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.

When the SWG was established in 2005, it emerged amid hundreds of other Tolkien fanfiction groups, including dozens of archives. (The SWG's archive would open in 2007, amid a diminished field but still just one of many options.) Then as now, most of our creators made Tolkien-based fanworks, not exclusively Silmarillion-based fanworks, but back then, it was easy to be cavalier about finding another place to archive the non-Silmarillion ones. After all, in the mid-aughts, Silmarillion fandom was a whisper compared to the force of nature that was the Lord of the Rings fandom and its fanworks, and the SWG ostensibly existed to focus the spotlight on fanworks and discussions that were Silmarillion-oriented.

Twenty-one years later, the fandom landscape is very different. Last week, Dawn updated her Fanfiction Archive Timeline for 2025. Four Tolkien-specific archives had new works posted in 2025, and we were the only one with weekly activity. This is not new, and some years ago, we began to hear people wishing there was an archive similar to the SWG that accepted their other Tolkien fanworks. In 2022, in answer to this need, we opened our Beyond the Silmarillion section. This section of our site accepts all fanworks based on Tolkien's texts and their adaptations and is open to creators who have posted either five fanworks with us or written fanworks totaling more than 10,000 words. Once an SWG member reaches one of those thresholds, they are certainly welcome to contact us and let us know, but Dawn checks for new Beyond the Silmarillion eligibility every day or two and will add creator permission for this section of the site then and message you to let you know when she does.

We have a Beyond the Silmarillion FAQ with more information on what's eligible and how to handle edge cases and multi-age works. If you have additional questions, just reply here! We hope our Beyond the Silmarillion section will continue to offer a Tolkien fandom alternative for our community members to archive their work and the opportunity for members and guests to enjoy fanworks about the full splendor of Tolkien's legendarium!

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.

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.

I teach writing to smallish humans, and one of the strategies I teach them is to harness the recency effect: make their last words their best words because it is what readers are most likely to remember. Today, we introduce our new challenge for March, and it puts the spotlight on authors, playwrights, poets, songwriters, and people who crafted last words that have lingered in the popular consciousness because they are funny, profound, or just plain weird.

Our new challenge, Famous Last Words, turns these wise and witty parting words into prompts for fanworks. This challenge is an assigned prompt challenge, which means that moderators will assign you a prompt. If you have a preference for the last line from a song, book, poem, play, or person, you can let us know. And if we really strike out and give you a prompt that leaves you utterly uninspired, do not despair—just let us know you'd like us to try again!

You can request a prompt by commenting on the news post on the website, emailing us, sending us an ask on Tumblr, commenting on our Dreamwidth, or requesting a prompt on the #monthly-challenges channel on our Discord. But if you're reading this in your inbox and think you might want to try the challenge, the easiest way is to reply to the email and let us know you want a prompt!

Because the newsletter comes out on the day the new challenge is released, we are on that magical day that happens once each month where we have two active challenges on the site. Title Track remains active through the end of March 15, so you still have time to collect a stamp for that one or really go wild and craft a challenge response that uses both the Famous Last Words and Title Track challenges!

Because March is Women's History Month, Famous Last Words also has a special stamp for fanworks that feature a woman as a leading character. Let one of the mods know if you need this stamp on your challenge fanwork.

In addition, Anna (IdleLeaves) is generously continuing monthly instadrabbling sessions on our Discord! This marks a year of every first Saturday being set aside for creativity and socialization with each other! Mark your calendars for April 4, May 2, and June 6 at 18:00/2PM UTC. You can find out more about our upcoming instadrabbling sessions here.

This week, we continue to go back to Back to Middle-earth Month (B2MeM), which has now been running for twenty years. For many of those twenty years, the SWG was an active part of this annual fandom "holiday," so as we restore many old events and projects in the Special Projects section of our site, we are revisiting some of the first B2MeMs and how they would shape the history of the SWG. The first B2MeM, held in 2006, built on the idea of a "return" to the heyday of the film years, when online Tolkien fandom exploded. However, as I noted last week, by 2007, that messaging already felt irrelevant for us on the SWG. While the Silmarillion fandom is impacted by film and show releases when those fans almost inevitably pick up the books—sometimes venturing as far as The Silmarillion—the impact is significantly less, and we are ultimately sustained by interest in a book that is far from new rather than the flash-fire interest that comes with big media releases.

