When we look at Tolkien's work today, we look at it from the vantage point of 2023. We see the trajectory of his decades of work on the legendarium. We see, within a historical context, texts that seem to respond to or even predict what would have been the breaking news of the day.

In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook continues his series of articles on the tower analogy found in Tolkien's pivotal essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," considered even today to be the most important scholarship penned on Beowulf. Simon makes the case that the tower analogy present in the essay has connections to the legendarium: that the tower-builder climbs his tower to look upon the same sea that so seduces the characters of the legendarium, separating Middle-earth from Valinor. From the view from his tower, the man glimpses the wisdom of a lost world, but to do so requires imagination.

In 1936, when he delivered "Monsters and the Critics" (and was also in the midst of some of his most productive work on the "Silmarillion" materials), Tolkien would have been grappling with a world again on the brink of war and all of the fear and uncertainty that provoked. Much like the Beowulf-poet and the man and his tower, he turned to the past for answers and for courage.

You can read Simon's article "1936" here.

Back in June, we published the first part of Melesta's biography of Húrin. In this article, they make the case that "Húrin's story is one of the backbones of Tolkien's legendarium, whose influence is felt in the narrative ages after his passing," specifically finding connections between Húrin's character and those of Tolkien's later heroes, including Aragorn, due to the influence of estel on Húrin's early life and outlook.

But this is the First Age, and things never fail to get grim fast. If you are reading this, you know that estel is a shaky concept in The Silmarillion compared to Tolkien's later and more eucatastrophic works. In the second part of Húrin's biography, Melesta traces the next half of Húrin's life, which is marked by tragedy, suffering, and betrayal*—yet as Melesta points out, Húrin's courage and loyalty to those he loves never wavers.

* In Húrin's story, we see Tolkien prefigure Kurt Vonnegut's later exhortation to writers to "be a sadist" to even the most likable of characters.

Of course, Húrin is an apt illustration of why Vonnegut's advice is so well-known among writers. Through Húrin, Tolkien unfolds what happens to an exceptional person when put under exceptional duress. And, as Melesta notes, the ending of Húrin's story is left vague, so we can never be entirely sure what our hero was really made of. Yet through Húrin's story and what he endures and how he endures it, many of Tolkien's most important themes—among the many reasons readers have loved his work for the better part of a century—are unveiled, defining heroism in such a way that will be remembered across the ages in the legendarium.

You can read the second part of Melesta's biography of Húrin here (and make your own decision about how you interpret the ending).

I remember when the cover art for the recent Tolkien Society Seminar proceedings Tolkien and Diversity—which includes essays by several SWG members and friends—was announced and I saw Ismene's portrait A Elbereth Gilthoniel for the first time. Seeming to glance over her shoulder as though interrupted at an important task, Varda Elentári gazed out from the screen with a look of casual challenge. In that moment, I learned it was exactly the look befitting the goddess who both painted the sky with stars and scared the heck out of Melkor.

I immediately looked up more about Ismene and discovered she was a fan artist (which I'd been secretly hoping for). Shadow had already signed on to review Tolkien and Diversity, so I asked Anérea: Would she be willing to see if Ismene would talk to us for Tolkien Fanartics, as a complement to the book review? Thankfully, both Anérea and Ismene agreed, and that interview is our column this week.

In the interview, Ismene talks about her creative process, her artistic training (she's self-taught!), and what makes The Silmarillion such an appealing text to build on creatively. Ismene describes a road trip where some internet digging revealed that "Sauron apparently did not always look like that suit of armour [from the films] at all … And what was more, there was another dark lord??? ... I started digging into it to learn the lore, and I got hooked."

Ismene's story is familiar. Tolkien's world invites fannish engagement because the more you learn, the more it seems you must find out. And that deep fannish engagement creates the kinds of personal stories where looking up images of Tolkien characters online one day brings the artist, many years later, to the place where her own work stands to shift how Tolkien fans see his characters and his world.

