The Scavenger Hunt challenge is winding down, but there are still over two days, as of this writing, to get a fanwork in if you want one of Grundy's beautifully crafted creator stamps! This is our annual Matryoshka challenge, which means that there are levels of difficulty to choose from, and the easiest level requires only two prompts ... and if you've been deterred by not having had the chance to solve the clues needed to find prompts, keep reading for a special prompt—then you only need to solve one more! (And the #monthly-challenges channel on our Discord server is your go-to for help and hints if you get stuck! There may even be solved prompts spoilered there ...)

As far as I know, the SWG is the only group that uses this challenge format, which was inspired by the concept of nesting dolls, where each doll (or prompt) is lifted to reveal the next. Traditionally, Matryoshka challenge requires opening subsequent prompts as you create your fanwork, resulting in a fanwork that is shaped by the prompts as it unfolds. This year's challenge, given the scavenger hunt component, does allow participants to collect all prompts first rather than opening them mid-fanwork.

We may be the only group that does these challenges (we do one per year), but the Matryoshka concept originated with Back to Middle-earth Month (B2MeM), where it was developed as a possible format to use for the annual event. After it was passed over a few times, we fished it from the pile of B2MeM rejects to try here, as one of our monthly challenges, and it has hung around since.

So, given that, if you're working on the challenge and need a prompt: add an element to your fanwork involving a comeback.

Remember that we welcome offbeat interpretations for our challenges (and very often craft prompts that can be read multiple ways), and if you can find a loophole, you should absolutely duck through it! So you are not required to interpret that prompt in the context of the history of the Matryoshka format. "Comeback" can mean many things ...

Furthermore, you can collect as many prompts as you want and don't have to use them all! So even if you have a full slate of prompts you're working through, you can discard one and use this one instead if you wish. (Nor does being aware of this prompt obligate you to use it!)

In other challenge-related news, Anna (IdleLeaves) will be hosting another round of instadrabbling on our Discord server over the next three months, on the first Saturday of each month! (Join here if you're not with us already!)

• July 4, 2026 at 6PM/18:00 UTC (find this in my timezone)
• August 1, 2026 at 6PM/18:00 UTC (find this in my timezone)
• September 5, 2026 at 6PM/18:00 UTC (find this in my timezone)

If you're new to instadrabbling, you can find more about (another long-running fandom challenge type not invented by the SWG!) here.

And look for the next challenge early morning European time on the 15th!

Angst over comments is the great equalizer among fanworks creators. Nearly all of us—newbies, fandom olds, BNFs, and lurkers—have opened our email the day after posting a new work, one eye shut, wondering if anyone commented. Nearly all of us have been sent on a second wind by an encouraging word or disappointed when a work we were proud of received little to no reaction.

If there has been a consistent thread among my work since beginning to dabble in fandom studies, it is figuring out why most readers don't comment and what motivates those who do. In 2018, I wrote an article in response to decreasing comment counts on AO3 called "Why People Don't Comment: Data and History From the Tolkienfic Fandom." Last year, I updated it with fresh data from AO3, intending to come back in a month with the same data from the SWG. Then planning for Mereth Aderthad intensified, followed by Cultus Dispatches going on hiatus while I awaited data from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey. More than a year later, the SWG data is in at last!

The data underscore a key point from my original "Why People Don't Comment" article, what I term the 3C's of commenting: confidence, community, and commenting as a skill. The SWG's data emphasizes the importance especially of community. When authors and readers are members of the same community, they comment on each other's work. The other two factors—confidence and commenting as a skill—matter less for the same reason that it is easier to talk to a friend than a stranger in the street.

For more on what I learned from the SWG's data, check on the latest article in Cultus Dispatches, the SWG's fan history column, Communities Do Comment: Expanding the 3C's of Commenting with SWG Data.

'My friends are caught in the willow-tree,' cried Frodo breathlessly.

'Master Merry's being squeezed in a crack!' cried Sam.

'What?' shouted Tom Bombadil, leaping up in the air. 'Old Man Willow? Naught worse than that, eh? That can soon be mended. I know the tune for him. Old grey Willow-man!'