Back to Middle-earth Month 2008 marked a shift away from a return to what once was and toward sustaining what is: a Tolkien fandom that, while less active than during the film years, never went away. B2MeM 2008 was the first "modern" B2MeM for us, being explicitly fanworks-focused. Participants contributed short fanfiction, excerpts, and fan art based around five Tolkienish themes, each accompanied by a personal reflection about what Tolkien and the Tolkien fandom meant to the creator. While looking back via the personal narratives, the event also spotlighted the writing and art still happening in the SWG.

The event also shows emerging values that would define the SWG as it grew in the years to come. It was the first event collaboratively planned by the moderator team, and the approach was chosen with the explicit caveat that it not only welcome but celebrate a variety of canon approaches and interpretations. As the Tolkien fanworks fandom entered its lean years between the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, a time when fewer new fans were joining fan communities, events like B2MeM and other annual challenges and exchanges would become mainstays on the fandom calendar that helped sustain interest, engagement, and communities built around creatively interacting with Tolkien's world.

And many of those events, including B2MeM, continue to happen—in fact, B2MeM 2020 is happening now! You can find more about this year's event here.

In honor of twenty years of Back to Middle-earth Month (B2MeM) and as part of our ongoing effort to restore all of our Special Projects on our website, we are going "back to B2MeM" in our newsletters this month to look back at the history of B2MeM on the SWG.

2007 was the year. Tolkien fandom clearly felt that they needed a monthly holiday, and B2MeM seemed to fit the bill. Middle-earth News posted a "Celebrate Middle-earth Month" (CMEM-07) challenge that was a minor reworking of the anonymously submitted B2MeM 2006 challenge. The SWG and the drabble community There-n-Back Again both posted their own challenges. There-n-Back's challenge was participatory in nature: a daily drabble prompt based on "the alphabet of Middle-earth."

Our challenge on the SWG took a different approach, partly due to the fact that, as Silmarillion creators, we weren't really going back to anything; our corner of the fandom—while impacted by the films leaving theaters—relied less on film fans than the Lord of the Rings fandom did. Our event was presented as a "journey through the history of Arda" with a new place-based quotation from The Silmarillion each day.

When B2MeM 2007 debuted, the SWG's website was less than a year old. Beyond a mention in the newsletter, B2MeM 2007 never existed on our website; it was presented entirely on our LiveJournal community. In the interest of historical preservation, we've compiled the original challenge text and the thirty-one quotes we shared that year. You can find the B2MeM 2007 text and quotes here.

Like the 2006 challenge, B2MeM 2007 was rather haphazardly embarked upon. While researching the history of how it came to be, I was unable to find a single email mentioning it, either in my personal email or in the moderator email. It seems the event came back around on the calendar, I felt we needed to participate too on the SWG, and the quote idea was likely a low-effort way to do our part. This would be the last year that B2MeM would fly by the seat of its pants, and beginning with the 2008 event, it would become increasingly elaborate with the focus less on simply appreciating Tolkien's world and more on creating fanworks about it.

Remember that B2MeM is still alive! You can find more about this year's event here.

Just about twenty years ago, an anonymous person sent a challenge to the LiveJournal community Middle-earth News. The Lord of the Rings films had been out of theaters for over a year at that point, and energy in the Tolkien fanworks fandom was beginning to flag. The challenge was to make March a "Back to Middle-earth Month"—B2MeM for short—to remember one's love for Tolkien and keep the energy in the fandom high.

The SWG, along with several other Tolkien groups, picked up the challenge and promoted it in their own spaces. For us, it was a humble beginning for B2MeM: just an announcement in the March 2006 newsletter and nothing more. There were no prompts, no reminders, no roundups of what was created for the event. But March, it seemed, had been staked out in the minds of Tolkien fandom as B2MeM for the foreseeable future.

