The midpoint of the year always brings multiple big events and challenges in the Tolkien fandom, and it can feel like a juggling act to get everything done that you want to do! As we prepare to announce our new challenge in this newsletter in exactly a week, it seems a good time to remind our creators who may be mid-juggling-act how our challenges work alongside other fandom events.

First and most importantly, our challenges can always be incorporated into fanworks created for other events. The purpose of the challenges is not to produce only fanworks created exclusively for the challenge. The purpose is not to "scoop" fanworks by being the first (much less only!) place they are posted. The purpose is to encourage the creation of Tolkien-inspired fanworks and to encourage archiving those works with us. That's really it!

That means that you can post your challenge fanworks somewhere else first. (You do need to eventually post with us if you want the stamp; the challenge guidelines spell everything out.) You can add to a work-in-progress using a challenge prompt or weave a challenge prompt into a fanwork you're creating for another fandom event. You can include prompts from multiple challenges into a single fanwork. (On the 15th of the month, the outgoing and new challenges are both active for that one day, and of course you can use past challenge prompts whenever you want; you just won't receive the stamp.)

What if you're creating for an event that has a reveal date past the challenge due date? Just let us know! (You can reply to one of these newsletters to quickly get the mods!) We always appreciate a heads-up ahead of time, but if you forget this part and let us know after the fact, we'll still make sure you get your stamp.

In general, we are glad to work with creators who have extenuating circumstances and miss the deadline to ensure they get their stamp. We need to keep a deadline on challenges because 1) the deadline is part of what makes it challenging and 2) stamps are awarded by people, not computer programs (thanks, Grundy!), so we need to keep that task manageable. But withholding stamps from people who met the challenge but were waylaid by illnesses, emergencies, sudden loss of power or internet, and other unforeseen crises is not the point of a deadline.

About half of the fanworks posted to our archive are challenge responses, so we appreciate our challenge participants' ongoing efforts to keep our archive alive and wish fruitful muses for everyone experiencing event juggling season!

When I first came into possession of the data from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, one of the questions I was most curious about concerned the impact of the Rings of Power television show. After all, I am a film-first fan myself, so I know firsthand the power of a good media adaptation, and as a historian and researcher into the Tolkien fanfiction fandom, I know the impact of the film adaptations through that lens as well.

Cultus Dispatches is the SWG's monthly column on fandom history and fan studies. This month, I use data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey to get a first look at the impact of The Rings of Power.

And so far ... it isn't much.

But that "so far" carries a lot of weight in that sentence. The 2025 survey was the third iteration of the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, meaning that we have longitudinal data now across a decade of the fandom's history. Looking at data around the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, the distance afforded by ten-plus years shows that enduring influxes of new authors occur mostly in the years immediately following the trilogies' ends. With three seasons left to go, The Rings of Power is nowhere near the point where previous data would predict an influx in fans.

At the same time, though, the films impacted the Tolkien fandom before they ended, and The Rings of Power isn't showing that same influence. Using Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data. So far.

If you're interested in reading more about the impact of the TV series so far, check out the article "The Rings of Power" Is a Ripple (So Far).

I'm also pondering the next direction to head for future research using the survey data. If you use Tumblr, check out the poll here to choose your favorite topic for my next deep dive into the data!

As I write this, the SWG is in the process of turning twenty-one years old—"process" because the SWG was formed on March 15, 2005 but didn't receive members until the end of July. Across a span of several days in the final week of July, ford_of_bruinen and I encouraged our fandom friends to join, and the SWG officially began.

I sometimes like to look back at the original documents and posts I made in the first months of the group's existence. Many of them were written when the SWG was an idea but not yet a group with members. (I.e., I had no idea what I was actually doing.) They're a little cringey, but I try to look at them with a fandom historian's eye as primary sources documenting an earlier era of online Tolkien-based fanfiction. As so many fanfic archives have gone offline, those sources are increasingly rare, or at least difficult to find.

