Find a Fanwork can help you locate fanworks about characters, relationships, and genres you enjoy while avoiding what you don't. We hope that if you find something you love, that you will let the creator know!
The archive is the backbone of the SWG, but our community and its discussions are its heart. The original space where we socialized with each other, Yahoo! Groups, shut its doors some time ago. Our social space is now located on Discord, and if you want to talk Tolkien and get to know your fellow SWG members better, we welcome you to join us there.
The SWG has always sought to blend fanworks with research and scholarship on Tolkien, written by and for fans of his work. The Silmarillion is an immensely complicated work, and we want anyone who wants to build castles in our sandbox to feel empowered with the resources to do so, even if they are new to The Silmarillion. Our Reference Library contains more than 300 reference works written by SWG members about Tolkien studies and adjacent disciplines, aimed at an audience of fanworks creators. If you love to research and write meta or scholarship, we are always looking for new contributions. We welcome newsletter articles and are revamping our peer-review process for the Reference Library post-Mereth Aderthad.
Fanworks creators looking for regular inspiration should check our our monthly challenges, which vary in format from month to month. If our challenge isn't doing it for you this month, we also cross-post event announcements from around the Tolkien fandom in our Around the World and Web section. We also hold group events on our Discord server, including monthly instadrabbling sessions on the first of each month. You can see any upcoming events we are hosting under SWG News.
All of this comes with a culture that values inclusivity and openmindedness. We've been around a while. We've seen a Tolkien fandom where gatekeeping was normal and some genres and topics of fanworks received hostility, if they were permitted at all. We didn't set out to be fandom revolutionaries and change the old order, but we did find that our strength wasn't in the quality of our fanworks or our knowledge of Tolkien trivia but in the diversity of perspectives our members brought to discussions and to their fanworks. If you're new, we welcome you to share your own perspective on Tolkien with us, and if you've been with us a while, we hope you will continue doing so.
If you have questions or need assistance from our moderators, you can always reply to these newsletters or email us at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org.
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.”
