One of my earliest fannish memories is joining a group of friends for tabletop gaming. I was the only woman present. But we were all nerds, and we'd all shared the experience of having hobbies we loved mocked by others. That particular night, my friends devoted quite a bit of time and energy to mocking something I had just recently come to do and was quickly beginning to love: writing fanfiction. (In fact, I even owned a fanfiction group, although the SWG was still in its infancy.) I remember feeling more shame than offense, and the result of that evening was that some of my favorite people at the time never knew about what quickly became a huge part of my life.

When the internet became widespread (and fanfiction did too), the popular consensus about it was not positive. If your nerdy friends putting down your hobby wasn't enough, you also got to hear authors you respected hold imaginary conversations with you where they concluded that you were a lazy, immoral, perverse thief. In this climate, I did have a defense, however: Before turning to fanfiction, I'd published a couple of short stories and worked as an editor for a couple small-press creative arts journals. I'm not proud that I made these facts known as a way of heading off criticism about my fanfiction (never read by the critic), but I did. I was already a Serious Writer^TM, the assumption went, just using fanfiction to have fun. I was not one of these fanfiction writers who could not craft her own characters and tell a story about them at the same time, like walking and chewing gum, and so had to "steal" the characters of other authors.

The relationship between fanfiction and original fiction is an interesting one. In the 2000s, fanfiction was often depicted as a sort of training exercise to write original fiction. But I was proof that it didn't always work that way, and as time went on and the shame became anger, I came to understand and defend fanfiction as simply another genre, not an entirely different class, of writing.

In this month's Cultus Dispatches column, using Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data, I consider the various ways that writers of Tolkien fanfiction push beyond the borders of Middle-earth: bending the canon, making their own original characters, writing or bringing in elements from other fandoms, and finally, writing original fiction. I wondered what connections, if any, between these various "border-crossing" activities there might be. Is there a "type" of writer, for example, who chafes at the confines of fanfiction and who pushes toward original work? I assumed there would be some connection between various survey items—that authors who write original fiction create original characters more often, for example—but I ended up quite surprised at what I found.

As always, analyzing survey data feels like it begs more questions than it answers. But you can read my first round of analysis here: Beyond Borders: Canon Deviations, Multifandoms, and Original Content.

This week, the journal Transformative Works and Cultures released their special issue on Fandom and Platforms. The SWG features in two of the articles in this issue!

Welmoed Fenna Wagenaar in Discord as a Fandom Platform: Locating a New Playground looked at two Discord servers and used the lens of play to study how "users interact with and negotiate rule-based structures and designs" on a Discord server. It won't be hard to figure out which is the SWG, even though we are not named!

How fans play together is one of the questions considered by the author, which made me think of how we play together on the SWG. One key point that Wagenaar makes is that fans use multiple platforms and technologies simultaneously, and it is hard to separate out our Discord server and the conversations and play that happens there from the fanworks that are posted to our archive (and others). Conversations and play can be both in response to fanworks, and fanworks of course arise from fan communities on platforms like Discord. Wagenaar also looked at how our relatively high level of moderation creates "a conflict-free space [for fans] to enjoy and explore their fandom together, where play moods can be created and maintained."

The second article is my The Fading of the Elves: Techno-volunteerism and the Disappearance of Tolkien Fan Fiction Archives. This article is historical in approach, looking at the rise and fall of Tolkien fanfiction archives and how these trends match with historical events in the Tolkien fandom, wider fandom world, and internet more broadly. It also considers Francesca Coppa's idea of the "archive elf," which was too easy to align with Tolkien's legendarium to not exploit to its fullest. "Archive elves" are the volunteers who keep archives running, and it is a job that is invisible by design, leading to a decline in the role as archives have faded from the fandom landscape. I've been the SWG's archive elf for over fifteen years now, so our archive and community heavily influence my observations here.

As we sunset the Character of the Month and other newsletter columns are on hiatus, I hope that these two articles hold you over until we get our next set of columns up and running! (And if you have an idea about the newsletter or an article or a column, or if you want to get involved with the newsletter, hit REPLY and I will send you an invite to come and play with the rest of the newsletter team on our Discord!)

Three is a number of power throughout myth and folklore, and the legendarium is not exception. Probably by now, you've thought immediately of a place where Tolkien uses the number three! Probably you've also thought of another use of the number three in history, science, mathematics, literature, myth, religion, folklore, language, or something else entirely.

The SWG challenge mods plan out the challenge calendar in November-December for the following year. Among the many factors we consider are other fandom events that run at the same time as our challenges. Since we always have at least one challenge running, we do not want them to compete with events that run annually or only occasionally. Because March is Back to Middle-earth Month, we generally try for a challenge that is relatively low-key and easy to incorporate with other events and challenges, like B2MeM.

