It is with great sadness that we share that our longtime member, Oshun, passed away earlier this week after a long illness. Many of you reading this knew her, and I expect that nearly everyone reading this knew her work. (Oshun's stories can be found here. Her character biographies and other essays can be found here.) Her impact on this group was undeniable as well. Although she staunchly refused to become a moderator (she hated discussing policy!), it was her work that grew our Reference section and newsletter, pushing our small ambitions for this section of the site. She is responsible for most of our Character of the Month collection.

But even more importantly than that is the positive force she was in the fandom, here in the SWG and beyond. She wrote slashfic, including Maedhros/Fingon well before the term "Russingon" was coined, even when intolerance in the fandom made it uncomfortable and even dangerous to do so. She felt that writing about love was never wrong. Her stories were light and funny; in a fandom where the source material can lead creators to explore the darker corners of human nature, Oshun intentionally focused on moments of love, joy, and celebration in the lives of Tolkien's characters. And if you knew her, this made sense. She welcomed everyone, and many people, starstruck by her work, who braved reaching out to her found a friend. She was always eager to share with fellow fans, whether knowledge about Tolkien or a good laugh.

Oshun has been absent from our group for over a year now due to her illness. It is heartbreaking to know that she will not be coming back, but her influence lives on in her writing and her kindness to so many of us in the Silmarillion fandom.

We've set up a GoFundMe to help Oshun's family with funeral and other expenses at this sorrowful time. She leaves behind a daughter, son, and grandchildren. If you wish to donate, you can do so here.

When we first started our Akallabêth in August challenge in 2008, the fandom was very different. Second Age fanworks were relatively rare—hence the challenge—as were fanworks focusing on women and characters of color. As for femslash??

As we close out our seventeenth Akallabêth in August—which we've mostly run unofficially since its inception but which shapes the challenges we plan during August—fanworks look different in a lot of ways. Many creators aim to increase the visibility of women, characters of color, and LGBTQ+ characters in their fanworks, and of course, the Second Age is no longer an obscure pocket of Arda's history. For our very first Themed Collection, Himring has gathered fanworks that prove that point in many ways, focusing on the three ruling queens of Númenor: Tar-Ancalimë, Tar-Telperiën, and Tar-Vanimeldë.

"Named female characters with any accompanying biographical information are not all that common in the Legendarium," Himring writes in her introduction to the collection. "Even fewer of these are shown exercising political power." The three ruling queens are a notable exception to that rule—yet they still remain somewhat obscure, with most information about them coming from Unfinished Tales, and as Himring also notes, with "tantalizing gaps in the available canon material that invite filling in and expansion by fan interpretations." As Himring's collection shows, creators have done admirable work to fill those gaps, often expanding the diversity of the people of Arda as they do so.

Himring has selected eleven works of fanfiction and fanart that show various perspectives on the ruling queens. But our Themed Collections are not in any way intended to be definitive, and if you find that your favorite story, art, or other fanwork about these three intriguing women is missing, we encourage expanding the collection by leaving a comment so that others can fall in love with it too!

You can check out the fanworks Himring chose for "The Ruling Queens of Númenor" here.

Finally, we invite anyone who is passionate about fanworks focused on a specific topic to consider creating a Themed Collection for an upcoming newsletter. You can find our call for contributors here.

Back in 2007, the SWG archive was still brand-new and the group itself was only just two years old when I had a modest idea: Let's feature a character in the newsletter each month with a brief biography about the person. Just something quick, no more than a paragraph or two, to acquaint a reader new to The Silmarillion with the basics about the character. Just the basics. Oshun volunteered to write these mini-bios, and the Character of the Month was born.

Of course, any of you familiar with the Character of the Month biographies probably don't know them as the small, unambitious summaries that can be dashed off in a matter of minutes. For that, Oshun—who eventually became the lead writer on the project—can be credited. If you go back far enough, you can see that they started that way, but they didn't remain that way for long. As the cliché goes, the tale grew in the telling. That seems appropriate for this group, which was never intended to be what it is today and yet is.

Oshun also began meticulously citing her sources for these biographies, which set the standard for the SWG, as it began to develop its own Reference section, and raised the bar for the fandom beyond us. At the time, online references about Tolkien, such as the burgeoning Tolkien wikis, rarely identified where they got their information, and when you're working with over a dozen texts (with varying statuses as "canon" in people's minds) that few fans have comprehensive access to, that led to confusion and easily spread misinformation.

Today, the Character of the Month is winding down (but not finished yet! the characters we still need biographies for are listed here), and we have over 150 biographies archived on the site, written by a variety of authors but mostly by Oshun. The Character of the Month collection can be found here, and you can search our Reference section for a specific character here.

Off the top of your head, name a king or queen from the legendarium. Likely, within a matter of seconds, you were able to name not just one but several. Drawing from medieval societies as he did, Tolkien leaned heavily on monarchial structures for governments, giving us an extensive and diverse array of kings and queens to draw from.

