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

"[T]he story of Húrin, Túrin, and the dragon Glaurung remains 'a favorite tale among Men,'" writes Melesta in this month's biography of Húrin, "and I would dare say a favorite of Tolkien himself."

This "favorite tale," as Melesta documents, is one of Tolkien's oldest. Many of our character biographies document how a character evolves over the decades and myriad drafts Tolkien wrote in constructing the text that Christopher Tolkien would one day publish as The Silmarillion. Húrin, unlike many of the other early characters, is "an essential and constant thread of the tapestry of the First Age," with essential elements of his story in place from very early in the writing of the legendarium and remaining so.

But Melesta also highlights that, in Húrin, we see the first glimmers of the kind of larger-than-life heroism that would distinguish Tolkien's Third Age writings—namely The Lord of the Rings, of course—from the drearier First and Second Age materials. Yet, of course, Húrin's story comes to a tragic end, making him a fitting part of the "Silmarillion" story while also hinting at the rise of Mortals that would offer such hope later in the tales.

It is the very larger-than-life quality that requires that Húrin's story is best discussed across multiple months, so this month's biography covers the early years of Húrin's life: the making of a hero. So for this month, we can pretend to be a LotR site and enjoy Húrin's defiant hope and role model-worthy heroics before heading back to the tragic  culmination of his story. You can read "Part One: The Making of a Hero" of Húrin's biography here.

Cultus Dispatches is our monthly fandom studies column, and as a part of this column, we collect fan memories and perspectives in our Fandom Voices project, present those responses, and include some light analysis. For the past two months, the topic has been canon. This month's article focuses on how canon is used by fanworks creators.

Chances are, if you're reading this newsletter, you are a fanworks creator or at least keep company with them from time to time. Even among the creators who cheerfully ignore Tolkien's canon and do their own thing, canon tends to be an issue that can't be ignored. Historically, canon has been a topic taken Very Seriously within the Tolkien fandom and especially the fanworks community, where after all, we are using that canon for our various creative purposes. In early Tolkien fandom, "canon" was often analogized as "the sandbox" where creators played.

What are the rules of the sandbox? How tall can you build your castle? How much sand can you use? Can you toss about the sand? Throw it at other fans? Throw it at Tolkien??

This two-month Fandom Voices foray into the question of canon has often raised just as many questions (and complexities) as it has answered or settled. But if any single conclusion emerges from this month's responses about creating fanworks, it is that Tolkien fanworks creators really do value the sandbox. Even when they use the sand in ways they know was not intended, they often do so with knowledge of how that impacts the creative work they are producing based on the legendarium.

You can read Part Two of our Fandom Voices series on canon, "Using Canon in Fanworks" here.

For many of us, animals are an important part of our lives. Stories and art throughout time reflect the unbreakable bond between human and animal, whether the anthropomorphic gods of ancient myth, the animal guides of folkloric traditions, or the animal heroes found in modern movies.

Arda is likewise populated by all sorts of creatures, some pivotal to the stories and others inferred. This month's challenge presents prompts as a "bestiary" of some of Arda's animals. We've selected public-domain images, modern music, and traditional songs that feature animals and invite our creators to choose one (or more!) of these prompts and use it to make fanworks. You can find this month's Bestiary of Arda prompts here.

This is a good opportunity to remind our would-be challenge participants that our challenges remain open to all Silmarillion-based fanworks, and we encourage creative interpretations of challenges and prompts. For this challenge, for example, while the prompt may be animal-based, your fanwork doesn't have to mention animals at all. And if the critters in our collection aren't inspiring any fanworks, you can use any aspect of the prompt: the title, the music video, the background in an image. Our complete challenge guidelines can be found here, but if it's Silmarillion-based and permissible on our site, chances are that you're good.

We hope this month's prompts inspire a herd (a flock? a pride? a murder?) of new Silmarillion-based fanworks!

Last Friday, May 5, more than half of the moderators were online on our mod channel on the SWG's Discord—a rare occurence—and we started talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and specifically how it might be used for fanworks and, more specifically, what we were and were not willing to allow to be posted on the SWG archive. By the afternoon, I'd started our draft policy and set aside the weekend for the mods to continue to discuss the issue so that the draft could be released for public comment in time for this newsletter.

Turns out, it was timely. The next day, May 6, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) linked to an interview about AI and fanworks with legal chair Betsy Rosenblatt in the OTW Signal. (The link points to Archive.org because the OTW has since taken the original mention of the Rosenblatt article down.) The general fannish consensus about Rosenblatt's perceived enthusiasm over training AI on fanworks was not positive. (That's a serious understatement.) But it made our in-progress AI policy all the more salient and necessary.

The draft AI policy has since been posted on our site and is now open for comment. If you'd like to comment on the policy, there is an open discussion about it in the #town-hall channel of our Discord, or you can email the mods. (Replying to this email will email the mods, either to register your comments on the policy or request a Discord invite if you need one.) We've already received a number of comments that will help us shape the policy to better reflect our values as a group and, we hope, make our members feel like our site is a safe, welcoming place for their fanworks. If you have comments on the policy, we'd love to hear from you too.

The downfall of Númenor is one of the (maybe the?) most cataclysmic events in the history of Arda. Involving a literal reshaping of the world and the consequent annihilation of an entire people, it was brought on by the rebellious voyage of Ar-Pharazôn to Aman, against the laws of the Valar. As his (unwilling) wife, Tar-Míriel had a front-row seat to the whole slow toppling of Númenor. Yet, as Grundy notes in this month's biography of Míriel:

"The text does not record Míriel’s reaction to any of these events."

As Grundy's biography of Míriel shows, she emerges as a sort of grace note on Pharazôn's story, at first just a name but then given something of a story of her own. I say "something" because her story is still very much enmeshed in her victimhood at his hands, so much that what she thought or how she reacted (or didn't) to the decisions he made go completely unrecorded.

We've now surpassed more than 150 character biographies on our site. Our reason for beginning that project back in 2007 was to provide resources for people creating fanworks. And while, if asked at the time, we probably would have said a primary aim was making more accessible the histories of some of the more complicated characters, Míriel is a reminder that an equally important purpose is bringing to light those characters whose histories Tolkien left missing, like Míriel. (She is mentioned twice in the published Silmarillion.)

Maybe her reaction to the ending of her world will at last be recorded.

You can read Grundy's biography of Tar-Míriel here.

"Not to be dramatic," says Tolkien fan artist Busymagpie, "but art is life for me."

I suspect if you (someone who subscribes to a thing called the "Silmarillion Writers' Guild Newsletter") are reading this, you do not find this statement dramatic at all. In this month's Tolkien Fanartics column, our art editor Anérea interviewed Busymagpie about her heart-meltingly beautiful character portraits, which range from warm family scenes to much, um, warmer interactions between couples, especially her favorite pairing, Maedhros and Fingon. (I am narrowly avoiding making a pun about Busymagpie's joyfully vivid portrait of Arien, featured among the art Anérea selected for this month's column.)

As part of her art-is-life credo, Busymagpie describes working on her art every day. Although she started drawing at a young age, Busymagpie is mostly self-trained. I mention this because, as someone who regularly endures the ridicule of school-age children about my whiteboard-drawing skills, it gives me hope and underscores the value of persistence, no matter one's creative craft.

If you'd like to read more about Busymagpie's creative process, her evolution as an artist, or how she once got a job by drawing a page full of bums, you can find this month's inteview with Busymagpie here.

Also remember that Anérea is open to ideas on future interview subjects, future column topics related to art, and guest columnists. Reply to this email if you'd like to make a suggestion or few!