We are currently in the midst of a Scavenger Hunt challenge, and if you feel like Merry, stuck without hope of escape, this week's newsletter will include expanded clues on the interactive path with additional hints for the challenge! Remember, too, that the challenge can be tackled collaboratively. There have already been hints and solutions posted to the #monthly-challenges channel on our Discord, and you can ask for help there if you get stuck.

If the challenge is finding time to create, don't forget that our next instadrabbling session is Saturday, June 6, 2025 at 6PM/18:00 UTC (find this in my timezone) on our Discord! If you're new to instadrabbling, find out more about it in the instadrabbling FAQ here.

Keep reading for hints for the scavenger hunt!

• Like a magpie, Bilbo collected Elven texts and crowed his achievements in the Red Book. He worked in this location, which is also this creator and SWG Discord mod's pen name.
• This creator's name, in the ancient world, specifically ancient Greece, is sometimes read as similar to the Quenya curu and sometimes read as fitting with Gandalf's reminder that "Not all those who wander are lost."
• Writer, artist, and one of our first Discord moderators (now retired) and with a name of angelic ferocity, this creator is the only person so far on the archive to write a romance about Aragorn's parents.
• This creator's pen name is a fortress in the First Age and becomes an island after the War of Wrath.
• The home office of the SWG is located in a country that celebrates its 250th birthday this year. The pen name of this creator, who writes Silmarillion/Star Wars crossovers, references the birth year of that country.
• One of our most prolific and talented poets, this creator's name is constructed of two words that the following characters all have in common: Rose, Marigold, Meril. For Mereth Aderthad, she read a poem voiced by a treacherous jewel.
• Annatar gave many gifts and has many names. This creator uses a pen name that is one of these names, used in the Second Age, and often writes about Dwarves, including a 30-Day Character Study of Mím.
• One of our finest and most dedicated artists, this creator is also the SWG's art editor, the mastermind behind the Tolkien Fanartics column in the newsletter, and the designer of the Mereth Aderthad zine.
• One of our Discord moderators, this creator often writes fanworks that incorporate science into the legendarium but has recent fanworks involving steampunk Númenor, a space opera, and Miranda Otto.
• You might have to scroll to the bottom of the list to find her, but in addition to being a talented writer and poet, this creator is also a skilled musician and was our lone musical performer at Mereth Aderthad 2025, where she sang a Dwarvish hymn.
• This moderator still hasn't finished her Taboo challenge response years later, but is better known for enthusiastically handing out stamps and is a frequent creator of crossovers.
• This creator's pen name is an English translation of the name Elros. She is one of the most prolific creators on the archive.
• This creator is a moderator on our Discord, did the graphics design for Mereth Aderthad, and takes her pen name from a character in one of fanfiction's OG fandoms, the fandom that gave slash its name.
• This creator is possibly a distant relative of a Noldorin prince known for his cave-hewing skills and bringing too much crap with him from Valinor. Though the sunrise is in her name, she's actually quite the night owl.

... but sometimes you are hoping to find a specific thing!

The SWG archive is approaching its nineteenth birthday in just a few weeks. That means that it contains nineteen years worth of fanworks ... and 6,595 fanworks at that! The original SWG archive was built using eFiction software, and fandom olds who spent a lot of time on eFiction-powered archives will recognize the structure right away. (AO3 also appears to have been heavily inspired by how eFiction organized and presented fanworks, so fans who missed the heyday of eFiction sites likely don't feel entirely at sea on our archive in the same way they might if we had used, say, the header format popular on email lists and LiveJournals that functioned as archives.) When we rebuilt the site five years ago, we kept the basic idea of how it was organized and rebuilt many of the pages that eFiction provided.

So if you're looking for something specific amidst those nineteen years of 6,595 fanworks, how do you find it? First, there is the Find a Fanwork page (which replicates as closely as possible the Advanced Search page on the eFiction site). Here, you can put in a bunch of parameters and get a list of results closely tailored to whatever you are interested in reading or viewing in the moment.

