"From where does Frodo first see the sea?"

Simon J. Cook opens his A Sense of History column this month, Thálatta! Thálatta!, with this question. Do you know the answer? (I didn't!) It seems like a question suited for a Tolkien-themed pub trivia night but in fact forms the crux of his latest installment on towers in Tolkien's work, both the 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and The Lord of the Rings.

Frodo first glimpses the sea in Galadriel's mirror, having descended into a hollow to see (versus ascending a tower, as Simon's work so far might predict). Yet Tolkien uses an interesting turn of phrase to describe Frodo's experience, as like stepping "through a high window that looked on a vanished world." One generally steps out of a high window—and falls. Frodo's safe entry into a vision of "a vanished world" aligns it with the views from towers elsewhere in the legendarium, and Simon explores that view this month.

Although Frodo's glance in Galadriel's mirror may seem anticlimactic by design—after all, Galadriel refuses the Ring and consents to fade from the story—Simon makes the case that the view Frodo sees and the actions it inspires are in fact a key turning point within the legendarium.

You can read Simon's article "Thálatta! Thálatta!" here.

When the SWG was founded in March 2005, it was intended to be a writer's workshop group and a small one. The vision was that ten or so Silmarillion writers would gather and share and provide feedback on their writing to each other, mostly using Yahoo! Groups (though we had a LiveJournal too). My (Dawn's) first post to that Yahoo! Group mentioned an archive as a down-the-road possibility, and it was this—not the writers' workshop—that captured our new members' interests. We never started the writer's workshop, but I did start learning HTML and CSS. Nineteen years later, here we are.

Likewise, when the concept of a character of the month arose, it was in conjunction with our monthly challenges. The idea was that we'd feature a character each month as a writing challenge to create fic about that character. We started including a brief bio about the character to, ostensibly, get people interested. In August 2009, Oshun took over writing these "brief bios"—and she did stick to the original vision at first. Her first biography was of Irmo and was about 560 words long. However, this idea also evolved and changed beyond anything we imagined at first, until Oshun was producing scholarship-level biographies every month—some of them so in-depth that they spanned multiple months—and ended up gifting us one of the most notable parts of our site.

Throughout the history of the SWG, we've often moved like leaves before the wind, following where enthusiasm and interest have taken us. Right now, the Character of the Month is in its sunset phase; most of the major Silmarillion characters have been written. But we are in the process of developing new columns to continue to provide a venue for fan scholarship, a space where fans who want to write nonfiction can learn the craft, and resources for fanworks creators and Tolkien fans alike.

Our next endeavor follows Oshun's Character of the Month (in fact, the idea was hers, when we realized we were running out of biographies to write) and will focus on locations in Arda. You can vote for the name of this new column here. If you want to contribute to this column (or any other!), reply to this email. As a fan group first and foremost, we are committed to welcoming beginners and experts alike and provide support to new authors, so don't let a lack of experience with nonfiction writing dissuade you!

We do have a handful of characters still in need of biographers: Elendil, Gothmog, Yavanna, Eönwë, Marach, Hador, Manwë, Melkor, and Nienor. Likewise, reply here if you are interested in taking one!

We are excited to see where the wind blows and our new column goes and will have more details on it in the weeks to come!

When we built our current site in Drupal (now more than three years ago!), we kept it as similar to the original eFiction site as we could. Part of this was convenience—not having to figure out the "what goes where" amid so many other big tasks and decisions—and part of it was to make it easier for our members to transition to the new site.

This week, to fix an ongoing issue where profile pages were throwing an error, we moved users' Favorites lists off of their profile—where they were in eFiction and where we kept them as well—and onto their own page. You can still access the Favorites list of any user in the same place: at the top of the profile.

This made me think that a quick primer on Favorites—and her sisters, Bookmark and Follow—might be useful this week.

Favorites serve as a sort of personal rec list of fanworks and creators on our site. Your Favorites list is available publicly; hence, you have the opportunity on Favorites to share the reason you have added a fanwork or creator as one of your faves. This is also publicly available.

Bookmarks are similar, but they are private, visible only to you. Logged in, you can find your bookmarks on the My Bookmarks page. Bookmarks are handy for the days when someone drops a 60K novella, and the rest of your week is packed, but you don't want to forget to read it. Or when you've started a fanwork you'd like to check out again later, want to mark all the works about a particular character or relationship, or any other number of reasons why we may want to put a pin in something but aren't quite ready to share your choice with the world.

Finally, following a fanwork (My Follows for logged-in members) will notify you via email when that fanwork is updated, the creator adds or updates a fanwork, or a new work is added to a tag you follow. These are also private.