Our newest challenge, Kings & Queens, is simple: Create a fanwork about a king or queen in Arda. While you can find a list of canonical kings and queens at the previous link, you should not feel limited to those on the list. First of all, the list was compiled by Dawn reading through the indices of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings on a beautiful summer afternoon, and it is very possible that some were missed amid the sunshine and summer breeze. There are also textual ghosts—characters who must have existed but remain unnamed—and characters whose royal status is questionable. Finally, there is potential for kings and queens who are original characters. All of these are welcome.

The simplicity of this month's challenge is part of the point. There are several large fandom events ongoing right now. (Check out Around the World & Web below for more!) We wanted a challenge that offered easy entry points for those who want/need them or an actual challenge for those who want/need that. (All those Third Age kings!)

This is also a good time to offer the reminder that our challenges can always be combined with other challenges and events. If you can't post your challenge fanwork due to posting requirements of the other event, just let the mods know (reply to this email!) and then let us know when the fanwork is posted on our archive, and we will give you the stamp for the challenge.

Check out the full Kings & Queens challenge guidelines, the (optional) list of kings and queens, and any fanworks for the challenge here. If you're new to our challenges, we'd love for you to join us, and you can find the challenge guidelines here.

(This is the last call for feedback on if and how you would potentially attend our live event! We will be collecting responses after this weekend and need as many as we can get, so if you haven't filled it out yet ... well, you get the point. Thank you to those who have filled out the form. Watch this space for an official announcement of the event very soon!)

For the past year as part of our column A Sense of History, Simon J. Cook has been looking at how Tolkien's writings on Beowulf, namely the lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," informs and is informed by his work on the legendarium that he was undertaking at the same time. Last month, he considered the crossing of ships from and back to the West. A familiar journey to fans of Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, a ship journey from and to the West also appears in Beowulf.

A ship-burial suggests that beyond the Shoreless Sea is hell, the realm of mortal shades in ancient English mythology. Tolkien reads the first ship of the exordium to Beowulf as ancient myth, the ship-burial as Anglo-Saxon art. The art breathes meaning into the myth, yet raises the uncomfortable thought that the good king came to his people out of death. Early in 1936, Tolkien penned an "Elvish myth" that told of a king who sailed the Straight Road, out of a mythical flat world and into the round world of history, and then died side by side with his Elvish friend, fighting Sauron in Mordor. This legendary appendage to The Fall of Númenor spells out Tolkien’s reading of the exordium, a connection that Simon explores in this month's A Sense of History article.

You can read Simon's article "Straight Road" here.

First of all, if you have not responded to our question about next year's live event for our 20th birthday, can you? We will be choosing a venue within the next few weeks and value as much information as possible about what we might expect for attendance. We also appreciate signal boosts if you are able to do so. (A Tumblr post of the announcement is here!)

Thank you to those who have responded already!

This week, we continue as part of our Cultus Dispatches column our exploration of the topic of commenting and feedback. This is often a fraught topic surrounded by a lot of emotion. Creators want feedback, especially comments, but many receive few (or none!) and the silence can be huge and easily filled with their worst fears about their work. Readers and viewers, on the other hand, generally want to keep happy the creators who are making the art, stories, and other fanworks they love, but writing comments is hard. It is not often that guilt, shame, and a sense of failure arise regularly in a Cultus column, but here they do. (Friendship, community, and fanworks barely saved from the dustbin by a timely comment are also common themes, but thankfully, at least the first two are more regular topics for the column!)

This month's column explores the topic through our recent Fandom Voices survey about comments and feedback. Thirtyish participants answered two simple questions: "What has been your experience around receiving feedback on your Tolkien-based fanworks?" and "What has been your experience of leaving feedback (or not) on Tolkien-based fanworks?" Their responses reveal the delights and challenges that leaving feedback creates for all parties involved.

You can read the article "Fandom Voices: Comments and Feedback" here. And if you missed the survey, or did it but want to say more, or answering the question about the live event made you hungry for more Google Forms, the survey is still open for new responses, which we will add to the collection as they come in.

The SWG's birthday is a rather inexact thing. The SWG was established on March 15, 2005, but we did not begin recruiting members until the end of July that year, making it so (just like an Elf) we have both a begetting day and birthday. However, as people trickled into the group across the course of several days, it is hard to pin down just one of them as our birthday.

It is, however, somewhere around this time, nineteen years ago. Nineteen, as a birthday, is pretty unremarkable, sandwiched between legal adulthood at 18 in many countries and the big 2-0 that marks the exit from teenagedom. Nineteen, in fandom terms, is pretty respectable, though. While there are some truly venerable fannish institutions, most do not last this long. In my research on archives, I have found some that lasted only a year or two. Most of the sites that seemed like big sisters to the SWG when it trickled to life at the end of July 2005 are now gone.

Just like a human birthday, we won't treat our nineteenth birthday as a milestone. We'll mark it and be mildly impressed that we've made it this far. But next year? Next year we turn twenty!

We are planning an event for our twentieth birthday next year. It will be hybrid, occurring both in-person and online. Because, as an organization, we have produced both fanworks and scholarship (the latter through a fannish versus academic approach), we will welcome presentations of both—watch this space in the weeks to come for more details on what this will look like, including a call for presenters if you want to share your work as part of marking our twentieth year!