This month's challenge, It Comes in Threes, features prompts focused on the number three. We've come up with 130 prompts, and you can select your own prompt so that it can be incorporated with B2MeM or any of the other events that will be running while the challenge is ongoing!

It's also a good time to remind challenge participants that if you use one of our challenge prompts in a piece for another challenge or event, and you cannot post the response with us right away due to the calendar or rules of the other event, just let the mods know, and we will award you the stamp when you are able to post.

You can find this month's challenge, It Comes in Threes, and the prompts here. If you're joining us for a challenge for the first time, challenge guidelines are here. Have questions? Hit REPLY and ask away!

Last week, I visited the Florida Keys and was able to climb to the top of the tower of the Key West Lighthouse. Despite living in mountainous country, I generally dislike climbing hills—yet I love climbing towers. There is something almost magical in never leaving the coordinates on the map where you began, ascending a tight spiral of stairs, and emerging to a different view than you had at the beginning. It's the same place but a vastly different perspective.

In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook continues to climb the stairs of various towers in Tolkien's works, both Middle-earth and not. This month, he focuses on the three inland "dark towers" of The Lord of the Rings and how they connect to the palantíri and other modes of seeing and imposing one's will in Middle-earth. These towers provide different insights than the tower at Elostirion, discussed last month, that looks out upon the sea. The dark towers—and later in the story, the Elf-towers as well—take on a different role that looks not outward to the numinous West but concentrates on the worldly machinations that will come to be preserved as the history of Middle-earth.

Simon's exploration of Tolkien's towers highlight the challenge that is the "Silmarillion" in the Silmarillion Writers' Guild. Tolkien's works are interlaced with each other such that the elements from one text or another are hard to isolate. The dark towers are a Hobbit story, but this story requires Fëanor and the Númenóreans; furthermore the tower in Tolkien's analogy in his 1936 lecture on Beowulf occasionally glimmers out of the mist on a far-off horizon. Each contributes its weight and meaning to the history we come to read as The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's ability to interweave so many elements from so many different places into a story is what gives us that sense that is a lot like climbing a tower: reading the same story yet, with a little effort, achieving vastly different perspectives.

You can read Simon's article "Seeing Stones in Dark Towers" here.

In 2006, after the films had ended and as the Lord of the Rings fandom began to fade like First Age Elves with no wars to fight, an anonymous* fan proposed the idea of Back to Middle-earth Month or B2MeM. The concept was simple: Pick a day of the week and post something Middle-earth-related on that day throughout the month of March.

B2MeM, then, was never owned by anyone. So while it is deeply entwined with the SWG's history, there is no point where B2MeM was an SWG event. Rather, for many years, the SWG ran a B2MeM event ... but other groups were free to run B2MeM events too and in fact often did!

This year is the nineteenth year that B2MeM has run in some form. It is a tale that has grown in the telling. From its humble origins, it grew in some years to highly organized and complex events. (In other years, the mods attempted to tame it to reasonable proportions, with mixed success.) In a fandom that has many large events, B2MeM is unique in that way: Part of the point was that every year should be different. (Of course, B2MeM belongs to no one so this isn't mandatory! But it is definitely how it's unfolded so far.) When the SWG ran a B2MeM event, we tried to make every year's event different from the last. For example, it was an unofficial rule that daily prompts would never run multiple years in a row! The thinking behind this was maximum inclusivity. If this year's event wasn't your speed, there was a good chance the next year's might be.

It's now March, so it's Back to Middle-earth Month. And, for the nineteenth time, there is something happening for B2MeM. This year's event is The Minhiriath Midway, and this year's organizers have many ways to get involved. Or go back to the OG B2MeM concept: read or view a fanwork, write something, make something, draw something, comment on someone's work, reblog or signal boost, jump into a discussion, answer someone's question, spend an hour reading a favorite chapter or work from Tolkien. Do something. Keep the fandom not just alive but vibrant!

*At least, they've remained anonymous this long. If you know who came up with the idea of B2MeM, hit REPLY and let me know! Their idea is responsible for many years of joy and thousands of fanworks ... and a Tolkien fandom that long outlasted the LotR films.

You're likely reading this because you have an interest, in some way, in Tolkien-based fanworks. That means that, at some point, several things had to happen. You had to pick up Tolkien. What motivated you to do that? Was it a book put in your hands by a parent, teacher, or friend? Or did you see the films and have to have more? Or did you see a work of art or read a story online that would not leave you alone until you learned more about the world that inspired it?

