Around the World and Web

New Collection of Tolkien's Second Age Writings Coming in November

J.R.R. Tolkien famously described the Second Age of Middle-earth as a "dark age, and not very much of its history is (or need be) told." And for many years readers would need to be content with the tantalizing glimpses of it found within the pages of The Lord of the Rings and its appendices, including the forging of the Rings of Power, the building of the Barad-dûr and the rise of Sauron.

It was not until Christopher Tolkien published The Silmarillion after his father’s death that a fuller story could be told. Although much of the book’s content concerned the First Age of Middle-earth, there were at its close two key works that revealed the tumultuous events concerning the rise and fall of the island of Númenor. Raised out of the Great Sea and gifted to the Men of Middle-earth as a reward for aiding the angelic Valar and the Elves in the defeat and capture of the Dark Lord Morgoth, the kingdom became a seat of influence and wealth; but as the Númenóreans’ power increased, the seed of their downfall would inevitably be sown, culminating in the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.

Even greater insight into the Second Age would be revealed in subsequent publications, first in Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, then expanded upon in Christopher Tolkien’s magisterial twelve-volume The History of Middle-earth, in which he presented and discussed a wealth of further tales written by his father, many in draft form.

Now, adhering to the timeline of "The Tale of Years" in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, editor Brian Sibley has assembled into one comprehensive volume a new chronicle of the Second Age of Middle-earth, told substantially in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien from the various published texts, with new illustrations in watercolor and pencil by the doyen of Tolkien art, Alan Lee.

The new collection will be available beginning November 15, 2022.

July Challenge at tolkienshortfanworks (Dreamwidth)

The July Challenge at tolkienshortfanworks on Dreamwidth has been posted.

Here is our thematic prompt and our formal challenge for June:

The thematic prompt is: summer storms and other explosions!

The formal challenge is exposition, in any form you choose to interpret this.

You could write an exposition of an explosion, but the two prompts can be filled entirely independently.

The challenge can be freely combined with other prompts and new members are always welcome to join.

More details on the challenge at the linked post.

Tolkien Gen Week 2022

Tolkien Gen Week will run July 4-10, 2022 on Tumblr!

This is a week to appreciate all of the incredible characters and relationships within Tolkien’s legendarium that fall under the broad category of “gen.” There is a great wealth of wonderful gen content in the Tolkien fandom, but those creations are not always the most visible because of the shipping-focused nature of fandom at large. This week is an effort to give them the appreciation they deserve.

Tolkien Gen Week began in 2018 and occurred again in 2020 and 2021, and we’re back for more from July 4-10, 2022!

Any content and creations are welcome as long as it is non-romantic and non-sexual! You can create edits, gifs, fanart, fanfic, fanmixes, and more! Please tag your posts with #tolkiengenweek AND @ mention this blog @tolkiengenweek​ so they can be easily found. If your submission turns into a long post, please put what you can beneath a “Keep reading” divider.

Below are some prompts for each day of the week. They are not mandatory, but they are here to inspire you. This page will lead to an explanation for each one. This year, we are expanding the number of prompts per day from one to three!

DAY ONE: Family ● Mentorships ● Community
DAY TWO: Friendship ● Animals ● Group Dynamic
DAY THREE: Gray Spaces ● Enemies and Rivalries ● Fealty
DAY FOUR: Solo ● Work and Craft ● Language
DAY FIVE: Culture ● Diversity ● Traditions
DAY SIX: Environment ● Places ● Objects and Symbols
DAY SEVEN: Freeform

This event is being organized by @arofili. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to message this blog or my main.

For further clarification, check out our about, FAQ, code of conduct, and prompts pages! Happy creating!!

Mobile links are accessible here.

Omentielva Nertea: The Ninth International Conference on J.R.R. Tolkien's Invented Languages

4–7 August 2022
Collegium Maius, Jagiellonian University, Kraków.

We will be staying at Hotel Zaleze in nearby Katowice, where we will also have some of our sessions. We plan to make one of the evening sessions an Onatsie, allowing those not present to participate via Zoom. The conference fee is 825 PLN. As usual, this includes bed and board for the duration of the conference.

See the event page for more information on presenting a paper or registering for the conference.

Tolkien South Asian Week 2022

From June 13^th to June 19^th, 2022 on Tumblr, this week will celebrate South Asian peoples, cultures, and lives through Tolkien’s Legendarium. TSAW stemmed from aims to diversify and enrich high fantasy, Tolkien’s literary works, and fandom.

Guidelines

• Tag your entries with #tsaw22 and mention @arwenindomiel;
• Everyone is free to participate, you don’t have to be South Asian;
• All creations should be Safe for Work so nothing explicit;
• Creations of all kinds are welcome: graphics, art, fic, meta etc;
• Bigotry will not be tolerated (non-exhaustive list here).

Non-Mandatory Prompts

• DAY 1: Ainur  |  Monochrome/one colour  |  Avari  |  Etymology
• DAY 2: Elves  |  Minimalism  |  Balrogs  |  Tragic hero/heroine
• DAY 3:  Dwarves  |  Faceless  |  Laiquendi  |  Foreshadowing
• DAY 4: Men  |  Portraits  |  Blue Wizards  |  Symbolism
• DAY 5:  Nazgúl  |  Typography  |  Firebeards  |  Foils
• DAY 6:  Hobbits  |  Motifs  |  Dunlendings  |  Subplots
• DAY 7:  Freeform  |  Colours abound  |  Unnamed characters  |  Alternate Universes

June challenge at tolkienshortfanworks posted

Here is the tolkienshortfanworks thematic prompt and formal challenge for June:



The thematic prompt is: cattle (or other domestic animals of similar kind like sheep or goats).



