Today is spooky instadrabbling on our Discord server. (It's not too late to join!) Right now, at this juncture of the SWG's history, our Discord server is one of the thriving corners of our community, along with our archive. But given that the SWG is a decade older than Discord, this was clearly not always the case.
The SWG didn't originate as an archive but as a fandom community, hosted on Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal. Yahoo! Groups, which closed in 2020, was a semipublic email list and formed the cornerstone of many early Tolkien fanfiction groups. During the heyday of the Lord of the Rings films, some Yahoo! Groups received dozens of messages a day and allowed fans to talk Tolkien using their email. LiveJournal was an early blogging platform; again, active LJs would sometimes have posts with comments numbering in the hundreds. Pre-dating Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, these early social media platforms tended to require you to opt-in to a community (versus seeing content from communities shared by others you follow or content recommended by an algorithm).
From these social communities, fanfiction archives arose. The fan scholar and archive expert Abigail De Kosnik calls them community archives because they become the more public, formal face of fan communities that were often highly informal. The SWG followed the exact trajectory De Kosnik described (as did many 2000s-era Tolkien fanfic archives): our Yahoo! Group and LiveJournal were active spaces for discussion, the foundation of the SWG, and the archive grew from there.
Fan-unfriendly decisions by the leadership of both Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal eventually led us to move away from those platforms, and neither are officially in use any longer (although the LJ community is still open for historical purposes and any SWG member who wants to use it). There was a time in the 2010s when there was no active community space for interaction and discussion on the SWG. On my endless list of fandom data projects is to trace how archive activity aligns with the moments in our history where community was vibrant and when it was essentially nonexistent.
Right now, the pendulum has swung back toward community spaces with the use of our Discord as a central meeting place for SWG members. Just like the Yahoo! Group email and LJ comments of old, discussions range from silly and irreverent to serious discussion of the texts and their implications ... and from all of this, fanworks continue to grow.
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.