If you want to see all of the fanworks with a specific tag, use the Fanworks menu to Browse Fanworks By creator, character, genre, or relationship. These pages replicate the Browse pages on eFiction sites.

Of course, if you're doing our Scavenger Hunt challenge, these tools may help you to solve clues and collect prompts, but anyone who likes to read Silmarillion fanworks should also find them useful for finding new works to enjoy. (And if you just like Tolkien-based fanworks, try our Truly All Fanworks page, which includes fanworks from the Beyond the Silmarillion section.) Because our archive pre-dates AO3 by several years and many of the archives contemporaneous with the SWG are now gone, we have fanworks archived that cannot be read anywhere else but are just as wonderful now as they were then!

If you are doing the Scavenger Hunt and feeling stuck on any of the clues, stop by the #monthly-challenge channel on our Discord server, where participants have been sharing hints and working together to solve clues!

Building the SWG challenge schedule each year is a kind of alchemy. Some of it is predictable ingredients: We always do a Matryoshka challenge. We throw in a challenge with a collaborative component every now and then. But some of it is just tossing out something new and seeing what happens.

Our new challenge, Scavenger Hunt, is kind of that way. It is our annual Matryoshka challenge—meaning that fanworks are crafted with more then one prompt—and it includes a collaborative component, but it's nothing we've tried before, so we're also seeing how it goes.

Here's the gist: A Matryoshka challenge involves creating a fanwork using multiple prompts, revealed progressively. Usually, the moderators provide the prompts. This time, we have turned prompt-giving over to you. We have fourteen members who are willing to hand out prompts. Who are these fourteen people? Well, this is where the scavenger hunt bit comes in: You have to solve a clue to find them.

Once you solve the clue, find one of their fanworks, read it or view it, leave a comment (a real comment please! not just asking for a prompt!), and request your prompt in the comment. They will reply with a prompt, you collect the number you want, and you create your fanwork using them.

If the thought of going out and talking to people online fills you with terror or exhaustion or any feeling that is making you think right now, "I think I'll skip this one ..." do not despair. We've also set up what we call the history path, where the clues point you to a place on the SWG site where you will find your prompt, no human interaction required.

And if you want to do a bit of both, you can mix and match interaction and history prompts to your heart's content!

Ready to start solving? The clues leading to the prompts can be found on the Scavenger Hunt challenge page! Happy hunting!

Possibly the best resource on our site is our Character Biographies. There are more than 150 of them on the site, featuring a range of characters important to The Silmarillion. Like many parts of our site, the character biographies began somewhat by happenstance and then grew into something very different from the original modest idea. The first biography, of Irmo/Lórien, was published in August 2007. To those accustomed to the later biographies, the first biographies are very short. The idea began as a featured character of the month, which would be a sort-of challenge to write about that character, and the month's newsletter would include a brief biography of the character—enough to acquaint a new Silmarillion reader with the basics of that person.

The member who volunteered to take on the task of writing the monthly biography was Oshun, an early SWG member and author of much-loved stories. Oshun quickly ran away with the project, crafting increasingly detailed and elaborately sourced biographies as time went on. Reading back through her work, the short summaries did not last for long. Furthermore, she was insistent on citing her biographies as though they were academic articles. Many fan resources at the time made claims that were difficult to support with the texts, and Oshun was committed that the SWG's reference section—where her biographies eventually came to live—would not be yet another of them.

Over the years to come, Oshun was joined by other writers who contributed biographies of their favorite characters, but her writing makes up the bulk of our biography collection. With time, the focus shifted from presenting the character of the month as a challenge and instead amassing a collection of biographies that could aid someone creating fanworks about a new character in learning the basics about the character, including which texts to read to learn more. Oshun passed away in 2024, but her more than one hundred biographies continue to aid creators who want a quick, well-sourced primer on a character.

Our character biographies now cover most Silmarillion characters, and it's no longer practical to feature a new one each month. However, we do still accept new biographies for characters we haven't written yet; in particular, we are looking for biographies for Elendil, Gothmog, Yavanna, Eönwë, Marach, Hador, Manwë, Melkor, and Nienor. If your favorite character isn't in our collection or on that list, we'd still love to feature a biography of that person! You can learn more about contributing to the character biographies here, or reply to this email.

