Our monthly fan studies and history column, Cultus Dispatches, has been on double hiatus, first while we prepared for last year's Mereth Aderthad event and then while awaiting data from the third installment of the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, which closed at the end of 2025. We are glad to be back, with a reminder that Cultus Dispatches is a column open to anyone with a story to tell related to Tolkien fandom history and cultures. Reply to this email if you have an idea for a future column!

This month's column was researched and written by Dawn and Grundy, two of the SWG site moderators, initially for a presentation at a roundtable on Tolkien fandom and AI. We had agreed to present about how our moderators and members developed the SWG's AI policy in May 2023. The tale—or the presentation—grew in the telling, as these kinds of simple-seeming tasks often do, inviting questions that ranged beyond our original purpose.

First, we wondered about how other small communities and events were responding to AI-generated fanworks. So we made a spreadsheet and collected data on fifty-eight Tolkien fandom events and their AI policies. From this effort, one conclusion was very clear: Tolkien fandom communities don't want AI-generated fanworks in their spaces.

That this boundary was drawn so firmly was noteworthy. Fanworks fandom does not draw a lot of boundaries. By definition, fanworks are transgressive, working as we do with texts to which we do not own the rights. Fanworks fandom is also a space where you can engage in interests that you wouldn't share at lunch with coworkers or on your weekly call to Grandma and generally expect to be left alone and not judged. When fanworks creators place something unequivocally on the side of NOPE, there is something significant going on.

So next we wondered about big multifandom archives. What were they doing with genAI? What were they seeing? And we wondered too if genAI was really that unique in earning the fandom's ire, or were fandom events using their rules to take a stance on approaches to fanworks that they found objectionable?

You can read what we found in Fandom Draws the Line: Fanworks, AI, and Resistance.

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.

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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.

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Nerdanel/Nienna moodboard by Independence1776 [Artwork]

A Nerdanel/Nienna moodboard.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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Around the World and Web

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