You can read Anérea's interview with Ismene here.

Tolkien's influence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is felt throughout popular culture. Countless games, films, and books have taken Middle-earth as a prototype for the modern fantasy genre, bringing Elves and magical swords into the popular imagination (making them cool even).

Or bringing them back into the popular imagination might be more accurate. Tolkien himself was, of course, deeply inspired by some—notably not all—of the creative works that he encountered both as a scholar and in popular culture in England at the turn of the century. Our challenge this month, Dip the Ladle, offers prompts that come from Tolkien's many sources of inspiration—not just the books he read (though we have plenty of quote prompts if that's your fancy) but locations he frequented and artwork that may have been in the books on his shelf.

This challenge is a good time to remind participants (and potential participants!) about some key beliefs our group has about challenges. First of all, a challenge prompt can be used however you want. Want to use just the title? A phrase? That tiny boat in the corner? Go for it! We encourage finding loopholes: odd and creative ways to interpret challenge prompts.

But if a challenge prompt doesn't speak to you, you can request another. For this particular challenge, if you have a preference for a quote, an image associated with a place, or a book cover or illustration, you can specify that.

Finally, as Around the World and Web below shows, we are in a season that is full of various fandom events. Some of these events have reveal dates that may be past our challenge deadline. If you want to use one of our challenge prompts as part of a fanwork created for one of these events, just let us know that you need to post late, and we'll award the stamp when you do. (That's the other thing: You can always use past challenge prompts. Due dates are for receiving creator stamps only.)

Tl;dr: Our goal with our challenges is to see more people making fanworks based around The Silmarillion. If you're using one of our prompts to do that, you've got the right idea.

If this challenge appeals to you and you haven't requested a prompt yet, you can reply to this email to do so!

Although Tolkien is best known for his formative influence on the modern fantasy genre through The Lord of the Rings (though we here at the Silmarillion Writers' Guild clearly think the rest of the legendarium is pretty special too!), his impact on the field of Anglo-Saxon studies was just as noteworthy. His 1936 lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" transformed how the Old English poem Beowulf was read and understood by scholars. It is cited even today in Beowulf scholarship and included in many contemporary volumes of Beowulf criticism for its foundational role in how the field would evolve over the next eight-plus decades.

But for all its importance, "Monsters and the Critics" doesn't tend to be included in volumes of Tolkien's popular works—not entirely unexpected, given that it is an academic (though highly accessible) lecture-turned-essay. In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook gives "Monsters" its due as a work that reveals something of how a people looks back in history and finds they have forgotten what they know.

"Monsters" includes one of my favorite passages from all of Tolkien's writing: an extended metaphor about a man who constructs a tower from old ruins and endures the scrutiny and scorn of his compatriots who wonder why he'd do such a thing—"But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea." Simon makes the case that the sea in this metaphor is the forgotten knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon people: just what lies beyond the shoreless sea alluded to in Beowulf, giving the poem its tone "both poignant and remote" and "weighted with regret."

Of course, fans of Tolkien's work—especially his First Age writings—identify this same sense of nostalgic loss for a distant, partially glimpsed past. And so we see Beleriand in Beowulf.

You can read Simon J. Cook's column "Beleriand in Beowulf" here.

(On the subject of Tolkien's inspirations, be sure to check out our new challenge Dip the Ladle, and remember that you can reply to this email to request a prompt.)

In July 2021, the Tolkien Society held a seminar on the theme "Tolkien and Diversity." The seminar emerged in the days leading up to the release of Amazon's Rings of Power series, when the series' diverse casting choices were at the forefront of discussion among Tolkien fans, leading "Tolkien and Diversity" to become the best-attended seminar to date.

But the issues raised in the seminar had existed for decades. Tolkien fans have been discussing race, gender, sexuality, and disability and Tolkien for nearly as long as there has been a fandom, and with the first translations of The Lord of the Rings appearing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the legendarium became an international fandom very early in its publication history.