When I started the SWG, it was not a mission-driven organization, something like AO3 where there was a problem in the fandom that required a solution centered firmly around a set of values. The SWG, which started in the tail end of the LotR film-driven heyday of the fandom, was started because I wanted a writers' workshop for Silmarillion-specific writing, and that did not exist at the time. I figured it'd be me and few friends who might be interested. I clearly remember thinking that, if we reached ten members on the Yahoo! Group, that would be a lot. (To compare, twenty years later, there are 1,239 registered members on the SWG archive.)

But that means that when it became clear that the SWG was becoming a "real group" (you can read that in Pinocchio's voice if you'd like), then part of that was figuring out who we were and what direction we'd take ourselves. A lot of that work seems to have happened in 2008—not surprisingly, given that the website and archive opened in June 2007. In May 2008, my comods and I first posted the SWG's mission, which still exists and remains essentially unchanged eighteen years later. (Here is the original wording.) One item felt a bit like it pushed against the grain of the fandom at the time:

Connectivity. To recognize that we are only a single small group in a vast online Tolkien fan community and to work toward connecting and sharing with the Tolkien fandom at large, as well as aiding members in finding groups and resources that meet their needs where the SWG cannot.

With so many Tolkien fanworks groups at the time, the climate of the broader fandom felt a bit like the low-key community quibbles over questions like which pizza place is best. Inter-community tensions rarely reached the level of overt conflict, but there was definitely a sense that using a community space to support another group needed to be done with care, which makes sense because there were so many fandom communities clamoring for a finite number of fans' finite amount of free time. Because we were a Silmarillion group in a mostly LotR fandom, we had the liberty to buck that a bit, and we decided to do that: not just to welcome signal boosts (which many groups did) but to create systems and spaces for promoting events and groups beyond the SWG.

Of course, the eventual shape of that would become Around the World and Web, which still exists today, but the initial idea was something called the SWG Yellow Pages. Like most of the hand-coded pages on our original site, they still exist; they just exist without formatting. But if you're willing to cast your web-reading mind back to 2005 (when it was not unknown to run a website that didn't use CSS formatting), the Yellow Pages are a time capsule of the fandom in the SWG's early years.

Like many of our early ideas, it never fully caught on. Organizers and webmasters weren't particularly eager to request inclusion in the Yellow Pages, and since they were a static HTML webpage—which means they needed to be updated by hand—then it was easy to let them go ignored for long stretches of time, which we definitely did.

Still, they remain in the dusty corner of our website, like a phone book from twenty years ago that, for fellow fandom olds, is fun to page through and remember all the places you've forgotten once were.

Every year, we run a challenge called a Matryoshka challenge. Like the eponymous nesting dolls, completing one prompt in the challenge reveals another so that participants build a fanwork progressively, using between two and seven prompts. This year, our Matryoshka challenge comes with a twist, and we need SWG creators' help in making it a success!

May's challenge will be a scavenger hunt. Clues will point to pages on the site, where participants can collect prompts. And what are the clues? Well, the clue can be ... you! If you sign up to hand out prompts to participants, a clue will point to your page on the archive (or a specific fanwork if you prefer), the participant will comment on your work, and you will hand out a prompt for the challenge.

Writing and art can be lonely, so we like to offer the occasional challenge that involves an element of collaboration so that we can discover new creators, support each others' work, and problem-solve challenges together. Furthermore, we hope that members willing to hand out prompts will be rewarded with comments on their work and new readers or viewers!

Maybe you think this sounds like fun but have some misgivings. "What if I'm not good at making up prompts?" No worries! The moderators will provide a list of possible prompts to give out to anyone who requests them. "I'm just not able to be online every day and don't want to leave participants hanging." Likewise, if you aren't able to respond, they can contact the mods, and we'll assign them a prompt. "What if I can't make a fanwork for the challenge?" You can hand out prompts even if you aren't able to participate in creating for the challenge!