Then you had to, at some point, decide that, of the hours allowed to you during your week, you wanted to spend some of it on or with Tolkien fanworks. Again, what put those fanworks on your radar? Maybe you'd been part of fanworks communities before, accidentally found Tolkien fanworks online while looking for something else, or had been making stories and art about Tolkien before discovering that other people do this too. Over and over again, you choose to continue to be a part of this community. Why? What keeps you coming back?

This month, for my monthly Tolkien fandom studies and history column, Cultus Dispatches, I took on the Organization for Transformative Works' "10 things about fandom" challenge for International Fanworks Day. I thought it would be an easy column. It was not—in fact, it may be the most challenge column I've written yet! When the dust settles after a lot of thinking, discussing, writing, and phoning in favors to friends who know way more about aspects of the fandom's history than I do, what I really tried to do was find ten "moments" that explain how so many of us—sixty-four years after the first Tolkien fanfics were published—are still doing this thing. What brought us here? What keeps us here?

It's really important that this list is not definitive. It is one person's perspective, and while (appropriate enough for a tens challenge!) it is informed by ten years now formally researching Tolkien fanfiction, its cultures, and its history, it is one person's perspective. If you made or make your own "ten things" list about our fandom, please comment on my article or just hit reply here and let me know. I'd love to share others' perspectives as well!

You can read "10 Important Moments in Tolkien Fanfiction History" here.

If it seems like the newsletter is early this week, you are not mistaken. It is and intentionally so.

On Saturday, we are hosting an instadrabbling session on our Discord server, and I wanted to make sure that the newsletter arrived before the first session started. This instadrabbling session is in honor of International Fanworks Day and serves as an opportunity to swap prompts for our new challenge, Meet & Greet Matryoshka.

There was a lot of fandom jargon in that last paragraph. First things first: instadrabbling is a collaborative activity aimed at making flash fanworks together. As far as I know, it was invented by Tolkien fanfiction writers JunoMagic and Aranel Took in the mid-2000s. The way it works: A bunch of creators get together on a chat service. Someone throws out a prompt (traditionally four words chosen at random from the nearest book on hand). Everyone makes a drabble or other flash fanwork, posts the results, and everyone squees over the results.

International Fanworks Day is February 15 and sponsored by the Organization for Transformative Works. Every year, we offer an IFD stamp for challenge participants and sometimes we fly by the seats of our pants in putting something else together at the last minute to make it look like we planned ahead. This year, we remembered about IFD in time to actually plan instadrabbling and have it appear in the OTW's news announcements. (Proof, perhaps, that at age 19, the SWG is indeed entering adulthood?)

Instadrabbling also provides an occasion to gather for our current challenge. Meet & Greet is our annual Matryoshka challenge. As far as I know, we invented this challenge format, something that I'm proud of even as I want to apologize for doing so. Matryoshka challenges are hard. The Matryoshka challenge involves cumulative prompts, like the nesting dolls that it is named after, so you never know how subsequent prompts may ruin the fanwork you so lovingly planned and had half-created in your mind. Typically, the mods send a separate email for each prompt; for this one, we will send your first prompt and then you need to find the rest, either by asking other participants (hence Meet & Greet!) or finding them online. Some participants have posted them publicly, and the mods have hidden a few in plain sight to see who actually reads the stuff we post on the site.

The sum total of all of this: fandom is truly collaborative. We are using a social activity invented two decades ago by a pair of Lord of the Rings authors to celebrate a holiday coined by a huge fanworks nonprofit and to support a challenge that we invented and hope will encourage SWG members to talk to each other and visit each other's socials. It seems fitting that this amalgam will result in a bunch of creators coming together to make and celebrate fanworks together.

If you want to join us for instadrabbling, you can join our Discord server here. Full Meet & Greet challenge guidelines (and the participant list) are here. Instadrabbling will occur on 17 February 2024 at 13:00/1PM until 17:00/5PM UTC (see this in your timezone) and again on 18 February 2024 at midnight until 2:00AM UTC (see this in your timezone). We hope to see you there!

Fans of Tolkien's legendarium, once they become aware that he was the preeminent scholar of Beowulf (and in some ways still is), often seek evidence of his academic work lurking amid the hills of Eriador. This is a fruitful area of Tolkien scholarship as well.

Less often embarked upon is the opposite: looking at Tolkien's Middle-earth work and how it influenced his academic work. Part of this is because Tolkien fans and scholars have internalized the idea that, although he looms large to us for having penned The Lord of the Rings, writing about Elves and Hobbits was a side hustle for Tolkien—and one he was not always proud of. But in this month's A Sense of History, Simon J. Cook does exactly that, turning the revelations from a close-read of certain passages from The Lord of the Rings and its Appendices to shed light on Tolkien's most famous scholarly work.

