In the quiet months of the year, we are making new again some parts of our site that have become buried or forgotten so that they can be enjoyed for the first time by our newer members and rediscovered by those of us who have been around for a bit longer.

The SWG was founded in 2005, and our archive opened in 2007. At twenty years, that feels venerable ... but there was an entire era of online Silmarillion fanfiction that existed before we did. Penned mostly in the years of the Lord of the Rings films, these stories represent some of the earliest examples of Silmarillion fanfiction and established tropes, fanons, and pairings that persist to this day. (Hello, Russingon! ... or MaeFin, as we called you back then ...)

Fanlore places the first Silmarillion fanfiction on Fanfiction.net in 2000, and in the year between June 2003 and June 2004, the Silmarillion section on that site roughly doubled in size. Some of the first of these stories, therefore, are now twenty-five years old or more. Written at the fruitful intersection of burgeoning interest in Tolkien brought on by the LotR films, increasing access to home internet, and the advent of platforms like Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal that allowed fans to build fandom communities, these first stories show how Tolkien fans were conceptualizing Middle-earth collectively and creatively.

In 2010, SWG moderator Angelica began working on a project aimed at archiving some of these stories on the SWG. The Library of Tirion asked for recommendations from SWG members of their favorite pre-2007 Silmarillion fanfiction, and Angelica worked tirelessly to contact authors who, by then, had sometimes been out of the fandom for years, seeking permission to archive their stories with us.

Although we have not added to the Library of Tirion for some years now, it remains on our site and is a good starting point for reading some early Silmfics chosen by our members for their importance, either to them as individuals or to the fandom as a whole. At a time of the year when many of us are in the doldrums of winter and others sweltering through the heights of summer, these stories offer an escape back to some of the first imaginings that can be found online of our beloved Silmarillion characters and stories. Check out the Library of Tirion here.