In all instances, you can add or remove a favorite, bookmark, or follow by clicking on the fanwork and using the links at the top of the page.

... by which I mean the Tengwar!

We have a new challenge on the SWG this month-and-some that is constructed around the Tengwar. What the challenge mods have done is take the thirty-six tengwar in the chart and done a prompt per day. We are not presenting the tengwar in any particular order (to make it less predictable for those of you who know the chart!), and each day will include the tengwa, its English translation, and a small graphic. As always, absolutely any part of the prompt is acceptable to use as inspiration for a fanwork!

Daily prompts can be anxiety-provoking for some, so it is important to note that the expectation is not to use every prompt or make something every day. A response that uses a single prompt (or part of one) is just as valid for the challenge as the person who can make something for every one!

Because there are thirty-six prompts and our challenges usually run for a month, note that we have extended the deadline to receive a stamp for this challenge to June 15. This will overlap with the next challenge, which will come out on May 15 as always.

You can see the Tengwar challenge, prompts posted so far, and fanworks created for the challenge here. If you want the SWG challenge guidelines, find them here.

This newsletter is coming to you live from the Tolkien at UVM Conference in Burlington, Vermont, where several SWG members and friends are here together! While we started as a fanworks group focusing on fanfiction, we include nonfiction and meta and scholarship under the broad umbrella of our group. In the months to come, we will be introducing new columns to the newsletter, so if you'd like to be involved, write for a column, or write a feature article (which we've yet to run yet, but we have to start somewhere and it could be you!), hit REPLY and let us know.

But today, we are featuring the next installment from Simon J. Cook for the A Sense of History column. Simon has been pursuing the question of towers in Tolkien, beginning with the mysterious (and controversial, I've since learned!) tower of "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," noting a correspondence in dates between this lecture and Tolkien's work on his Ardaverse, inspiring the question of how they are connected.

This month's column follows the "red thread" of Valarin aid to the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings. Returning from the West-gazing palantír of Elostirion, which is said to show a glimpse of Varda in Valinor, Gildor Inglorion bestows a blessing of Varda's protection upon Frodo. Simon traces the miraculous influence of Varda throughout the ensuing narrative that becomes an essential element of The Lord of the Rings.

You can read Simon's article "Crossroads" here.

Things and people are always getting lost in Tolkien. In trying to come up with a clever title (I lost), I just searched my digital Silmarillion for the word "lost," and Tolkien uses it forty-nine times. It's not surprising, given that his stories are generally about people taking long walks over vast swathes of land, sometimes in large and unwieldy groups, and featuring objects that are always getting tossed into remote places or being squabbled over. People and things are easily lost under such conditions.

While I can't help you if you get lost with a group of Elves dragging their feet over a mountain range or if you lost something dropped into a volcano, I can help you not get lost on the SWG archive. As of this writing, there are 5,509 fanworks archived with us. That puts the SWG on par, stats-wise, with the big Tolkien archives founded in the early 2000s. It can also mean that, when you're looking for something specific, it can be hard to find.

The SWG was originally an eFiction site, so when we rebuilt in Drupal, we kept the basic structure used by eFiction for organizing fanworks in place: the ability to see lists of all fanworks in the order they were added/updated, all fanworks for a particular tag, or a filtered list of fanworks meeting the searcher's exacting specifications.

If you just want to see what's new on the site, start with the Fanworks dropdown on the menu at the top of the page. Here, you can see everything that's been added or updated, or you can see all of a particular type of fanwork (e.g., Artwork or Link Collections). If you click on All Fanworks, click one link further to include Beyond the Silmarillion fanworks to truly get EVERYTHING.

But if you're feeling lost in finding what you want, you probably don't want everything. There's 5,509 things in that everything, after all.

If you want all fanworks with a particular tag, at the bottom of the Fanworks dropdown menu, there is an option to "Browse Fanworks By." Use this if you want to see fanworks by a specific creator or tagged with a specific character, genre, or relationship. (If you really love that genre, character, or relationship and want to know when something is added or updated with that tag, you can also follow tags from here. You can also click any tag on the site and end up with a list of all fanworks for that tag, and follow the tag from there.)

But what if you want something really, really specific? Like you want an adventure story including Glorfindel but not Ecthelion. Or an Adult-rated Anairë/Fingolfin fanwork, but no violence please? Under the Tools menu, use Find a Fanwork to really narrow down those 5,509 fanworks to exactly what you're looking for across nearly all available tags.

Finally, the SWG site is built by us, for us, the Silmarillion fanworks fandom. If there is a feature or tool that we don't have that you'd like to see, hit REPLY and suggest it!

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.