Right now, we are working to secure a venue, and the most important thing we need is to know how many people would like to attend, assuming they are able to do so. This is not an RSVP or any kind of sign-up; we're not even collecting names. It is more of an attempt to gain a sense of whether we should expect a small gathering in a library community room or whether we should rent something larger.

Please answer the one question on this form to help us gather this information. It is also helpful if you can signal boost this survey outside of the SWG in any fandom spaces where it is acceptable to do so. This will not be an SWG-only event, and we want to welcome as many Tolkien fans as want to attend, whether they are SWG members or not.

Finally, thank you to everyone who has supported us in the many ways needed that we have nearly survived our teens! (If you're reading this, that's you!) It has been an incredible nineteen years!

What is your passion in fandom, the one thing you will always click on? Maybe it is a favorite character or pairing. Maybe it is a genre or a type of fanwork. Maybe it's a mix! (Classical music about Fingon/Maedhros? Crafts about Dwarves? Science fiction stories about textual ghosts?)

We are excited to announce a new column for our newsletter that offers a chance to harness that passion (or riffle through all those bookmarks you've been saving) and share it with others. We will begin featuring themed collections of fanworks. What type of fanwork? Anything! All formats are welcome and, no, it does not need to be archived with us. You pick the topic, put together a collection of five to ten pieces, and write an introduction—that's it!

If you'd like to know more the full call for contributors has the details. If you have questions, reply to this email and we'll help you out.

If you want to contribute, you can also reply to this email and let us know what topic (or topics ...) you are thinking about.

(If you're looking for a hint of where to start, we will have SWG events later in the year where themed collections on queens and/or kings and Orcs would be especially welcome ...)

Older than Hollywood, Bollywood—the nickname for the Indian film industry—is the most prolific producer of films in the world. Characterized by their vibrant costumes, catchy song-and-dance numbers, and rollercoaster extremes of emotion, Bollywood films draw from Hindu scriptures on aesthetics and sometimes capture elements of the great Hindu epics. This month's challenge is based around Bollywood: its tropes, colors, songs, and films.

For this month's challenge, the mods will assign prompts to creators interested in participating. You can request a prompt on Dreamwidth, Tumblr, the #monthly-challenges channel on our Discord, or by replying to this email. Let us know if you have a preference for the type of prompt—a film, a song, a color palette, or a trope—or if you want the mods to surprise you. Likewise, if you request a song and want to be sure it has an available English translation, let us know.

Remember that you can use any aspect of your prompt. This can include—but certainly does not require—branching out beyond the prompt the mods give you. For example, some films are available online or through streaming services. Songs may have music videos, or you may find stills from films or songs, movie posters, and more. We will give a very (and intentionally) brief and vague synopsis of each film, but you may discover characters or subplots that inspire a fanwork. All of these are fair game to use to inspire your fanwork!

Note also that this challenge is being posted two days early so that we could get it into the newsletter now. The Funky 70s challenge is still active too, and you will receive stamps for responses posted on or before July 15. The deadline for stamps for creating a fanwork the Bollywood challenge is August 15.

Finally, with several large fandom events running, remember that if you create for an event and incorporate an SWG challenge, but the event does not allow you to post with us before the deadline, just let the mods know, and we will award the stamp whenever you are able to post.

You can find the full Bollywood challenge guidelines and fanworks here.
New to our challenges? You can find the SWG challenge guidelines here, and reply to this email with questions or to request a Bollywood prompt!

Comments are one of the more perilous parts of the fanfiction-writing experience. I say "perilous" because authors really like comments (as a general rule), and when someone perceives that something they enjoy is being withheld, all sorts of thoughts and feelings and actions can ensue. If you write fanfiction, you have probably compared your comment (or click or kudos) counts to someone else. You have probably entertained dark thoughts about your skill as a writer based on that single data point. You have possibly thought unkind things about the people reading your work for free but not leaving a single word of thanks. Or maybe reasoned why that other person's numbers are higher but not actually deserved.

This month, in Cultus Dispatches, our monthly column about Tolkien fandom history, we begin to explore the world of commenting. The first article in this series looks at authors' perspectives on the comments they do (and do not) receive, using data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey to identify trends. Of course, it includes the unsurprising information that, as children like ice cream, authors like comments. (Most do anyway. I was a child who didn't like ice cream, so exceptions are always possible.) However, a deeper dive into the data shows that commenting appears to be bound up with a broader interactive component to fandom, which in turns ties in to shifts in platform use that have occurred across the fandom's history.

You can read "Fandom Chocolate ... or Authors Love Comments" here.

If you have big thoughts and big feelings on commenting (or even just regular-sized thoughts and feelings), we have an active Fandom Voices project about commenting. Fandom Voices is a sub-project of Cultus Dispatches that collects fan experiences and perceptions on fandom-related topics. Readers and creators (of all different types of fanworks, not just fanfic!) are welcome. Responses will be collected and published for next month's Cultus column. You can contribute a response to Fandom Voices here.