While having a nostalgic walk down memory lane to when the SWG was still in its infancy, I stumbled across the SWG's original mission, which is still up on our Dreamwidth (and LiveJournal) communities. Our current mission was written in May 2008; this is truly the foundational document of the group in its current form, and the SWG's moderators always begin with this mission when writing policies and making other decisions. The original mission established my penchant for the listicle format for a mission and expresses some of the same values that are part of our current mission: "thoughtful discussion" that leaves room for multiple interpretations, creation of resources aimed at fanworks creators, and a community that offers support and feedback for creators. Interesting, "the primary goal of the group ... [to] center on workshopping members' stories and essays" was never realized, as we turned our attention to building an archive instead.

Twenty-one years from now, in 2047 (not a real year, I'm sure!), perhaps we'll look back at our current mission and again at our original mission and marvel at what has changed and what has remained the same.

A final note: remember that next Saturday, August 1, 2026 at 6PM/18:00 UTC is our monthly instadrabbling session on our Discord (find this in my timezone). All are welcome to join to create fanworks or simply hang out and enjoy what is being posted!

Throughout place and time, people have responded to the challenge of sheltering themselves by using the materials in the environment around them and devising architectural styles that not only fit their environment and its challenges but express the aesthetics and philosophies of their culture. One of the joys of traveling to a new place is experiencing what is familiar about life in a setting utterly unfamiliar, with windows and walls unlike those that enclose our familiar lives at home. Traveling imaginatively to Middle-earth is no different, and many of us likely remember our first visit to Rivendell or Nargothrond or Númenor.

Our next challenge is in this spirit, using architecture as inspiration for fanworks. If you want to participate, you will receive a an architectural style, a location on Arda, or both as your prompt. You can use your prompt or prompts however you want! You don't have to set your fanwork in the location selected or discuss setting or architecture at all. We always welcome creative and off-beat interpretations of challenge prompts.

If you'd like to participate, you can reply to this email and let us know if you'd like an architectural style, location, or both. If you prefer, you can request a prompt by emailing us, sending us an ask on Tumblr, commenting on our Dreamwidth, or requesting a prompt on the #monthly-challenges channel on our Discord. If the prompt you are assigned isn't working for you, just let the challenge moderators know, and we will draw again.

In order to receive a stamp for your fanwork, your response must be posted to the archive on or before 15 August 2026. Thank you to Sallysavestheday for the beautiful original hand-cut collage artwork used to make this month's stamps! For complete challenge guidelines, see the Challenges page on our website and remember that you can always reply to this newsletter to get in touch with our moderators with questions.

The SWG started almost twenty-one years ago on early versions of social network sites, namely Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal. Our website and archive wouldn't come for another two years, and while that has since become the center of our organization in many ways, it is not the center of community life on the SWG, and we maintain presences on several social media as a way to reach out beyond our website and foster community among our members.

Because we have new members joining us all the time, we like to periodically use the newsletter to share information that, to those of us who have been around a while, can be easy to forget that everyone doesn't know.

So if you are new or just want to get more involved on the SWG, how can you do it?

If you want to read, view, and post your own fanworks, the SWG site and archive is the place to begin. The SWG, like Archive of Our Own and many other fanworks archives, structures its site much like Rebecca Smallwood's highly influential eFiction script, so using it should be familiar if you've wandered around a fanworks archive before. Start at the Fanworks menu and explore from there. If you want to do stuff with your own account, start at the My Account menu. Our FAQs have detailed instructions on how to post and do things on the site, or you can reply here and get our mod team and ask for help—that's what we're here for!

The social center of our site is our Discord. For fandom olds who don't use Discord, it functions like the instant messaging platforms back in the day, letting you talk with other SWG members in real time. The #read-me-first channel will get you start, then each channel has a description of what it's used for. You can join our Discord here—and again, if it's a new platform for you and you need help, just reply here and ask!

The SWG maintains a presence as well on Tumblr and Dreamwidth. All announcements are posted here but both are also open to contributions from our members. (No one has ever submitted anything to our tumblr! You could be the first!) We accept Silmarillion-based fanworks, links to work you've posted elsewhere, essays and meta, and announcements for fandom events and projects.

