"[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!

As the primary author of the Cultus Dispatches column, I will confess that I love the months I get to write columns for the Fandom Voices project, in part because there is really not a lot of writing involved. Fandom Voices is a sub-project of Cultus Dispatches that poses an open-ended question or two and invites Tolkien fans to share their perspectives and experiences. When the time comes to collect responses, I copy and paste the responses into a document, color-code them based on subtopic, and then string those responses (written by people who aren't me) together with a few words of my own. It makes for a easy simple column.

The responses for the "Defining Canon" Fandom Voices? Were anything but simple. There were more of them than usual, and the responses were much deeper than usual, but that wasn't the issue. The complexity around the topic is what made this topic not only challenging but illuminating to write about.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise. In the early years of online Tolkien fandom, debates over canon escalated into flame wars. Today, they have (mostly) simmered down into a more reasoned, intellectual discussion of the many ways different people turn the same vast set of contradictory facts into an understanding of the legendarium.

In the end, I decided to break the column into two parts. This first part will look at the many considerations fans bear in mind when defining canon. Next month, I'll share responses, with some light analysis, around how fans use Tolkien's canon to make fanworks. (Note that all of the responses are available now with the first part of the article.) This also means that if you missed getting your response entered before the article, it's not too late to get something in for the second part. (Response forms never close, and I will update the response collections as new responses come in, but this is the first time I've been able to extend the offer to be included in the article. The "Defining Canon" response form is here. Let's break even more records with this one.)

You can read the first part of "Fandom Voices: Defining Canon and Using Canon in Fanworks" here.

The History of Middle-earth and other texts related to how Christopher Tolkien constructed The Silmarillion out of his father's unpublished drafts can seem both a blessing and a curse to the fanworks creator. On the one hand, they give us so much raw material for our works. On the other, they muddle the water considerably where "canon" is concerned.

Fanworks creators have different views on which of these posthumous, draft, and previously unpublished works count as canon and which do not. Many, however, reject the earliest concepts when they were replaced later by different ideas (which often went on to become that "canon" that is the published Silmarillion). This isn't shocking. Tolkien's earliest writings on the legendarium date to the 1910s, when he was still in his 20s. The Book of Lost Tales, especially, seems at odds with the Silmarillion we know, in terms of plot, character, and style. Tolkien himself appears to have agreed. When he recommenced work on the first phases of what, decades later, would be published as The Silmarillion, he stripped almost all of his Lost Tales work away and began again with something termed, literally, "The Sketch of the Mythology." (Though many of these ideas would end up rejected too.) From there, decades of successive revisions, many letters, and much noodling about brought about the various materials that Christopher Tolkien used in putting together the published Silmarillion.

This month, however, we are embracing those early rejects like they were never cast ignobly out of the legendarium. Prompts for our challenge this month, called Rejects, are just what they sound like: rejected concepts from Tolkien's pre-LotR work on the legendarium. These were the days when the Silmarils had yet to achieve central status, Victorian fairy-story and the medieval Northern mythos somehow coexited, and Tolkien hadn't yet abandoned his "mythology for England" (do not laugh!) We're asking creators to pretend like their assigned event did transpire as it did in the early works and explore any aspect of the legendarium with that revised canon in mind.

If you'd like a Rejects prompt, you can reply to this email, and we'll send one along.

Also: The schedule for the Second Age Book Club hosted on our Discord server on April 29-30 has also been posted. (If you need a Discord invite, reply to this email!) And this is the last call for responses on the Fandom Voices project on defining canon, if you want your response included in the article. (Incoming responses will be added to the collection forevermore ... or as close to it as we mortals can achieve.)