Cows are not particular prominent in Tolkien's Legendarium, but they clearly are being kept all over Middle-earth: in the Shire and beyond the Long Lake, in Rohan and in Gondor, for dairy or as draught animals. In the First Age, things are less clear, but there are scattered mentions in Tolkien's writings of cattle being kept by Men of the House of Beor and by the Sindar in Eastern Beleriand. (This last is in Nature of Middle-earth and has recently inspired some lovely art of Sindarin cowboys on Tumblr!)



And here is one famous example, from one of Bilbo's rhymes:



They also keep a hornéd cow

as proud as any queen;

But music turns her head like ale,

And makes her wave her tufted tail

and dance upon the green.



Here is an optional art prompt, from an English illuminated manuscript that shows a cow being milked while licking her calf.





The formal challenge is to write a bredlik poem.



If you have not heard about this, the original bredlik poem is this:

my name is Cow,

and wen its nite,

or wen the moon

is shiyning brite,

and all the men

haf gon to bed -

i stay up late.

i lik the bred.



It was apparently written in response to an incident on a re-enactment site, which is one of the reasons why the author adopted pseudo-archaic spelling.

If you can't imagine how to do the same kind of thing with a Legendarium setting, here is actuallyfeanor having a go at Silmarillion bredliks on AO3.





Although this month there is clearly a connection between the thematic prompt and the formal challenge, as always you can combine the thematic prompt and the formal challenge, but they can be filled entirely independently. You are also very welcome to combine your responses to either of them with other current challenges, such as the SWG Vintage challenge or Ekphrasis Week.

More details on the rules of the challenges (which are few) in the linked post at the community on Dreamwidth. 

New participants welcome!

2022 Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature: Rebecca F. Kuang

The 2022 Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature, delivered by Rebecca F. Kuang on May 23 at Pembroke College, Oxford, concerns the topic "Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: The Value of Art in Times of Crisis." The lecture is now available on YouTube.

Rebecca F. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the forthcoming Babel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.

Scribbles & Drabbles 2022 Sign-Ups Open

How the Event Works

1. Artists submit their art.  All art submitted should be "finished" before it is submitted.  Art is added to a super awesome presentation. At the end of the submission period, artists who also want to write get first dibs at making claims.
2. Authors choose art to write for. Each author can make up to three claims to start; as they finish pieces, they can return and make additional claims.  Artwork can be claimed multiple times.

Any kind of artwork is eligible. Writing must be at least a drabble (100 words).

Dates

Sign-ups for Artists: June 1-30

Sign-ups for Authors: June 1-July 31

Art Submission Deadline: July 15

Gallery Goes Live for Authors: July 22

Art Posted Publicly: August 1-15

Author Claims (for those participating as artists): August 5 @ 21:00 UTC
Author Claims (for those who participated the previous year): August 6 @ UTC 17:00
Author Claims (for first time authors): August 7 @ UTC 17:00

Author Submission Deadline: November 12

AO3 Collection Revealed: ​November 26

"The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien"

Over more than four decades J.R.R. Tolkien’s son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, published some twenty-four volumes of his father’s work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Standing on the mountain of his son’s colossal publishing effort and extraordinary scholarship, readers today are therefore able to survey and understand the vastness of the landscape of Tolkien’s legendarium.

This collection of essays by world-renowned scholars, together with family reminiscences, sheds new light on J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, his son Christopher’s unique gifts in communicating and interpreting that work and the debt owed to Christopher by the many Tolkien scholars who were privileged to work with him. What was Tolkien’s intended ending for The Lord of the Rings? Did it leave echoes in the stripped-down version that was actually published?  What was the audience’s response to the first ever adaptation of The Lord of the Rings – a radio dramatization that has now been deleted forever from the BBC’s archives? What was the significance of the extraordinary array of doorways which confronted the hobbits as they journeyed through Middle-earth?

The book is illustrated with colour reproductions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s manuscripts, maps, drawings and letters and, with the kind permission of his estate, photographs of Christopher Tolkien and extracts from his works, some of which have never been seen before, making this volume essential reading for Tolkien scholars, readers and fans. The book includes essays by Maxime H. Pascal, Priscilla Tolkien, Vincent Ferré, Verlyn Flieger, John Garth, Wayne G. Hammond, Christina Scull, Carl F. Hostetter, Stuart D. Lee, Tom Shippey, and Brian Sibley.

Preorder your copy of The Great Tales Never End for £40.00 on the publisher's website. The book will be published in June 2022.

Tolkien Fanart Survey

Maria K. Alberto and Megan Abrahamson are working on a project related to race and Tolkien fanart and need your help taking a short anonymous survey about fan art that centers racially diverse depictions of Tolkien’s characters. The survey is open to Tolkien fans who:

• are over 18 years of age
• regularly see and interact with fan art through liking, commenting, and/or reblogging
• are located anywhere in the world
• Bonus: create Tolkien-inspired fan art!

Additionally, the researchers' main interest is Fingon the Valiant from The Silmarillion, particularly when portrayed as a Black elf in fan art. They are especially hoping to hear from Tolkien fan artists who depict this Fingon.

This survey has been reviewed and approved by the University of Utah Institutional Board.

Learn more about the survey and take it here or visit the project's tumblr here.