Yahoo! Groups closed in 2019. In 2022, we stopped using LiveJournal as one of our official social media platforms, meaning that we stopped posting official SWG announcements there. The community remains open, however, and is also available for SWG members who want to use it to share their work, including event announcements.

If you look around yourself in Tolkien fandom, who do you see? Who is reading stories? Who is writing them?

Every five years, Maria K. Alberto and I run the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey. We are now on our third iteration of the survey, spanning ten years, and over the coming months, I will be sharing our findings each month in the Cultus Dispatches column, beginning this month with the demographic data from the survey.

I always have mixed feelings about working with the demographic data. On the one hand, it rarely feels revelatory, especially compared to some of the survey items still to analyze. It usually seems to describe what we all already know. (Because it involves a lot of free-response items, it's also a lot of work!)

On the other hand, as the survey traces ten years of Tolkien fanfiction history, the demographic data offers insights into how the fandom has changed in that decade. Who participates—and who doesn't—often indicates broader patterns in the Tolkien fandom, fanfiction fandom, and the world beyond.

Ten years is not a long time given the longevity of Tolkien fanfiction, which has been written for at least sixty-six years, yet that decade has seen demographic changes that quite likely parallel what we are writing about and how we engage with Tolkien's works. In other instances, the changes the survey has documented upend the "canon" of fanfiction studies.

If you want to learn more about the demographics of Tolkien fanfiction fandom, according to the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, check out Six Demographic Takeaways from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey.

Finally, don't forget that today is our monthly instadrabbling session on Discord, led by Anna (IdleLeaves)! If you're not a member of our Discord, you can join here. The session begins on Saturday at 6PM/18:00 UTC (find this in your timezone).

Every now and then, I like to remind those of you who are reading our newsletter that this is truly our newsletter, and we would love to feature your work here! The SWG has always been a group for fans of Tolkien's work. We are not a scholarly journal; we are not a publisher, so we do not accept and reject work. Rather, we seek to collaborate with creators to spotlight their work that, in the case of the newsletter, will be useful to members and friends of the SWG. Work that is featured in our newsletter and special projects comes from our members—people just like you!

If you'd like to learn more about writing for the newsletter, check out our call for contributors here!

But the tl;dr is that we accept articles on a variety of topics. If your work doesn't fit one of our existing columns, we accept feature articles as well.

If you've never written nonfiction or meta and want to give it a try but feel nervous about writing for publication, don't despair—our editors will support you however much you need through the process. Our newsletter reaches more than 250 readers every Saturday, and articles become a permanent part of our Reference Library.

Perhaps our best-known column, due to Oshun's exceptional work developing this resource, is the Character of the Month biographies. We still have several major characters needed to complete the collection: Elendil, Gothmog, Yavanna, Eönwë, Marach, Hador, Manwë, Melkor, and Nienor. If you'd be interested in writing a biography of one of them, let us know! (The full call for biographies is here.)

If you have questions or want to run an idea past us, just reply to this email!

So like we do a challenge every year that focuses on the history and pop culture of a decade, and this year we're jetting back to the 1980s for a month of wicked rad fanworks based on our mondo list of '80s prompts.

Now if you can't quite dig Túrin in a Members Only jacket or Daeron grokking Maglor's latest album on his Walkman, just take a chill pill. It's no big whoop if your fanwork has nothing to do with the 1980s! You can use the prompts in whatever dope ways your imagination takes you, and you can totally use any part of the prompt or related to the prompt. So like if you wanted to use your favorite line from one of the TV or movie prompts, you can totally rock that. Or just the title if that's your speed. Now if you want to get really radical and put your characters back in the '80s, that's allowed too of course. No duh.

We're hoping for lots of tubular fanworks to veg out with at the start of summer or winter, depending on what part of the world you're reppin'. If you want to find a buttload of '80s prompts compiled by our bodacious challenge mod Grundy, you can score those here.

Mad props too go to Anérea for this month's stamps and banner, which you like for sure want to collect this month when we hightail back to the '80s. Epic!

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.