Just about twenty years ago, an anonymous person sent a challenge to the LiveJournal community Middle-earth News. The Lord of the Rings films had been out of theaters for over a year at that point, and energy in the Tolkien fanworks fandom was beginning to flag. The challenge was to make March a "Back to Middle-earth Month"—B2MeM for short—to remember one's love for Tolkien and keep the energy in the fandom high.

The SWG, along with several other Tolkien groups, picked up the challenge and promoted it in their own spaces. For us, it was a humble beginning for B2MeM: just an announcement in the March 2006 newsletter and nothing more. There were no prompts, no reminders, no roundups of what was created for the event. But March, it seemed, had been staked out in the minds of Tolkien fandom as B2MeM for the foreseeable future.

We're remembering this history as part of our ongoing effort to get all of our Special Projects back online, especially as B2MeM turns twenty years old this year. B2MeM 2006 never even had its own page on our site—our archive wouldn't open for three months after the first B2MeM—and its historical importance lies more in what would follow than the 2006 event itself. (B2MeM 2006 does have its own page now, in the interest of documenting its place in the SWG's historical record and Dawn's completionist tendencies.) B2MeM 2006 seems mostly to mark something magical about fandom, which is how an idea tossed out to the world can be picked up and take on a life of its own. I sometimes wonder if the anonymous person who invented the original B2MeM challenge stuck around in the fandom to see how big their idea would become in the coming years!

The SWG, B2MeM ... both are Tolkien fandom institutions that grew from a small idea. Remember that we support fandom endeavors whenever we can. If you have an idea for a fandom event, we will promote it in our Around the World and Web section, and we set up channels on our Discord server for events that aren't big enough for their own server but want a place for participants to learn and chat about their event. And for bigger projects, like the recent Fëanorian Zine, we collaborate around hosting as well. Decades of people having ideas and seeing them through has kept the Tolkien fandom alive.

Twenty years later, although no longer an SWG event, B2MeM is still alive. You can find more about this year's event here.