In our most recent Read & Review column, Shadow reviews the recently released proceedings of the 2021 seminar, Tolkien and Diversity. They find that the proceedings coalesce around two major themes: cultural diversity and the international fandom, and the representation of marginalized identities in the legendarium and fandom. Providing a brief synopsis of each paper included in the proceedings, Shadow's review can help you decide if Tolkien and Diversity is a worthwhile addition to your Tolkien bookshelf.

You can read Shadow's review of Tolkien and Diversity here.

They is something primordial and terrifying about creatures that howl in the night. Few of us in the modern world have the opportunity to hear wolf howls anymore, but I still remember well the creeping cold that passed over me that first time I heard coyotes hunting in the dark. The chilling sound of marauding predator's voices taps into a deep, primitive urge to hide someplace warm and preferably near a fire.

In writing this month's character, Tolkien drew from those deep wells of human memory and the folklore they gave rise to. As Narya's biography of him reveals, Draugluin is an early character in the legendarium (though in a much different and less forbidding form!) who evolved into a wolf with a brief but important role: the "lord of werewolves" who challenged Huan, was defeated, and unwittingly provided Beren's disguise when sneaking into Angband.

Although myths and folklore involving wolves loom large in Western literature—from the Norse wolf Fenrir the fairy-tale Big Bad Wolf to the naturalistic writings of authors like Jack London—nearly every continent has its wolf-stories, dating back to the Mesopotamians and Ancient Egyptians. Narya taps into some of these old stories and how connections with Draugluin can deepen our understanding of his character. At the same time, Tolkien rejected some popular wolf-lore in constructing his own wolfish characters, proving—as he would write in On Fairy-stories—that he did "not dip in the ladle blindly." And, as Narya concludes, Tolkien's construction of Draugluin ultimately supports key themes present throughout his work.

You can read the biography of Draugluin here.

In 1966, Tolkien received a letter from a fan for about a sequel to The Lord of the Rings that the fan planned to write. His response is preserved in Letter 292 to Joy Hill: "I suppose," he wrote, "that since one cannot claim property in inventing proper names, that there is no legal obstacle to this young ass publishing his sequel ...."

This quote is often held up as a counterpoint to the more famous "other minds and hands" passage from Letter 131 to Milton Waldman, which many fans have taken to presume Tolkien's support for fanworks. What always strikes me is how he assumed this "sequel" (i.e., fanfiction) was permissible—probably because he was doing that same kind of writing himself.

Tolkien was a fanfiction writer. Of course, that term would never have been applied to him; its modern use didn't come into being until Tolkien was deceased. But he did respond to the medieval texts he worked with as a scholar by writing his own versions and gapfillers in the same way that fanfiction writers respond to his work today.

The most recent posthumously published volume of Tolkien's work, The Battle of Maldon, contains an example of this. While the collection itself contains multiple texts, including Tolkien's prose translation of The Battle of Maldon and a lecture transcript about Old English poetry, it also contains The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, a verse play that considers the aftermath of the Battle of Maldon. In other words: a fanfiction.

In our most recent Read & Review column, Narya reviews The Battle of Maldon. She provides an overview of what you can expect from each section of the book and offers advice for fans of Tolkien's Middle-earth as to whether the book is worth their investment of time and money. If you're thinking of purchasing the book (or if you're interested in Tolkien's scholarly work ... or his fanfiction), you can find Narya's "Review of The Battle of Maldon" here.

For at least several years now, the oldest Tolkien fanfic was identified as George Heap's Departure in Peace. Published in 1960 in the fanzine I Palantir—itself credited as the first Tolkien-only fanzine—this is a clear and obvious fanfic, described in the editor's introduction to the zine as a "fictional narrative."

Recently, in one of those serendipitous collisions, SWG member and newsletter contributor Lindariel was researching the fiber hithlain used in making the Elven ropes described in LotR. She found a blog post by the scholar Douglas A. Anderson that mentioned a fanzine "article" about hithlain and was able to hunt it down at the library.

