This month, in honor of Back to Middle-earth Month's (B2MeM) twentieth anniversary, we've been going "back to B2MeM," revisiting past events and, perhaps most importantly, getting the restoration work done necessary to make them available on the website again. This week, we take a look at B2MeM 2009, which did not have a snazzy title but was the first B2MeM to act as a full creative challenge. While B2MeM 2008 focused on fanworks, its primary purpose was more to spotlight fanworks rather than to encourage the creation of new works (even if those creations are never shared!) B2MeM 2009 was also the first collaborative B2MeM, with both the SWG and Many Paths to Tread (MPTT) posting the daily prompts on their Yahoo! Groups.

B2MeM asked creators to engage in personal reflection, then craft fanworks based on that reflection. There was a prompt each day (with a choice between two on "Mercurial Mondays"!) and every day received multiple responses, which still seems astonishing even seventeen years later. The daily prompt format would become the subject of some debate as B2MeM continued as an event in which the SWG was involved. Some people loved it and the burst of creativity the prompts generated, while others loathed it, feeling that it was too high-pressure. Our compromise was to switch off years—daily prompt one year, another format the next—but the entry of this format the controversy around it that would ensue marked another hallmark of B2MeM taking shape: inclusivity of all Tolkien fans, both in what fanworks we welcomed and the challenge formats we used.

B2MeM 2009, in retrospect, feels rather unremarkable—there wasn't anything noteworthy or especially creative about the format of the challenge itself, which wasn't even given a name—yet it marked a turning point for the event in many ways. Its focus became a month for creating fanworks, and it became a collaborative, inclusive endeavor. And perhaps most importantly, it showed that interest in creating Tolkien fanworks remained high. Gathering data off of FanFiction.net is difficult, but from what can be gleaned, 2009 was a slump year for Tolkien fanworks—yet those who were involved in the fandom remained engaged, some to the extent of crafting a fanwork a day for an entire month.

The Special Projects page for B2MeM 2009 can be found here. Note that the event itself is in the early phases of restoration, so you will find broken links and awkward layouts galore, but the prompts and the sheer number of fanworks created for this event can be seen.