In honor of twenty years of Back to Middle-earth Month (B2MeM) and as part of our ongoing effort to restore all of our Special Projects on our website, we are going "back to B2MeM" in our newsletters this month to look back at the history of B2MeM on the SWG.

2007 was the year. Tolkien fandom clearly felt that they needed a monthly holiday, and B2MeM seemed to fit the bill. Middle-earth News posted a "Celebrate Middle-earth Month" (CMEM-07) challenge that was a minor reworking of the anonymously submitted B2MeM 2006 challenge. The SWG and the drabble community There-n-Back Again both posted their own challenges. There-n-Back's challenge was participatory in nature: a daily drabble prompt based on "the alphabet of Middle-earth."

Our challenge on the SWG took a different approach, partly due to the fact that, as Silmarillion creators, we weren't really going back to anything; our corner of the fandom—while impacted by the films leaving theaters—relied less on film fans than the Lord of the Rings fandom did. Our event was presented as a "journey through the history of Arda" with a new place-based quotation from The Silmarillion each day.

When B2MeM 2007 debuted, the SWG's website was less than a year old. Beyond a mention in the newsletter, B2MeM 2007 never existed on our website; it was presented entirely on our LiveJournal community. In the interest of historical preservation, we've compiled the original challenge text and the thirty-one quotes we shared that year. You can find the B2MeM 2007 text and quotes here.

Like the 2006 challenge, B2MeM 2007 was rather haphazardly embarked upon. While researching the history of how it came to be, I was unable to find a single email mentioning it, either in my personal email or in the moderator email. It seems the event came back around on the calendar, I felt we needed to participate too on the SWG, and the quote idea was likely a low-effort way to do our part. This would be the last year that B2MeM would fly by the seat of its pants, and beginning with the 2008 event, it would become increasingly elaborate with the focus less on simply appreciating Tolkien's world and more on creating fanworks about it.

Remember that B2MeM is still alive! You can find more about this year's event here.