And it was fanfiction.

A Study of the Hithlain of the Wood-elves of Lórien by Arthur R. Weir is contemporaneous with "Departure in Peace"—in fact, it was published in the same issue of I Palantir. Like Heap's story, Weir's is published online via Marquette University's FellowsHub fanzine archiving project, so it is not obscure; one doesn't have to be as diligent as Lindariel was, in other words, to find and read it. So why did it go unnoticed as a fanfic for so long?

This month's Cultus Dispatches takes a look at these two old fanfiction stories. The analysis hinges on the concepts of "transformational" and "affirmational" fandom, with Heap's obviously an example of the former: It poses an alternate history of the Ring War, with Sauron the embattled and self-sacrificing defender of Mortals against colonialist oppressors. But Weir's story is more affirmationally oriented, full of textual citations, extensive notes, and structured like a research paper—likely why it went unnoticed as fanfiction ... until a fanfiction writer picked it up.

You can read the article "Affirmational Fandom, Transformational Fandom, and Two Old Tolkien Fanfics" here.

Also note that we started a new challenge this past week: our annual Matryoshka challenge, this year with prompts based around mystery novel tropes. Check out A Secret Gate here and remember that you can simply hit Reply to this email to request a prompt set.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is currently being discussed and critiqued in some fannish circles for how the organization is governed and has handled important concerns, such as harassment and volunteer safety. Governance! Policy! Bureaucracy! These are not words that fill most people with excitement. However, in light of the discussions raised about the OTW, it seems important to consider questions of how we, the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, are governed. We will also work to get this information permanently and more readily available on our website in the coming weeks.

Our leadership: Dawn Felagund (Hi! That's me! I'm writing this!) founded the SWG in 2005 and has remained at the helm of the group since. That means I (Dawn) do have ultimate decision-making power. However, my preference is to always make decisions in collaboration with my co-moderators and the members we serve.

SWG policies, how to interpret them, and issues with or raised by members are discussed collaboratively among the SWG moderators. This applies to both our website and our socials, including Discord. When making decisions, we generally go for a majority rule, though we may suspend this in time-sensitive situations. For example, if a moderator needs to address a non-urgent issue with a member, she may run the message she plans to send past other mods who are online at the time. If this is time-sensitive and we want to reply to members as quickly as possible, responses from a few mods giving the go-ahead (or suggesting changes) would green-light the response. In urgent situations, moderators act with their best judgment to respond immediately as needed.

Member involvement: The SWG is not a democracy because we do not hold formal elections and there are matters that are not open to change (either for practical or philosophical reasons) no matter how strong the support for them. However, we do try to involve member input on matters that are important to them or where we believe that member input will strengthen the end product. For example, we recently held an open discussion period about our AI policy because we knew this was a controversial issue and wanted to make sure our policy reflected our values as a group. Furthermore, we knew that our members would be able to contribute insights that we, as moderators, did not have.

We also have two formal member groups for assisting with the SWG: our inclusivity focus group and our newsletter focus group. Our Volunteers page has more information on both.

Finances: The SWG is not expensive to run. Our current costs are $255.74 per year, which includes our hosting fees, domain registrations for our primary domain and test site, and extra spam protection for our site email account. I (Dawn) have paid all site costs for the entirety of its existence. We do not fundraise, and I do not accept donations. Multiple moderators have access to the account that includes both billing and the web server so that if I'm hit by a meteorite, operations of the site can continue.

Contacting Us: You can reach all of the site mods via email at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org or via our contact form. This is the best way to get the fastest response, and we aim to answer all communications within twenty-four hours. You can also contact individual mods via the contact form on their user page on the SWG site or by DMing them on social media used by the SWG. However, be aware that individual mods may not be able to respond within twenty-four hours or may be away or on hiatus.

If you have questions or want to get more involved by volunteering with the SWG, hit Reply on this email and let me know