If you want to provide prompts for the challenge, you can sign up here. If you have additional questions, just reply to this email!

The Scavenger Hunt challenge will not begin until May 15. In the meantime, our Everyman challenge is running if you missed last week's announcement: create a fanwork about an ordinary character in the legendarium using a quote about an unnamed character as inspiration.

And next week is our monthly instadrabbling session on our Discord server, hosted by the wonderful Anna (IdleLeaves). The session will run on May 2, 2026 at 6PM/18:00 UTC (find this in my timezone). You can find out more about upcoming instadrabbling sessions here. And if you're not a member of our server yet, you can join our Discord server here.

The Silmarillion is a story about heroes and antiheroes, kings and queens and gods. Yet amid these larger-than-life tales of larger-than-life people are those more ordinary: the servants, spies, mariners, soldiers, and kinfolk who go unnamed and sometimes unspoken of altogether, perceptible only through inference and assumption.

This month's challenge, Everyman, asks creators to use their fanworks to bring these ordinary people to the foreground of the story of Middle-earth. We've compiled 113 prompts about unnamed, ordinary people in The Silmarillion, and you should choose one of these prompts for your fanwork, which should place an ordinary person in a key role.

As is usual for our challenges, we welcome creative interpretations of the prompts. While you can certainly expand the scene presented in the prompt, this is not the only approach. You can use prompts partially or in their entirety to create about an entirely different scene or character(s). Some of the prompts we've left intentionally vague so that they can be used to create fanworks about people who don't appear in the story at all.

The prompts and full challenge description can be found on the Everyman challenge page. In order to receive a stamp for your fanwork, your response must be posted to the archive on or before 15 May 2026. If you're new to our challenges, the complete guidelines can be found on the Challenges page on our website.

Most people, when they use a website, don't think much about the software behind it. This week marks five years since we reopened the SWG with Drupal software, so it seemed as good a time as any for a quick digression into what keeps the SWG running for the tech nerds and tech-curious among us.

Like the majority of automated Tolkien fanfiction archives (63%, according to Dawn's data), the SWG initially used eFiction. Originally coded by Rivka—herself a Tolkien fan and the founder of the website Council of Elrond—eFiction was easily installed and used but stopped being actively developed in 2015. Because the internet never stops evolving, when software doesn't keep up, eventually it breaks, and in 2019, that's what began to happen on the SWG as our webhost continued upgrading our server but eFiction stagnated.

Where to go from eFiction was a difficult call. We needed software that could be adapted to function as a fiction archive. We also needed something that was likely to be supported into the foreseeable future—in other words, so that we weren't rebuilding and migrating the site again in another twelve years. We eventually settled on Drupal, an open-source content management system, as the most likely candidate. In August 2020, with the world largely shut down due to COVID-19, Dawn began rebuilding the SWG archive with a local installation of Drupal 8.

It was not easy. None of the SWG moderators knew anything about Drupal, which utilizes core software extended using open-source contributed modules. Perhaps in a normal year, unable to resist the siren call of summer, the rebuild would have happened much slower or not at all. Obstacles arose regularly, seemingly as impassable as Caradhras. Eventually, however, the SWG archive existed in parallel form: in eFiction and in Drupal.

Russandol next had to figure out how to migrate 3,500 fanworks from eFiction to the new Drupal site. This also came with frequent snags, but by March 2021, the new site opened for beta, and five years ago, it opened officially.

eFiction certainly has a nostalgic appeal. It was a simple software, easy to run, and hard to break. Drupal is much more complicated and, therefore, finicky. Major updates feel just shy of terrifying, and the Venn diagram of Dawn-and-Russa-are-swamped and someone-reports-a-white-screen-of-death-on-the-site is nearly a circle. However, Drupal brings a lot more flexibility, and we have been able to extend and grow the site in ways we never could with eFiction. This is the fun part: building and adding features that make the site better for our community. And most importantly, Drupal is being actively developed and has a robust community behind it, meaning it should serve the SWG for some time to come.