We're remembering this history as part of our ongoing effort to get all of our Special Projects back online, especially as B2MeM turns twenty years old this year. B2MeM 2006 never even had its own page on our site—our archive wouldn't open for three months after the first B2MeM—and its historical importance lies more in what would follow than the 2006 event itself. (B2MeM 2006 does have its own page now, in the interest of documenting its place in the SWG's historical record and Dawn's completionist tendencies.) B2MeM 2006 seems mostly to mark something magical about fandom, which is how an idea tossed out to the world can be picked up and take on a life of its own. I sometimes wonder if the anonymous person who invented the original B2MeM challenge stuck around in the fandom to see how big their idea would become in the coming years!

The SWG, B2MeM ... both are Tolkien fandom institutions that grew from a small idea. Remember that we support fandom endeavors whenever we can. If you have an idea for a fandom event, we will promote it in our Around the World and Web section, and we set up channels on our Discord server for events that aren't big enough for their own server but want a place for participants to learn and chat about their event. And for bigger projects, like the recent Fëanorian Zine, we collaborate around hosting as well. Decades of people having ideas and seeing them through has kept the Tolkien fandom alive.

Twenty years later, although no longer an SWG event, B2MeM is still alive. You can find more about this year's event here.

If Christopher Tolkien's work with his father's writings made anything plain, it was how prolific a writer J.R.R. Tolkien was. Yet he didn't follow the trajectory of most other famed 20th-century fiction writers, with multiple novels and a trove of short stories in print. As we know well, as fans and creators based on The Silmarillion, much of his work was posthumous.

But he was prolific, having authored hundreds of essays and poems and fragments beyond his major works, and while coming up with titles is one of the more anxiety-inducing parts of the process for many writers, it doesn't seem to have been for him. At least, it isn't evidenced in the variety of titles that grace his works, some of which may surprise even the most well-read Tolkien fans.

For this month's challenge, we've used the titles Tolkien's many and varied works as prompts. Title Track offers 125 titles of chapters, poems, essays, lectures, fragments, and drafts to inspire your fanworks. Note that you work does not have to be about the text it titles (although it can be!) As always, we encourage creative interpretations of the prompts in any way that encourages you to create Silmarillion-based fanworks.

If you'd like the stamp for creating a fanwork for the challenge, it needs to be posted to our archive no later than 15 March 2026. Because February is Black History Month, we encourage creators to consider featuring a character of color and have a special stamp for fanworks that do. Let a moderator know if you've earned this stamp (replying to this email is a good way to reach us!) All of our challenge guidelines can be found here.

With the introduction of Title Track, we are bidding adieu to another year of the Resolution challenge, but note that Resolution does not close until after 15 February, so you still have time to get stamps for those amnesty fanworks.

Every month, Anna (IdleLeaves) generously hosts an instadrabbling session on our Discord server. For many of us, we are in the depths of winter. For all of us, life brings its usual stresses and challenges, and it is easy to put writing, art, and creative expression at the bottom of the list. A couple hours making fanworks with fandom friends can be a welcome oasis amidst the stressors of life.

Instadrabbling is a long-running Tolkien fandom tradition. More than twenty years old, instadrabbling was first held on Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and prompts were four words chosen at random from the closest book at hand. One of the advantages of Discord has been the ability to bring instadrabbling back. If you've never participated before, instadrabbling involves a group of creators meeting on chat, someone throws out a prompt or four, and everyone writes a drabble (or whatever comes to mind). We share our creations in the server and admire each other's work. Instadrabbling is low-pressure and casual, and all are encouraged to participate to whatever degree they are comfortable.

Instadrabbling doesn't have to be drabbles, and it doesn't have to be writing. It doesn't even have to be Silmworks; we are open to all Tolkien-based fanworks! We've had participants make art; we've had participants use the prompts to add on to longer stories. And of course stopping by just to read and enjoy the fanworks is very much encouraged!

We hope you can join us today at 6PM/18:00 UTC (find this in my timezone)! If you're not on our Discord server, you can join here. Just scroll down to the #instadrabbling channel!