On August 31, 2005, we posted our very first newsletter and, with it, our first challenge as well. The challenge was called Strong Women and was offered by Jenni (digdigil), a founding member of the SWG and one of our early moderators:

Choose a female character from The Silmarillion or related texts. It could be someone like Galadriel, one of the Valar, or someone barely mentioned, such as Nerdanel or Elenwë. Write a story--any length--about this character, developing a strong personality for her. Her strengths could lie in many different areas: Perhaps the woman would be a good mother, perform an act of heroism, or be a healer or a teacher, but she must contribute something of value.

I went on to write about the challenge:

Tolkien is often criticized for the lack of strong female characters in his work. ... The stories of Middle-earth would be vastly different without characters like Varda, Galadriel, Haleth, and Lúthien Tinúviel.

Nonetheless, there are still many women who recieve [sic] only glancing acknowledgment or appear only as "footnote" characters--regardless, their influence on their husbands, children, and the world around them is undeniable.

This first challenge always strikes me as looking forward to what the SWG would become. Tolkien fic fandom, at the time, was not friendly toward writing female characters. The specter of "Mary Sue" loomed large and prevented many writers from venturing into writing about women about whom we know little or nothing or even writing about women for whom there is substantial material in the texts. (Fandom Voices: Women in Fanworks recalls some of these experiences from fans who wrote in the first decade of online Tolkien fic fandom.) But we were, one month into the SWG's existence, still small, with only a couple dozen members and without grand aspirations, and still largely flying by the seats of our pants. The Strong Women challenge feels more significant in retrospect than it did at the time. Still, it prefigures the work of many of our creators over the past twenty years to elevate not just women in the legendarium but other groups of characters who are marginalized in both Middle- and Modern-earth (including Elleth Textual Ghosts Project, which has done much to facilitate the goal of the Strong Women challenge to encourage writing about what we termed "footnote characters").

Twenty years later, challenges are still at the center of the SWG—another legacy of this inaugural challenge. Check out our current Kids These Days challenge, join us for instadrabbling next Saturday, and don't forget we are collecting prompts for the Jumble Sale challenge!