"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by Tolkien that marks a watershed moment in Beowulf scholarship. It is widely credited by Anglo-Saxon scholars with changing how Beowulf is read, allowing it to be interpreted as literature and not simply mined as a historical and philological source. The lecture-turned-essay includes a lengthy and beautiful analogy of an old man and a tower. This analogy has been interpreted by numerous very well-known Tolkien scholars.

For the past several months, Simon has discussed the tower analogy, including (much to Tom Shippey's chagrin) how existing scholarship about it reads it wrong. This month, he does what is so rarely done: looking at towers in The Lord of the Rings, especially as they appear in Frodo's dreams, and considering what the meaning of these towers in The Lord of the Rings can show us of the meaning behind an uncannily similar tower in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Tolkien's side hustle, in other words, may have shaped or at least reflected how he thought about the medieval texts he cherished and made his life's work.

You can read Simon's article "In the House of the Fairbairns" here.

The SWG is rapidly approaching its nineteenth year of existence. When I founded the group in 2005, it was a niche community, one of hundreds of Tolkien fanfiction groups, and when the website opened in 2007, it was a niche website and one of dozens of Tolkien fanfiction archives. The landscape around us looks very different now. Where there are still Tolkien groups (mostly on Tumblr and Dreamwidth), we are one of the only Tolkien-specific archives remaining. When the OTW recently published the results of its 16th Anniversary Survey, and when the SWG was listed as one of "the most popular sites not already offered as answer options," that was a splash of cold water to the face: Somehow, this niche website had assumed some degree of centrality.

Watching other independent archives fade around you (and sometimes out from under you) creates a lot of anxiety. These are, after all, hubs that hold the creative work of dozens if not hundreds of people, and they are communities of people who have come to know and care about each other. Probably many of you reading this have been personally impacted by site and community closures. When one closes, especially with little or no warning, that represents a significant loss to many people. Over the summer, while researching independent archives, I asked the question, "What concerns about independent archives do you have?" and 72% of people responded that "small archives can close without warning." This was the top response to that question.

Sites fade and close for a lot of reasons, but declining interest (from mods or members and usually both), unforeseen tragedies that cut off funding or management of a site (or both), and obsolescence of technology are among the most common. Here, we've worked really hard across the years to insulate the SWG against declining interest and obsolescence of tech. We maintain a moderator team that is interested in running events to keep the group active, and in 2021, we migrated the site to software that we have every reason to believe will sustain us for many years to come. Within the past couple of months, we've put plans in place to ensure the site's survival in the event of unforeseen tragedies as well. We've ensured that there is a clear plan for who will pay for the site and who will administer and moderate the archives and our various social media if I am unable to do so.

None of these things are a guarantee that the SWG will live forever. It won't. An enduring message of Tolkien's works is one of impermanence: things change and fade. However, we recognize the incredible community so many people have built over the last (almost) nineteen years, and we want to be fully transparent with everyone of all that we are doing to ensure that the site survives and thrives for as long as it can.

We've also set up a page on the site about Governance of the SWG that includes information on how we run the site, fund it, and make decisions, including around continuance of funding and management of the site. We welcome questions always; you can hit REPLY to this email or reach out to the moderators through any of the usual channels.

A few weeks ago, our newsletter issue was called "Characters in the Margins." This week, as we feature a biography of Olwë written by LadySternchen, we end up thinking about characters who often seem to exist mostly between the lines of The Silmarillion.

Olwë is just that character. LadySternchen's biography details the early years of his life, about which we know quite a bit. What seems to be missing—and where LadySternchen offers insightful inferences—are the emotional impacts of those events.

If we adopt today's language, we would say that Olwë experienced multiple traumas over the course of his early life. Melkor's attacks on the Quendi form a frightening foundation, followed by separation from others of the Teleri, most notably his brother Elwë, who goes missing long enough that Olwë is forced to choose between continuing to search for him and crossing the sea to join the rest of the Eldar. And of course, the Darkening and the first kinslaying form particularly brutal codas to an already tumultuous life.

As many of us are fanworks creators, these are the fertile points in a characters' life for our work, often elided by Tolkien and all the more intriguing for the open spaces left behind.

You can read LadySternchen's biography of Olwë here.

This is the first biography in 2024, the first year where we have so few major characters left to write about as part of the Character of the Month column that it will, for the first time in over sixteen years, cease being published as a monthly column and become an occasional column. If you'd like to tackle one of our nine remaining characters (Elendil, Gothmog, Yavanna, Eönwë, Marach, Hador, Manwë, Melkor, or Nienor!) reply to this email and let me know!